Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I hate the idea of writing about anything even tangentially related to my job because I know people I work with read this page and I’m not usually willing to risk anything I say here being misinterpreted or held against me at a later date. Today, however, I want to draw upon my experience as an IT professional to comment about something posted on John Gruber’s linked list at Daring Fireball.

Question for anti-iPhone IT managers like those quoted in the Wall Street Journal story yesterday: Do you see your role as serving the employees of your company, or ruling over them?

(As an aside, I’m very turned off by how Gruber has divided people into antagonist “anti-iPhone IT managers” and “iPhone doubters” versus protagonist individuals who are implicitly more intelligent. “iPhone doubter” and similar phrases resemble “holocaust denier” and other pejoratives too much for my liking. He’s essentially accusing these people of stupidly “doubting” a reality of iPhone super success that is not yet certain.)

I’m not an anti-iPhone IT manager. I do see my role as serving employees, but not by obeying their every whim. I’ve been hired because of my expertise and to presumably use that expertise to create a work-ready environment. A huge part of my job is to make sure that equipment and services are as reliable and available as they can possibly be so that employees, who are generally technologically ignorant at all but the most shallow levels, can work and make money for the company, and hence, my salary. When either employees or executives dismiss my opinions and recommendations out of hand because they want something that may adversely affect others who rely on the same infrastructure for their jobs, that angers me. It defeats the point of my presence. It relegates me to “just do it because I said so” trained monkey status, and I’ll be damned if I’m anyone’s “do it” bitch. My job is to provide what the company needs to function, manage the infrastructure underlying that function, and protect the same. IT policy by executive edict or end-user whining snowballs into eventual disaster, for which I will take the hit later because of my inability to manage the arbitrary tuna net thrown over top of me.

So I intend to serve the employees the same way a parent serves a child - by knowing better in a lot of cases, and by saying “no” frequently when adverse consequences, including my inability to effectively and securely manage features-by-fiat, are likely to occur. If that means employees sometimes cannot play with their new toys on the corporate network, too bad. It’s not that I rule end users with contempt. I have to consider the big picture, and sometimes that means temporary inconvenience while the IT people plan and test and secure and make sure you have the reliable, functioning technology you need to do your job.

Utterly terrifying.

[Julie Amero] was substituting for an English class. She went to the restroom, and when she returned, students were gathered around a computer that was displaying porn pop-ups. Amero, who describes herself as a total computer novice, couldn’t make them stop, and she eventually ran to the teacher’s lounge to get help. In court, school officials admitted that the antivirus software installed on the PC was out of date, and antispyware programs were not installed. A school official did tell parents, however, that the school district had comprehensive filtering and firewall software in place at the time.

Although it’s hard to conjure up a simple explanation for why a substitute teacher would show middle-school students porn pop-ups on purpose, Amero was prosecuted on the ground that she had done this intentionally. She was eventually found guilty and faced the prospect of 40 years in jail because of the incident.

The idea that circumstances beyond my control could cost me the rest of my life in prison because of some superheated sexual paranoia that fuels illogically indignant parents and abusive prosecutors makes me want to surround my house with razor wire and land mines. Considering that in Ohio, you can be declared a sex offender without any criminal conviction whatsoever, I wonder if there is any truly safe place to live where children and their parents can’t potentially ruin your life at a whim.

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, Democrat, has declared that there will be no beer or wine sales during this year’s Ohio State Fair because it’s a “family” friendly event, and apparently by definition, alcohol is “family” un-friendly.

1. I have grown sick of the word “family” being used as a replacement for “children”, and the attempt to cast me as a second-class “anti-family” or “anti-children” citizen because I do not reproduce. Since when is the “family” some kind of moral absolute against which the worth, rights, and considerations of others is measured?
2. What kind of stick-up-the-ass society do we live in when a responsible adult enjoying a cold beer on a hot summer day is considered an open expression of hostility toward “families”?
3. Assuming reasonable adults still live in Ohio, why aren’t they mad as hell about increasing government contempt for their ability to conduct their own lives?
4. I would like those of you who routinely complain about the “Christian right” and their zeal for pressing their moral beliefs onto others to remember that such behavior is neither exclusive to Christians, nor the right.

I want to link to an article to reinforce some points I made in a previous article.

Teachers leaving profession in droves

Teachers stifled by bureaucracy and blocked from making decisions in their own classrooms are leaving teaching in droves, according to a new study by Cal State University’s Teacher Quality Institute.
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In the Bay Area, the sky-high cost of living and comparatively low salaries also make it hard for new teachers to stick it out, particularly in rough conditions.

Sabrina Walasek loved teaching middle school science and math in Daly City and Felton, near Santa Cruz. But after six years, the Oakland resident found herself worn out from keeping kids in check .

“The amount of energy spent on discipline and behavior management just got to me after a while,” Walasek said.

The stress wasn’t worth the pay, she said.

“It was almost impossible to exist in the Bay Area on that salary,” Walasek said.

I don’t intend this post to make any judgments about the teachers, their situation, or their motives. But I did notice that the reasons many teachers seem to be leaving their jobs are the same reasons I left my job in education. Just an observation, but obviously I have a lot of lingering thoughts and feelings about that past situation.

Here was the real kicker in the article, at least for me:

The 1,900 teachers surveyed by the institute said they left mainly because of the endless amounts of paperwork, constant interruptions and fruitless meetings that take time away from actual instruction, said Ken Futernick, principal author of the study and director of K-12 Studies at the institute.

Welcome to just about every other job in America. In this respect, you’re not unusual.

This article caught my attention today: Some Schools Ban iPods to Stop Cheating.

MERIDIAN, Idaho — Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious — students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning cell phones, realizing students could text message the answers to each other.

Now, schools across the country are targeting digital media players as a potential cheating device. Devices including iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.
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Mountain View recently enacted a ban on digital media players after school officials realized some students were downloading formulas and other material onto the players.
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Using the devices to cheat is hardly a new phenomenon, said Shana Kemp, spokeswoman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

I spent probably the most harrowing 18 months of my professional life working at a high school. I took care of several labs of about 150 Windows machines , give or take a few. Each student that sat at each machine during each period of the day saw that machine as completely their own, to do whatever they wished, including destroying the thing so as to make it unusable until I was able to fix it, which was almost always an ordeal. Usually the quickest way to restore the machine to working order was to reimage it, and the images were stored on a Netware server behind a chain of 10mbit hubs, which served all the other machines in the labs. Figure 150 machines * 6 periods per day * 5 days per week, and that’s 4500 hours per week students had to lay waste to machines, versus my 40 hours to clean them up. Even if my week had been 80 hours, I’d still be behind. And then two sets of bosses giving me directly conflicting orders almost constantly… Talk about a test of patience. But I digress.

Anyway, one thing that was true almost a decade ago was that the students didn’t need portable gadgets of any kind to cheat. They used the computers themselves to cheat. There were ways to lock the computers down, but that required equipment the school wouldn’t buy; or it required inconvenience to the students, which they would in turn exaggerate into crisis for the teachers; or it required inconvenience for the teachers, which in turn would become issues for school administrators. The teachers didn’t know much about computers and didn’t want to - that’s why I was there, in their estimation, and their hands were full managing hormoned adolescents all day. I can’t say I disagreed with them. Nobody had an easy job.

And one day it just dawned on a very young me that cheating isn’t a technological problem, it’s a behavioral problem. From the article:

“You can just thread the earbud up your sleeve and then hold it to your ear like you’re resting your head on your hand,” Nelson said. “I think you should still be able to use iPods. People who are going to cheat are still going to cheat, with or without them.”

Banning the popular gadget of the moment isn’t going to stop cheating in school. These kids cheat because of bad parents. You’ve raised your narcissistic, spoiled, lazy, entitlement queen children to accept cheating as a matter-of-fact occurrence without any accompanying guilt or thought of consequences. It’s going to be done, so might as well do it, is their thought. Technology isn’t to blame, parents and the nasty children they’ve raised are to blame.

In the end, the teachers at the school I worked at accepted the fact that eyeball patrol was the only way to catch cheaters, and the students kept cheating. I got frustrated with the job (and the shitty pay) and left. But it was certainly a learning experience and what I’ve come to realize about school, teachers, and parents could fill a volume. The ultimate lesson of that volume, I think, would be that most problems at school start at home, and ultimately, the quality of parenting is directly reflected in the child. No teacher or school can change that. Parents, the wet cement that is your child will eventually dry, so start giving a damn and take time to shape that wet cement into an actual human being that will be an asset to society rather than a liability.