I’m wrong? You suck! *sticks out tongue*

There, set things straight.

The caller identified himself and then further identified himself as an editor for a well known magazine published in the UK. He was extremely to-the-point with his call.

He would donate $1000.00 immediately to The HeliOS Project if I would give him the name of the Teacher I blogged about.

I hung up the phone.

“This is madness.” I thought to myself. What is the big friggin’ deal here? This is a non-story.

And my phone buzzed again but it wasn’t with the incoming call ring…it was a text message being received. I cued the caller ID and it returned as “unavailable”.

I pushed “read message” and waited for the text to appear on my screen.

“Can I call you?”

I pulled the truck over into a parking lot and answered:

“I guess. Who r u?”

The inactivity was so long that I started the truck and began to put it into gear and re-enter traffic when the buzz came again. I pushed the read button.

“Karen”.

It was my turn to hesitate. Finally, I toggled Reply and typed in one character.

“k”

She didn’t call right away. It took her about 15 minutes to finally call me. When she did she didn’t say anything for the first 15 seconds. When she finally did speak, it was obvious she was crying.

“Why did you throw me to the wolves like that?”

I didn’t even have to think of the reply.

“I didn’t throw you to the wolves Karen, I threw ignorance to the wolves. Let me ask you something. If I had not emailed you a link to my blog, would you have even known about this?”

Again she hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that if you didn’t know I had written that blog, would you have known about all these comments? Has anyone called you or bothered you about this? Have your co-workers mentioned it?”

“Well…no.”

“Then the wolves didn’t touch you Karen. If I had included your last name or email address, then yes, you could ask me that question but as it stands, you are just a nameless school teacher that evoked a public response from me.”

She didn’t say anything for several seconds. When she did, it was a quiet and simple:

“Thank you”.

Yeah…thank you. Like I deserve that. Let me share a couple things with you here. First off, I want to sincerely apologize for some things I did say, things that were way off base and even if they were situationally true, they didn’t add anything of value to the conversation.

I want to apologize to all the hard-working and honest NEA members. My statements were based on an isolated but nasty experience two years ago, and, while I developed a nasty dislike for the people in that situation, it was both unfair and short-sighted to say the things I did. The teachers that we entrust our kids with on a daily basis do us a service that is under-appreciated, under-paid and over-criticized. My mini tirade didn’t add anything of value to the situation and only served to inflame an already volatile area of debate. You have my sincere apology for slapping you all with such a wide brush.

Karen isn’t alone in her ignorance. I have sat in a PhD’s office…a PhD that happened to be a principal of a school. She told me that according to her “tech staff”, it was illegal to remove Microsoft Windows from their school computers. So who is ignorant here? The “tech staffer” afraid of losing his MCSE position or the Dr. of Education that didn’t bother to check into such a statement. Ignorance isn’t the sole possession of this particular school teacher.

Karen and I have talked on the phone now for a couple of hours, here and there. We’ve come to understand each other more and had she said some of the things in her email that she said during our phone conversations…this black ink on white digital paper probably wouldn’t exist.

And neither would over 2000 comments that were less than kind on one end of it and absolutely brutal on the other.

The student did get his Linux disks back after the class. The lad was being disruptive, but that wasn’t mentioned. Neither was the obvious fact that when she saw a gaggle of giggling 8th grade boys gathered around a laptop, the last thing she expected to see on that screen was a spinning cube.

She didn’t know what was on those disks he was handing out. It could have been porn, viral .exe’s…any number of things for all she knew. When she heard that an adult had given him some of the disks to hand out, her spidey-senses started tingling. Coupled with the fact that she truly was ignorant of honest-to-goodness Free Software, and you have some fairly impressive conclusion-jumping.

In a couple of ways, I am guilty of it too.

Karen seems to be a good teacher, and as she stated to me today, she has learned more about the tech world in a few days than she’s learned in five years.

That’s because she’s trapped in a world of Windows. Most people are.”

She got schooled.. *sigh*

…I want her held responsible for her actions as any teacher who screws up should be, and not have this brushed under the carpet. Simple as that.

Furthermore, this is an important lesson that teachers should already live by, not to mention pass on to their students.

We’re all fallible. We all make mistakes. But admitting them and learning from them is pretty much the foundation of learning. (As part of the Socratic method.) And no one can afford to allow their ego to interfere with that. The only shame would be deserved by trying to cover up your ignorance to protect a pretense of authority. Conversely, would publicly admitting that she learned something new and stands corrected by one of her students be humiliating for a teacher? If so, she should be fired.

I’m reminded of that anecdote Richard Dawkins is fond of telling… I think it’s form The God Delusion (although he also uses it in one of his television specials)… about a professor who after being convinced that a theory he believed to be accurate for 15 years was actually wrong, the professor thanked the lecturer for revealing the error to him.

Karen seems to be a good teacher

does not reconcile with

you have some fairly impressive conclusion-jumping.

and

“I didn’t throw you to the wolves Karen, I threw ignorance to the wolves.”

Someone who jumps to conclusions and who can’t tell the difference between accusations of being a bad teacher and accusations of being a bad person, is hardly exemplifying the characteristics of someone tasked with illuminating the minds of children.

Is that excessively cynical of me that line: “Karen seems to be a good teacher, and as she stated to me today, she has learned more about the tech world in a few days than she’s learned in five years” just seems a bit, somehow, too magnanimous? Pat the nice teacher on the head.

I’m not the type to shout “CLEARLY PHOTOSHOPPED” when a photo goes online but this just seems a bit too perfect of an outcome and a scenario – a spitting and hissing “no software is free” fanatic doing a legally awkward confiscation/theft of a poor student’s (while educating his peers) LiveCD. Before coming around so completely to discover that, actually, she likes the idea and her association has thousands of linux installations in their system and use free and open source software.

Try setting one up under Linux. Yes, you can apt-get install mediatomb. Then what? Oh, it’s got a nice web interface it tells you about. You go to the web interface – the only way to add files to it. Wow, what’s that page all about?

It’s something I’ve worked through, I understand it, but I would never, ever expect my dad to understand it. (And he’s an advanced computer user, been using computers since the 1950′s.) I wouldn’t even try talking him through it on the phone. But I could easily talk him through setting up WMP on the phone. It takes 5 minutes. When is the last time you set up an unfamiliar Linux service, I mean completely 100% unfamiliar, in five minutes?

The worst part is, I’m someone that likes it and gets it and sees what a pain Windows is. But it works better for the vast majority of users. It really does. For now.

…observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence [sic] with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization.

Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.

These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer, and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all.

Instead of posing questions and investigating for herself, her first reaction was one of blind dogmatism and authoritarian intimidation.

These are the actions of a tyrant, not of a skeptic.

I’m glad this had a good outcome.

I’m in software support. I tell people how to make our company’s proprietary software (all of it Windows-based) work. I love explaining the inadequacies of IE and how if they don’t clear the browser cache regularly, virtually any possible behavior of a program can result.

But Linux scares me. And I even know what rm -r * does, and that I shouldn’t do it.

Out of line? Hardly.

Yes, some teachers are underpaid and schools are underfunded. But the concept of teaching and the education system needs to be completely torn apart and rebuilt. And that means getting rid of teachers like this.

And replacing them with robots . . .

Back in 2001 I was a volunteer writer for the student newspaper at my university. Being more tech-savvy than most of the other journalists, and having heard that the IT department held open community forum meetings to announce policy changes, I decided to go to one of these. And one of the agenda items was that the university was soon going to buy a Microsoft campus agreement, at significant expense. The reason given for this was that the Business Software Alliance had threatened the university with an audit. Both the BSA and the university knew that, with thousands of computers in labs and offices, such an audit would turn up huge amounts of pirated software. So, the BSA gave the university a way out: They could sign the campus agreement, and the BSA would leave them alone.

Now this, to me, sounds pretty indistinguishable from a protection racket. In those days, I wasn’t yet a serious Linux user (although I’d had a few tentative stabs at it), and it was still some years before I became one. Nevertheless, the experience shaped my view of Micro$oft, its products and its marketing strategies.

I would dearly like to see some accountability (e.g. prosecution) for this kind of behaviour, but I guess when the “harm” part of the extortion is a law suit, it’s skating the edge of the legal definition.

Ignorance is everyones enemy… even those who think they ARE enlightened. We all sleepwalk… some are just deeper sleepers than others.

Double checking is one thing, but threatening to call the police? That’s just small mindedness.

Which is why I’m lobbying for replacing teachers with android bio-trons.

I use a Mac with XP, Vista, and Ubuntu on VMWare. I need all of these OSes for browser testing. I can honestly say that Linux isn’t where it needs to be in order for any regular person to pick it up and start using it as comfortably as they can use a Mac or Windows.

Ubuntu certainly is nice, but until it’s as easy to install any program on it (not just the ones in the default repository), as it is on OS X, then it’s not ready. As easy as Windows isn’t good enough. And until they sort out interface inconsistencies, it’s not ready. Why do some menus stay dropped down and some behave like Mac System 7, where you have to hold the button down?

It’s getting closer, and it’s great if you have some moral opposition to paying for software, but it’s not as good as Windows, and this comes from someone who has never owned an actual Windows PC.

I really want it to be better than Windows, but it’s not there yet.