"Let me tie your hands and see how well you do your job"

[The Straight Story]

Over the past few weeks I have talked to about 1000 teachers. I currently have a seasonal job (though it looks like I might get hired on full time - hopefully in a programmer capacity though) doing customer support for teachers.

School computer admins restrict the teachers (ie, they remove admin rights from their computers - which causes a lot of head aches for the teachers), the district buys packages and then dumps them on teachers - often without getting them any training. Even when the programs are really good and can make the lives of teachers much easier in the long run they don't seek the input of teachers before hand.

One school got rid of all the regular books and went with e-books that are flash based - and bought I-Pads. They bought the whole ebooks package without even thinking about asking what was needed to run them and if they were compatible.

I get calls from teachers totally confused about their states' adoption programs (curriculum adoptions) and how it correlates to their class. The school did not purchase all the needed programs, and in some cases totally forgot they had to renew licenses for their products this year and the teachers are in class calling me with no way to teach their students.

While on an (evil to be sure) smoke break today with a fellow worker I noted that my Grandma taught school back in the 30's and 40's. Kids come to school and have their books there, the teacher was in control, and that was that. They wrote the tests, they decided who passed and failed, and the buck stopped there.

Now teachers are beholden to the big money - from book sales to online books. They have district reps who decide what to purchase (and then drop off the face of the earth), sales reps to deal with (your district is small? Sorry, I will get back to you later - another district makes me a lot more money and gets my attention), testing and making sure they can meet their state and federal standards (so that the district can get more money). Kids are a dollar sign now - not someone to be taught.

The investment is not now for the kids, they are a vehicle for more money. The teachers I meet still want to teach and use technology to better help all their kids - but now they have no choice in what is best for the kids. The teachers are just a vehicle as well to more money for the district. The more you bring in the more you make. Our kids have become a financial investment for the short term gains and a commodity like many other 'futures'.

They are trying, but from the techs to the administrators teachers are getting more and more removed from how they teach kids and what tools they have. No one is willing to trust them - and I actually told a teacher today "they trust you with their kids but not with admin rights to your own computer, it just seems wrong". It is like folks are tying the hands of someone and then acting all surprised when those people cannot do the job they were hired to do.

I won't blame teachers, because I don't see them as the ones anymore making decisions. You want to fire people for under performing schools? Fire the decision makers - not the workers. If test scores are not met, start at the top - because that is where all the decisions are made. Want to blame a company for failing? Don't blame the workers who do as they are told, blame the people who make the decisions.

Problems don't start with the people closest to the actual work, they start way above that pay grade - and yet time and again we see those making the bad decisions awarded the most money and the people doing the actual work, doing as they were told, being punished.

It is high time we held the people responsible for failure responsible - and not the people doing the grunt work for them.

[TroglodyteScholar]

1. K&R n/t

[Clovis Sangrail]

2. stupid user tricks

<RANT>
==
School computer admins restrict the teachers (ie, they remove admin rights from their computers - which causes a lot of head aches for the teachers)
==

Admin rights get removed for good reason (in any organization) - mainly that 99% of users are too stupid to be trusted with their own machines.
-they disable virus protection because it slows down their machines.
-they open file attachments from unknown sources.
-they walk away from the computer without locking the screen

A stream of people coming to your office to clean off the same rootkit (that they got infected with *because* they had admin rights) is seriously NOT fun.
It costs in both repair time and lost productivity.

</RANT>

[JuniperLea]

3. I am the admin...

And yes, yes, and yes... I restrict for those and many other reasons. Anyone who wants anything "extracurricular" on their PC or laptop must go through me first. I hold the admin logon... in a very tight fist... the alternative is unacceptable.

[The Straight Story]

5. I have worked with computers since I was 13. I am 44 now. Here is my rant back

If you are going to expect your teachers to install and use programs that need admin rights - set them all up before school starts. And make damn sure they are running how they should be.

If you don't know that your MAC (not the network card mac, talking apple here) cannot view the student editions of texts - that you need the day school starts - then don't blame teachers when they come calling on you to install the plug-in I send them.

If you are planning on installing our CD's for a variety of programs, then learn what the heck is needed to be installed before hand, and don't get all grumpy when the teachers come to you telling you that they have a class full of kids who cannot read their books.

When you call a guy like me and you don't get how to create a share with the proper security and don't know how to read a manual that we sent you months ago, don't even try to cuss me out.

And worst of all for me - don't call and pretend you know what your are doing when you don't even get the basic concepts of networking and how to install a program that needs to access drives on the network (let alone the folks who don't get the idea of cd roms that are software based and don't actually exist physically - that seems to throw many a tech for a loop).

My longest calls - usually lasting a half hour or more - are with techs who have no clue and are too lazy to look up things. I have techs that don't even get the basic idea of running things in compatibility mode, how to modify ini files, etc, and who think the registry is some weird thing that only engineers from Microsoft can modify.

[Clovis Sangrail]

7. I've been working with computers for about the same time

been making a living at it for nearly as long - now I mostly work supporting scientific computing.
I don't mind *at all* installing the applications that my users don't have access to install.
That's a much easier pill to swallow than explaining to a scientist how they've lost 3 years worth of data.

As for annoyances.. they go on forever.
However, I'm sure you're aware that technical buffoonery goes in both directions.

I routinely interact with vendors who are supplying some boutique piece of hardware and/or software.
It's rare that one of them is actually competent when it comes to something outside of their narrow field.
99.9% of the time tracking down the rights that an application actually needs is trivial but nearly all of the vendors tell the users (and even put in their manuals sometimes) that the program **must have** admin right to run properly - even when it demonstrably doesn't.
The only reason for this is laziness... they don't want to tell people "it needs access to x y z" because it's easier to just say "must have admin".
Let the local admin figure out what access it needs and bear the brunt of users complaining that they need admin.

There's this incredibly unrealistic view that the machine their software is going to run on is somehow going to exist in a bubble rather than on a multi-user machine that's on a network with firewalls and 2000 other machines.
Considering the holes in XP (where most of this stuff runs) it should be criminal to encourage users to run as admin.

[diddlysquat]

4. Thanks you, Straight Story

This is, of course, the root of the "problem". You have expressed it beautifully. The teachers are not the ones in power.

[The Straight Story]

6. Well, you summed it up better than I did :)

They are not in power, but they are being held accountable as though they were.

[femmocrat]

8. K&R

Our district purchased a gradebook/attendance program that is practically undecipherable. Our training on it was one hour of reading the tutorial (on our own). Every time we have problems with it (which is all the time), we are treated as if we are dimwits.

Every nine weeks there is some problem or another with printing report cards. Our teachers' web-site program is just as bad.

I wonder whose pockets were lined when these programs were purchased. :eyes:

[Laelth]

9. Righteous rant. Well said. k&r n/t

-Laelth