Tag: funding

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Skool Daze

A few days ago I was talking about my daughter and pre-school and how she had a great teacher. Well, that’s all still true, but I’ve had an experience with higher education that’s really appalled me. I was asked by someone to tutor their son in Adobe Creative Suite. He attends City College and was having a little trouble with a couple of programs so I offered to go into the lab with him and help him out.

Part of this is because I’m an expert with these programs and another was in part because I went to City College close to thirty years ago. I was cheap (cheap meaning free) back then and the teachers were decent but a bit quirky. In the end it turned out to work out for me because I got to get all my core courses under my belt and then I transferred to SF State where I could focus on my core courses in Broadcasting. I think my entire college experience which lasted 6 years cost me less than five grand back in those days. Honestly, while it gave me a few skills to use in the outside world, most of those skills are useless today except for the writing and communication skills.

I was referred to a speaker at TED who said something that was very important to me. I can’t remember his name, but I’m sure my friend Fitz will remind me after reading this. The speaker said: We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented. Well then, what’s the point of college? There was no photoshop classes when I was in college. The computer courses were all about programming in languages that only came into use again during the Y2K scare and we were using punch cards to store our data not floppy disks, CD or the now ubiquitous thumb drives. Nothing was on the cutting edge back then and none of us had cell phones.

Now going back to my student. We were working last night in photoshop and the course was basically a book of exercises that said, do this, then this, then this. The problem was that this was a class teaching you how to use photoshop in which you needed to know photoshop to pass the course and if you knew photoshop you could see that they were teaching it wrong. I’ve worked previously in the print industry for over twenty years and I know what formats you use to output files. I was going over the test with my student and started making notes to take back to his teacher. One of the questions was: What is the proper format for outputting graphic files to print from photoshop. He answered TIFF and JPEG. Which is correct. For offset print work you always want to use the TIFF format because it gives you the highest resolution with no loss in compression. JPEG’s used to be problematic with some digital print servers, but the new servers handle them better, but TIFF is always the best choice.

The teacher told him he was wrong and deducted two points from his score. Two points doesn’t seem like much, but you need twenty-five points to pass the class. The correct answer according to the teacher was PNG or GIF. I wrote down that this was the wrong answer. While PNG is technically correct some print servers that the print houses use still can’t handle them, though most can. It does have some loss during compression, but the majority is unnoticeable. Many on demand print houses actually like PNG because the smaller size aids in faster rasterization getting the final product out faster. GIF is as outdated as my college education because it only allows for up to 256 colors which is far from the color range you normal see with the naked eye. OK, sorry if I’m getting a bit techie for some of my readers so I’ll try to make it easier to understand.

Essentially, this course doesn’t need a teacher. All it needs is a student that can read and follow instructions which they hopefully learned in High School. The writing wasn’t very good in the manual either because there were some steps that it just told the student to perform a task without telling them how to do it. The course book was a cheaply printed low quality book that looks like it was printed on a laser printer and tape bound and then sold to the students for about $50 if not more.

You could do better by purchasing one of the O’Reilly books from Amazon that has links to downloadable files to work with that would give you far better instruction than this course would. The unfortunate part is that an O’Reilly book doesn’t give you Adobe Authorized Certification™ when you finish it and this class did even though you’re probably not taught well enough to satisfy the needs of a company who’s looking for someone with that kind of certification.

I had to learn all of what I do from magazine articles, a few books and now YouTube videos that kids in elementary school are sometimes putting together. Some of my schooling came from the school of hard knocks which I’m sure I’ve earned a Ph.D. by now. When you have kids who are going to college trying to learn a programs that were written by high school kids who didn’t go to college so they could spend more time with their multi-billion dollar start up company it makes you wonder sometimes if there still is much value in college today because as I mentioned earlier, We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented.

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The Sorry State of Education in San Francisco

I received an email today from my daughter’s pre-K teacher. I was sad to read this email. As a few of you know, my daughter was diagnosed with autism.  Few people really know what’s going on with autism. Not every child acts the same way. They could be normal looking kids who don’t have the ability to talk and are sensitive to song or the tastes of foods to the kids who have what are called “stimmy” behavior which could be that they hit themselves or bang themselves around or making odd gestures.  I have to say we have received excellent help along the way from the school system. Kara, my daughter’s teacher is the best. All of the aids who help her out are also the best. They all have the patience of saints, but the problem is that they only get $250/year to supply their class. When I was a kid, my mother along with other moms would bring stuff to the class for the teacher to use. My mom was a teacher and still had lots of left over stuff that we wouldn’t need anymore, but would probably be able to be used in the class.

I knew things were kind of tough, but I never realized they had gotten that bad in San Francisco. Autistic children’s behavior runs across a wide spectrum. Some people have seen my daughter and don’t understand because they don’t see anything odd about her except that she doesn’t really speak much at 3.5 years old. Most of these people either haven’t had to deal with kids or their kids are fully grown and they can’t remember what a 3 year old is like. The school district needs to be better run to provide for our kids whether they are autistic or not. California ranks very low on the education scale. While we’re spending more than other states because we have more teachers, our teacher to pupil ratio is much higher than other states. Here’s the email:
Dear Family and Friends,
As most of you know, I am Pre-K special education teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District.  I teach a wonderful group of 3-5 year olds, who are mostly on the autism spectrum.  What many people do not know, is the huge negative effect our economy has had on California’s schools.  The last two years SFUSD teachers have only been given $25 a month for classroom materials.  Yes, that is right, we are given only $250 a year to purchase paper, markers, books, puzzles, etc.  It is nearly impossible to access these materials alone, and our current materials are nearing their end.   Recently, I joined Donor’s Choose and submitted a project to help enrich my students’ learning through music, art, science, and sensory materials (as well as necessary classroom materials such as shelves without holes, new carpets, etc.)   On this wonderful website, you can support this project by donating any amount. Once we reach our goal, the website will purchase the materials and send them to my class. I’ll take pictures of my kids using them and we’ll make thank you notes to our donors!

A free way to donate $5 to my project  is by going to this website http://www.bing.com/gives/default1.aspx#fbid=nYe–0CPAFi&wom=false .   Click START HERE, enter your email address, click MAKE BING MY HOME PAGE (do not worry it will NOT make BING your homepage), click NO I will not make BING my home page,  and then click finish.  You will receive an email from Bing (most likely in your junk mail) subject donation code.  You can redeem the $5 donation yourself for my project at : http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/proposal.html?id=487308 .

I am sorry that my daughter’s teacher has to ask for money to help cover the costs, but if you’re a teacher think about only having $25/month to fund your school supplies. It seems to me that all the money we’re spending on education not enough is being spent on educating our children. Special needs kids especially need special things to help them get over some of the textural issues they have. I know my daughter when she was 2 years old didn’t like the feeling of dirt and sand and now she’ll be grabbing handfuls of dirt like all the other kids with no problem. This may not have happened if we didn’t have the extra help to bring her around. We might have been able to do it ourselves, but it probably would have taken longer, so I have to thank the school district for that.
I’m hoping that Jerry Brown while he’s cutting out unnecessary expenses to the school department like his removal of the Secretary of Education because it was a 13 person department with a $1.9 million/year budget that was basically a yes man to the Governor and redundant to the Superintendent of Public Education office. Our children deserve more in a state that’s the 8th largest economy in the world. I’m sending my $5 right now.