Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2007/05/05/walnut-hills-1998.html
I taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati,
OH during the 1998-1999 school year.
I taught this course because:
- They were desperate for a teacher. The rather incompetent
teacher who was scheduled to teach the course quit (actually,
frighteningly enough, she got a higher paying and higher ranking job
in a nearby school system) a few weeks before the school year was to
start. - The environment was GNU/Linux
using GCC‘s C++
compiler. I went to the job interview because a mother of someone in
the class begged me to go, but I was going to walk out as soon as I
saw I’d have to teach on Microsoft (which I assumed it would be). My
jaw literally dropped when I saw: - The
students had built their own lab, which even got covered in the
Cincinnati Post. I was quite amazed that some of
the most brilliant high school students I’ve ever seen were assembled
there in one classroom.
It became quite clear to me that I owed it to these students to teach
the course. They’d discovered Free Software before the boom, and
built their own lab despite the designate CS teacher obviously
knowning a hell of lot less about the field than they did. There
wasn’t a person qualified and available , in my view, in all of
Cincinnati to teach the class. High school teacher wages are
traditionally pathetic. So, I joined the teacher’s union and took
the job.
Doing this work delayed my thesis and graduation from the Master’s
program at University of Cincinnati for yet another year, but it was
worth doing. Even almost a decade later, it ranks in my mind on the
top ten list of great things I’ve done in my life, even despite all
the exciting Free Software work I’ve been involved with in my
positions at the FSF and the Software Freedom Conservancy.
I am exceedingly proud of what my students have accomplished. It’s
clear to me that somehow we assembled an incredibly special group of
Computer Science students; many of them have gone on to make
interesting contributions. I know they didn’t always like that I
brought my Free Software politics into the classroom, but I think we
had a good year, and their excellent results on that AP exam showed
it. Here are a few of my students from that year who have a public
online life:
If you were my student at Walnut Hills and would like a link here, let
me know and I’ll add one.