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Tuesday, January 9, 2007

 

On Encouraging Youth

I remember once back in early high school we had an assignment for phys. ed. class where we had to write about something we’re recently achieved and were proud of. It was some self-esteem building thing, I assume.

This was back in the early 90’s, when the interwebs were nothing much more than shell accounts, lynx and telnet. At this point in time, at the tender age of 12 or 13, I was playing MUDs quite a bit, and had infact, after many months of effort, managed to become a wizard and was able to actually program my own little kingdom in the game that other players could run around and kill monsters in. [They were mostly killing hobbits. That’ll teach the hairy little bastards.]

So, I wrote my assignment about the months of work I’d put in to reaching the point where I could program my own part of the game, and I wrote about how I’d learnt the programming language [LpC, it was] and done good bit of coding in the time since, and all the various other things that had taken many months to do. [I didn’t write about just _how_ I was accessing the internet in the early 90’s, which was an achievement in itself. :)]

And I was reasonably proud of all the effort it had taken me to get there, and the effort I’d put into the coding. Bear in mind that all the other people playing/programming this game were university students, so I thought it was pretty good to be holding my own with people 10 years older than me, many of whom were actually studying for Bachelor degrees in computing at the time.

Anyways, I got the assignment back and was told by the teacher that it didn’t count as an achievement and I’d have to do the assignment again. Everyone else’s achievements counted, except mine, apparently.

And that is why PE teachers are PE teachers and not kings of the interwebs like me. Ha! 🙂




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