Cut nails
My kids tech teacher is making me crazy.
My son brought home a simple HTML assignment — generic old “Hello World” stuff — requiring that they use several different text colors. When I looked at the examples he provided I was surprised to see stuff like:
<FONT COLOR="BLUE">Hello</FONT>
So I gave him a quick lesson in CSS (which he got instantly) and he went ahead and gutted the deprecated <font> tags. I also mentioned that he might be better off sticking to lowercase in his markup and that a DTD was a good thing to have.
He turned in a perfectly sound page that validated and received a ‘C’ because the teacher felt that he hadn’t demonstrated a mastery of the <FONT> tag.
He’s got these kids building sites like it’s 1999.
Your comments
twitch I weep for the future.
Oh man, I am angry FOR you, that’s just so sad.
I think we worked it out.
I contacted the teacher and explained that knocking points off for not using an invalid tag (the page is XHTML strict) was akin to calling Pluto a planet. I offered to elaborate, but he declined.
It seemed to work, the grade went to a B+ and he made it pretty clear that he never wanted to hear from me again. Win win.
Oh man, that would drive me insane.
I’d end up doing exactly what you did (contacting the teacher) but then I’d be doubly frustrated by being dismissed by him (“never want to hear from me again.”)
I’d probably end up being arrested for standing in his classroom ranting. “Can’t you see, this is IMPORTANT. The future is at stake here!”
Stewart, my kids are 11, 13 and 15.
I have to pick these battles and Tech is only a quarter and the teacher’s an asshat anyway.
I need to muster my resources for illicit (and possibly indecent) murals, plumbing ‘accidents’ and unfortunate incidents involving weight machines and gel packs — all of which have happened and will again.
About this entry
This is an individual entry and was posted September 21, 2007.
This entry is tagged with: family, kids, school
Related entries
You may also be interested in:
About
I really need to put something here. Something about myself, something about this site. Something.
Maybe right after I add site navigation... say, a week from never.
Credits
This site is powered by Textpattern and the fine folks at Joyent. The stylesheet is derived from Harry Roberts wonderful Typogridphy.
Popular Tags
art, bazoomi, cartography, christmas, css, design, ephemera, family, internet, kids, law, media, music, photography, photos, photoshop, politics, privacy, recovery, schenectady, school, science, silly, software, summer, typography, web design, web development