School teacher bans Linux
A US school teacher has taken the somewhat stupid step of throwing the open sauce operating system Linux out of her classroom.
The teacher got her knickers in a twist when one of her students, Aaron was seen giving away free discs for the HeliOS Linux distribution and showing his mates how it worked on his laptop.
Her reaction was as though the boy was peddling drugs. The unnamed teacher apparently believed that anything that wasn't Windows was illegal and immoral. She confiscated the discs and put him on detention.
But not satisified with that, she wrote to the HeliOS distributer to complain about his giving Linux to children.
"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," she wrote.
She said that children look to adults for guidance and discipline and she was going to research to see if she could report the distributer, a bloke called Starks, to the cops.
"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," she wrote.
Her argument was that the world was ruled by Windows, and it was on almost all computers. "Putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison [sic] of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..."
Writing in his bog, Ken Starks said that the letter from the unnamed school teacher showed what an uphill battle Linux people had in dealing with entrenched attitudes.
He wrote back telling her she should be ashamed for thinking that he was doing anything illegal. Starks told the woman that if she investigated anything she would discover that Linux did what it said on the tin and was a free as-in-cost and free as-in-license operating system.
"The fact that you seem to believe that Microsoft is the end all and be-all is actually funny in a sad sort of way," he said.
However he pointed out that the Vole pumps shedloads of cash into her teachers union so it probably was important that she "recommend" Microsoft Windows" or else she would might get reprimanded at the least or fired.
Stark said that the AISD purchases millions of dollars of Microsoft Software when that money could be better spent on educating our children.
"A dedicated School Teacher would recognize that fact and lobby for the change to Free Open Source Software and let the money formally spent on MS bindware be used on our kids. A teacher who cared about her students would do that," he wrote.
Stark told her that she should give Aaron his discs back. He is a brilliant kid and he's learned more using Linux than he ever did using Windows. Those disks and their distribution are perfectly legal and even if he was "disruptive", you cannot keep his property, he wrote.
Just to make sure he has arranged a meeting with the school's Superintendent.
"It looks like we will get to meet in his office when School starts again after the holiday.
"I am anxious to meet a person who is this uninformed and still holds a position of authority and learnedness over our children," Starks wrote.
It looks like this teacher might have allowed her ignorance about life, the universe and everything to get a wee bit out of control. µ
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Stark should ask this teacher to try and find the land of the free ( as in Linux ) home of the brave on a map.
He should sue her arse - I hear Americans love that!
Should someone so ignorant be allowed to teach? The teacher should be showing the correct process of understanding the input before making a decision.
This is a pretty typical response from a teacher. If they do not know of it or understand it it must be bad and therefore stopped.
You'll never meet a more blinkered and insular group of people.
Is 'open sauce' the more saucy version of open source?
This woman must go to Windows Mass On A Sunday if you ask me.
Teach.
Heh, someone give the lady a Mac, then come back in a month and see what she's saying... ;
Is this school in Tuttle, Oklahoma, perchance?
At least she did not call in the FBI...
Is really bliss, it made our Office have a nice laugh this rainy morning.
It is frightening to have someone like that teaching children.
Next thing, she will say gays are satanists and Anarchists are the new communists.
Or Sarah Palin is a porn actress.
"He should sue her arse - I hear Americans love that!"
posted by : krs360, 11 December 2008
I think that most would thinkk that MS would, if the shoe was on the other foot.
So much for Free Trade, eh. The supposed cornerstone of Uncle Sam Capitalism but then we can all see where the dumb "say one thing, but do another" experiment for competitive advantage has landed the System ..... in Terminal Meltdown with the Inventive Nature of Money Supply ..... $700 Billion here and $200 Billion there to close friends and dodgy partners .... the Game that has been blown wide open.
I find it worrying the teacher clearly did not even ask the student about the issue. Just made assumptions.
And taking a students property is so wrong.
"I am anxious to meet a person who is this uninformed and still holds a position of authority and learnedness over our children," Starks wrote.
Sadly around half the teachers in the US are that uninformed, as shown by their adherence to the fairy tale of religion and their refusal to believe that the Earth wasn't created by some sky-god. It's therefore not at all surprising that they don't know anything about IT either.
Wow... college. You remember, you were curious. What would it be like? I mean, its forbidden but don't you kind of want to know?
Yeah, we all tried linux in college, I'm not afraid to admit it.
*furiously jabs the KILL button*
she is probably a short, scientologist, short sighted, ginger, old lesbian with learning difficulties. (and any other stigmatised politically correct adjectives)
Whenever you think you know how stupid people are, there's always someone to draw the line a bit further. She should be sacked, for pure stupidity alone. I'd like to know what that woman is teaching the children, and how many of what she says is fact or pure fantasy by herself?
Coming from a country that elected Bush twice and almost elected Palin this sort of ingnorance doesn't surprise me.
... that no one has questioned the veracity of Mr. Stark's accounts. Unnamed and unreported accounts of audacity... the wording used couldn't be written any better by a newstypist.
Congratulations, slathering and frothing commentators, you've more than likely just been played by a marketing campaign. Not that I disagree with open sauce cuisine, just inane marketing.
what a surprise to have such an ignorant case of teaching in this country like we underfund education. No problem the less money they have the more they will end up using an free OS and maybe the children would teach their teachers more lessons.
Another case of take money from the masses and give it to the elite, make people ignorant so they cant understand reality .
I am outraged over this. I have seen my fair share of stupid US teachers (I live in the US, its true that there are a lot of them, but this is ridiculous.
On the other hand, I am surprised that the teacher did not confiscate the student's laptop, as when I was in high school the staff treated all electronics, purses, backpacks, and bags as being worse than illegal drugs or underage drinking.
This:
http://i29.tinypic.com/mj3h4k.jpg
This can't be true... someone made this up, right? It would take epic levels of sarcasm to create this from scratch, but this seriously cannot be the words of a teacher in my glorious United States. I mean, I had a teacher confiscate a deck of cards I played Solitaire with because it was "gambling paraphernalia" but his ulterior motive was revealed when he used them to demonstrate probability. Linux as youth-corrupting contraband? That's just ludicrous.
she should be sued.
This teacher is apparently not as educated as she thinks she is. There are quite a number of idiots, teachers and other professionals, who are both misinformed about Linux as well as Microsoft drones. She completely overlooked the fact that the Mac OSX is based on Free BSD(a version of Unix). Now the fool is going to end up being made a fool of on a grander scale than would otherwise have happened, had she just left the boy alone.
If you ask me the only thing more enraging than the cretinus teacher was the softie giving out linux discs. Geez mate stand up for yourself! When an arrogant twat gets in your face tell 'em where to gO!
Come on. "Like many others, I tried Linux in college, and ...". If you will, google for "adequacy-style troll".
I believe the news media has just been had.
Ignorance knows no bounds. This is an illustrative point. Those who know a little are frequently very dangerous, like script kiddies. I would like to sit in on that meeting in the new year, as I feel there will be new depths of stupidity to be plumbed.
Out in the heartland of America is a starving lawyer, deserving a juicy lawsuit. He or she may well stumble upon this and feast well this year.
A client-server software specialist in Germany is offering a freely downloadable, server-oriented Linux distribution for Sony's Playstation3. Helios's unnamed PS3 distro installs in less than 10 minutes, and showcases the company's cross-platform file-, print-, PDF-, and image-server software, it says.
Helios describes its PS3 distro as a version of TerraSoft's Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) for the PS3 that has been simplified and optimized for use as a server OS. The simplifications are said to result in 40 percent more RAM available for server applications. Optimizations include AppleTalk support in the kernel, and a Java 1.5 environment pre-installed.
Also pre-installed is Helios's suite of file, print, PDF, and image server software for heterogeneous networks.
The Helios PS3 distro can be installed from a script that runs on top of YDL, or from a downloadable CD ISO image that doubles as a maintenance shell.
Get some verifiable sources because this sounds like it's completely fabricated.
In fact, this sounds exactly like the story where Sarah Palin didn't know South Africa was a country.
http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/digitalsavant/entries/2008/12/11/breaking_local.html
Sounds like there some repentance..
It just goes to show how out-of-touch with the "real" word that she and probably most teachers are.
Teachers usually go from being students to being teachers in one fell swoop; having never left educational establishments. I believe that all teachers should be required to take none-educational work for several years before they are allowed to teach. They will then have a better idea of what the real world is like and be better equipped to teach their students.
"No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful"
Not all software is non-free, and spreading *that* misconception is harmful!
that teacher should have to sit at the back of the classroom wearing a hat bearing the name "dunce". my god, how has life been under her rock? linux is "free", and i say that because it is free (as in free speech) to the consumer. it is not free to the programmers or not-for profit companies that push it. but it's free enough. that teacher is such a bugger. wouldn't want her teaching my class.
btw, i agree with krs360, lol. the yankees do seem to like suing eachother over anything.
... Those that don't have a clue about a subject - Teach!
Well it stands to reason, if you were a good math, IT or language teacher you'd go out into the big bad world and earn a hell of a lot more...
Unless of course you like having half the year off on holidays of course.
She tried it during her college days
but did she have an orgasm
or was she faking it?
07748262394 said:
"she is probably a short, scientologist, short sighted, ginger, old lesbian..."
Scientologists aren't necessarily that stupid.
Lesbians aren't normally that ignorant.
I don't agree with Scientologists or lesbians or even necessarily shortsighted folk on any given subject but that's no reason to insult them by comparing them to an AISD teacher
Even my daughter (who attended AISD) knows teachers there can be abysmally ignorant and incredibly stupid.
(And most of them are not 'old' either)
See also:
http://austinist.com/2008/12/10/aisd_teacher_throws_fit_over_studen.php
http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/digitalsavant/entries/2008/12/11/breaking_local.html
This story is over the top...
Starks turned down $11000 so far in
donations to unveil the teacher's identity.
I eagerly look forwards to you reporting on how that meeting with the superintendand goes!
Starks says he has spoken with the teacher twice since his Monday post and that “Karen” was crying when they spoke. What she failed to mention in her initial e-mail, he says, is that she gave the Linux discs back to the student and was more concerned that there might be pornography or other suspect material on the discs than about a non-Windows operating system being introduced in the classroom.
“She was beside herself,” Starks said, “I excoriated an entire profession. If I can’t heal that what I want to do is make this lady understand that I’m really and sincerely sorry from the bottom of my heart that I caused her grief.”
Being an american who spent most of his young life teaching his teachers about computers and who has a mother who is a school librarian who has to deal with a lot of the teachers IT issues I can honestly say it's sad how little teachers in this country at the elementary and middle school levels know about computers.
Honestly the only thing I find surprising about this is that it wasn't a more recognized distro of linux. I mean not even distrowatch lists anything about Helios's version of linux
If this article is about an American teacher, then you should realize that teaching is the easiest curriculum in American colleges and universities. Thus said and with her actions it seems easy to see how she felt justified when in fact she is just ignorant. I prefer MS Windows because of the applications available to it but I respect Unix of any version and would have encouraged the student.
Before going too far off the deep end, and/or letting this story end here, everyone needs to read the followup blog entry.
The public education system was a corporate invention designed to prepare a new generation of skilled workers. Nowadays it's purpose is to create a new generation of ignorant consumers. Sadly this teacher demonstrates how effective the system is.
The Inquirer..friction....
I see..
Should e-news consider changing news content as soon as it develops?
I taught high school in the USofA for three years - 1973-1976. I quit for three basic reasons: no money, no future, and no support. Frankly all the good ones left.
In my state (please excuse me if I keep that to myself) the schools are the absolute pits. I come into contact daily with "students" who lack basic arithmetic, reading, writing, and science skills. That which we produce comes back to haunt us. Poor students make poor teachers and so on and so forth.
I disagree that teaching is the easiest degree to get in the USA. Physical Education is the easiest; teaching is second easiest. But keep in mind, "easy" is relative. My major was in Geology and Physical Geography and as such I took an awful lot of chemistry, physics and math.
The teacher in question needs to be fired because she is stupid. She is also ignorant but ignorance can be fixed; stupid is forever.
I've never heard of someone so opposed to Linux. While it may be true that Windows is a better choice for most users (Linux is for people in the IT industry and people who want to have more control over their computer at the cost of spending much more time messing with that instead of using the computer for actual productivity), that doesn't mean that the alternative should be discouraged like this. Kids who want to go into computer science will have an advantage when they go to college if they have already learned Linux. I had to learn after I was already there.
Thing is, besides the whole religious OS-isms, that teachers in the US have to be very afraid of losing their jobs( and insane litigation) if anything happens in their classroom that would expose their students to such life-wrecking events as seeing a boob. I mean, if you can be forced to spend years in courtrooms to fend off idiots accusing you of poisoning the minds of students when all you did was use an infected computer, I'd be scared shitless everyday. Not that that's not another reason to start using Linux today...