Added Part G to «Today» section

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Kenneth John Odle 2024-07-13 14:58:22 -04:00
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@ -263,6 +263,45 @@ This was my first real experience with a server and FTP. I had made websites bef
I had to learn FTP, which meant that I needed an FTP \textit{client}. I had no idea what a client was, so I had to learn some new vocabularly. It was like being in elementary schools again, where new words were printed in boldface and then defined in the margin. But I eventually figured out (through learning JavaScript) the difference between client-side (your computer) and server-side (their computer).
Part G
I got myself a web site and got myself a blog but the educational-industrial complex said that web 2.0 was the next big thing. I thought that having those things would give me a leg up on to the (then) very tight job market.
Alas the educational industrial complex does not exist to do right by students. They largely exist to extract as much as profit as they possibly can. (Guess what---their lobbyists are also behind a lot of the legislation that requires these expenditures. Your tax dollars are not going toward making your child education better, but toward making rich men richer. Yay, capitalism!
Part of the problem with the educational system in the United States is that it's coupled to so many other things. For every teacher that loves their subject matter and once to change kids lives there is at least one (and often two or three teachers) that are there so they can have the summer off or coach the golf team.
In reality they are right—teaching as a profession a job it should not be a cause but as long as there are so many inequities and inequalities in our society teaching will always be a cause because young people are the most effective place to make a chain.
The irony here is that while a teaching profession appears to be very progressive and embracing of new technologies, that is only true on the surface. Under that surface it is deeply deeply conservative. Principals don't want to hire teachers who might rock the boat and teachers are deeply territorial. I suppose the latter is only to be expected when you work in a chronically under funded and under appreciated field.
An aside.
I saw a tweet a couple of years ago by someone in law enforcement who was responding to the ``defund the police''' initiative complaining about how hard it is to be a cop these days and that no other profession has ever been the victim of a defunding initiative. I'm sorry that simply is not true—Republican law makers have been trying to defend public education my entire light.
My web Host offered word press that a one-click installer which meant that you enter few details, click the install button and voila! You have a word press blog. You might know absolutely nothing about web technologies but suddenly here you are easy peazy mac and cheesey—with a blog.
I don't remember exactly when this was but it was before tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous.
I like having a blog to review books as I thought it would put me head and shoulders over any other potential teaching candidate and getting things done on paper always helps me organize my thoughts.
Alas, I was not entirely happy with the appearance of my blog. At this point knew HTML and I knew CSS but I knew nothing about PHP which is what WordPress is built with. Nevertheless i jumped right into WordPress built-in file editor and started pressing buttons.
This is of course exactly what you are not suppposed to do. I made plenty of mistakes and bolloxed the whole thing up and had to start over from scratch more than once.
It was fun but it was also frustrating to have to start over so i did what i should have done in the first place and RTFM. I learned about the proper way to edit your themes, which is that you don't—you create a child theme and do your mischief there. I learned a lot more about HTML and CSS and delved into the world of PHP and Javascript enough that I was able to develop my own plugins and eventually themes from scratch.
I found a highly adaptable theme that i really loved (Graphene) and became an expert in it and started helping out in its support forums. The theme's developer appreciated my efforts and made me a moderator in those forums and also gave me free access to the mobile-friendly version of the theme. It was a great time and I was learning a lot.
This was back when mobile was just becoming a thing and a lot of websittes had two versions of their site—a desktop version first and a mobile version second but at some point people began accessing websites more on their mobile devices than on a desktop so that process is now reversed—we develop first for mobile and then usually later for desktop, sometimes poorly. If you've ever been to a website that looked fine on your phone but looked like an utter shit show on your computer this is why.
I was not, however, getting a teaching job. I was getting lots of opportunities as a substitute teacher but that was because I could follow a lesson plan, I could manage a class room and keep kids in line, and I would actually teach and then wander around the classroom and make sure kids were learning.
Part H
\section{Today}
I am in a very different place now than I ever thought I would be. I'm not on Plan A or Plan B. In fact, I've pretty much run out of alphabet to describe exactly where I am now.