7 ms·

A friend almost failed an IT class because his website didn't render at all in IE6. This was during the time of IE9. The teacher just hadn't updated their brows

• Cpoll 4mo ago
  I had a similar class where they threatened to fail us if we didn't use Dreamweaver and instead wrote our own html.
  • arsenicwater 4mo ago
    Were they paying for the Dreamweaver licenses?
    • nekusar 4mo ago
      Please. Universities have students by the short and curlies. They can academically do basically whatever they want, and fail you for not complying. Professors can even demand their book be purchased, and fail for not buying the book. Most universities are unethical shitholes that can do basically whatever they want to gatekeep a diploma.
      • dcow 4mo ago
        It’s getting so bad. My wife is in a remote school where they fail students occasionally to squeeze a little extra $$ out of them.
        • what 4mo ago
          I’m sorry your wife failed some classes, but it’s probably not because the school wants some extra money.
          • picofarad 4mo ago
            They didn't say that.
            • mort96 4mo ago
              They did seem to think that it's a problem for schools to fail students.
              • necovek 4mo ago
                They didn't say that either. What they did say is that the school sometimes fails students to get more money — supposedly implying that this was not because they did not meet the passing criteria. This does not preclude failing students when they deserve it. It is ok to question of what makes them believe they would have passed the exams without this financial motivation for the school, but they were pretty clear IMO.
                • nekusar 4mo ago
                  Lets use names. Western Governors University. Online 4 year degree. Classes are passed when you pass the "high stakes" (read: proctorio test). This means if you know the material, then you can pass a class in 1 day. HOWEVER, when you do your final test, they only tell you pass or fail. They do NOT show you what questions you got right or wrong. If you fail, you have to wait 5 days and go through professor hoops. Of course, you naturally never actually talked to the prof. Its all online through ZyBooks. But WGU benefits on failing people, and by hiding what you failed at. Because the longer you attend, the more they charge. Their response is basically "Get Gud Scrub but we're not gonna tell you how".
              • dcow 4mo ago
                It’s not a problem to fail students. But when the online wing of the school has a 35% graduation rate, doesn’t hold lectures, and has a swarm of disgruntled reviews from people who feel like the school is in the business of taking Pell grants and maxing their student loans then stonewalling them when they hit mid 3rd year (right after you’re in for a pound) and start asking questions about where all the money went and why they were sitting at a B all semester then magically ended up with a 59 after the final, it’s a little sus.
    • anon7000 4mo ago
      When I had web design a bit after 2010, they still used Dreamweaver and yeah you could get a license for free via the university. That’s pretty normal (eg giving you a Visual Studio license, Office, all that). It was more crazy that the course was so incredibly basic (nothing more than static page building in dreamweaver) at this college compared to the other one I later transferred to
  • HerbManic 4mo ago
    Dreamweaver was cool as a beginner because it took a lot of the troublesome parts out of the equation. But it did end up being more of a hindrance than a benefit the further you went in.
    • bandrami 4mo ago
      What were these "troublesome parts"? The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.
      • notpushkin 4mo ago
        There was a ton of... not exactly footguns, just things to keep in mind if you’ve wanted your site to work as you intended in all browsers. The webcompat nowadays is way better now. That said, personally I’ve never understood Dreamweaver either. By the time I tried it, I’ve already got used to Notepad++ and writing HTML by hand, so I’ve just treated it as another text editor... and IIRC it just felt way more laggy than Notepad++, with a browser preview panel that took half of my 4:3 display. Maybe I’d discover some cool features if I’ve spent some more time in it? I dunno.
      • lolc 4mo ago
        > The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly. A lot of people (me included) used text editors to write HTML. The process was not easy, and the results mostly not correct. HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML. This is the first example of HTML from RFC 1866 that laid out HTML 2.0 in 1995: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <title>Parsing Example</title> <p>Some text. <em>*wow*</em></p> Using an HTML editor was required if you wanted to get anywhere near that standard.
        • bandrami 4mo ago
          > HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML Worse, it was an extended superset (ha!) of SGML. At least 20 years ago, SGML::Parser would reject some valid HTML documents. That said, it was really easy to type correctly in a text editor (especially compared to actual SGML), particularly one that indented and matched tags for you.
  • layla5alive 4mo ago
    Was that class taught by a certain woman who had a business making websites, per-chance?
    • dcow 4mo ago
      You just described my teacher, and I’m fairly certain we didn’t go to the same middle school.
      • layla5alive 3mo ago
        Probably not, but then again, it's a small world! What state? Northeast?
        • dcow 3mo ago
          Midwest.
  • bowersbros 4mo ago
    I had a teacher who told us to make a website using Powerpoint.. Turns out you save save as HTML and any links you put between slides become anchor tags. Pretty neat, but hurt my soul to have all my classmates do that
  • moduspol 4mo ago
    Hmm. Dreamweaver must be what the cool kids were using instead of Frontpage.
    • noumenon1111 4mo ago
      I was a cool kid! I used FrontPage :D
      • hbogert 4mo ago
        Yeah that's what they all thought :P
• mathstuf 4mo ago
  Heh…I once was in a state-level coding event (it was a small portion of a larger competition) where half of the test was turning in code on a CD during the competition, with the written half during the event. My CD was deemed unusable for whatever reason (it had worked on XP and Fedora 6 or 7 at home) and didn't count towards my score. I still got second in the event. I declined to continue because I couldn't trust that the judges would be able judge my submission fairly and that with half of my score missing I still got second that I didn't need to prove anything else at the cost of more after-school practice hours and wrecking my perfect attendance record during my senior year to travel to nationals.
  • rogerrogerr 4mo ago
    Does high school attendance matter for anything? Genuine question. Always seemed like pre-college schooling always wanted you to think everything was more important long-term than it really was.
    • repeekad 4mo ago
      It’s needed to get into college and that’s it, which is needed to get your first maybe second job and that’s it, which is needed to…
      • 71bw 4mo ago
        ...attendance? I landed a spot in likely the best economics uni in Poland while having 52% attendance in my final HS year, out of which perhaps 10% of the absence was due to illness.
        • Tor3 4mo ago
          It all depends on the country and the local rules, which can also change from year to year. Attendence didn't matter much, if at all, in my day, but right now it matters. Extremely so. Student's couldn't, until this year (when this was finally revised) even visit the school nurse without getting a "no attendance", which would count negatively with respect to the mandatory attendance requirement for advancing further. And even for receiving the common stipend.
• techpression 4mo ago
  It's a built-in secret part of the teaching for any job where you interact with customers, they don't upgrade and they have no troubleshooting skills. Or just ineptitude, but I'm hoping for the former.
• lovich 4mo ago
  Tenure. Or at least that was my experience with my comp sci teacher who required that we gave him printed out programs for our homework and then tossed them into the trash while making eye contact with you and gave you a grade later. The schools admins told me he had tenure so there was nothing I could do. Didn’t take me a whole year before I switched majors.
• JimDabell 4mo ago
  During the time of Internet Explorer 9, it was surprisingly common for people to still be using Internet Explorer 6. This was often out of their control, for instance if they had intranet sites that required Internet Explorer 6, or if they were stuck on an old version of Windows because they had outdated hardware. Later versions of Internet Explorer had compatibility mode, but it often wasn’t enough to get things working, especially if there was ActiveX involved or the security policies were restrictive. Schools were especially prone to this due to their limited budgets among other reasons, and IT teachers weren’t normally the decision makers who could do anything about it. You shouldn’t assume that a random IT teacher had the authority to spontaneously upgrade a school computer that needs to be used for things besides that one student’s assignment.
  • mort96 4mo ago
    I will, however, assume that an IT teacher has the ability to recognise, "this isn't working because I'm using an ancient browser". If the teacher is completely unable to use a less ancient browser, the requirement for the project to work on IE6 should be clearly stated, which it was not. However in this case, my friend just helped the IT teacher install Google Chrome on his computer and showed that the site rendered fine there. I don't know what sort of policies were in place but there were evidently no technical measures implemented to prevent people from installing a modern browser.
    • exceptione 4mo ago
      I think your friend might have used portableapps.com, they offer many types of browsers . These programs are packaged to install under a restricted account, without requiring admin rights.
      • mort96 4mo ago
        And the IT teacher could have done the same, if he was competent.
• hilariously 4mo ago
  I left community college after a week because my "computer" teacher required us to change our monitors to 640x480 and print out ever step that we completed in things like Notepad or Configuring the Desktop and then every day we'd punch it out and would add it to a three ring binder of all the things we've done. Full Color.
  • wccrawford 4mo ago
    I took a computer class in college (like 25 years ago now?) and corrected the teacher multiple times every class. And it was like 95% things that were in the book that was issued, so I could even point out the page it was on. It was absolutely embarrassing.
    • Tor3 4mo ago
      In college I one year had a physics teacher who refused to believe that you could hear the harmonics of a guitar string simply by lightly touching the string at the right place, e.g. in the middle (12th fret) to hear the octave. Nothing could convince him that this was possible. That year was when several of us spent a good part of the week bowling in a nearby bowling hall, either because we didn't have to take the class (the curriculum was years behind what we had already done before college), or the teachers were so incompetent that there was no point attending. Fortunately the other educational years (everything after middle school, that year excepted) were great though.
  • yoz-y 4mo ago
    640x480 in 16 colors is the resolution as it was prescribed in the Bible.
    • jagged-chisel 4mo ago
      Amen
    • markhahn 4mo ago
      though shalt not wear garments of mixed pallettes
• paulluuk 4mo ago
  I assume this was at a highschool and not at university? My IT teacher in highschool was the chemistry teacher, because.. he knew how to use Word, I guess? He knew we were computer nerds so didn't really care about teaching us (we knew more than him anyway). And we didn't mind that he just sat there drinking coffee and reading a book, as it meant we could just play videogames for an hour. Good times.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• dosman33 4mo ago
  Those that can, do - and those that can't, teach. Teaching is rewarding which is why people do it, but you're asking them to take less pay for what is often a harder job - convincing kids to learn something when they have dozens of other things competing for their interest. The math aligns on the side with the teacher having the knowledge you would expect in this scenario - with a fair number of teachers not as much knowledge as one would hope they would have. On the students side, if they are bright then this is a soft-skill learning opportunity - how to navigate knowing more than your superior to the benefit of you both.
  • OrsonSmelles 4mo ago
    Surely you could have made essentially the same point without regurgitating one of the most perniciously derogatory lines ever concocted to describe teaching? All of the market forces you describe are real, but they are partly sustained by cultural templates that make teaching a low-status job among those with technical qualifications and lead to an assumption that every teacher is either (a) internally motivated and doesn't "need" competitive compensation or (b) a washout from a more prestigious track and doesn't "deserve" competitive compensation. This affects administrators, policymakers, voters, and teachers themselves, giving us the status quo where teachers are paid and treated like shit (ask a K-12 educator about the most psychotic parent they met this year and whether admin had their back) so that even many people who love teaching gradually evaporate out of the field if they can. I suppose I'm not even arguing that the material result is much different than you describe it, just that it's lazy, amoral thinking to frame it as a market quirk or the immutable nature of teaching rather than a slow-motion sociocultural trainwreck over which we can exercise some iota of agency. (One such iota might be to simply not say "those who can..." in earnest ever again.)
• mghackerlady 4mo ago
  I'm lucky both of my schools IT teachers were actually competent, they were both technically business teachers but were good with code. That first teacher died shortly after, she had terminal breast cancer. I miss her a lot
• BrandoElFollito 4mo ago
  OTOH this is an opportunity to learn yo add guardrails to the cide to check for browser capabilities and display a page inviting to move to new stuff
• soneil 4mo ago
  This feels like a good place to reel out my favourite anecdote; community college IT (or for the natives; BTEC), 1998; our programming tutor told us to "ignore the internet" because it's a fad. Almost 30 years, and every so often I still wonder about where that got him.