My school and internet experience

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my school experience and it was awful. I always felt comfortable with studies until i started coding and doing internet related stuff. My school wasn’t comfortable with my thoughts.

This is the first post of a series i’m to be posting (i hope) in order to order my ideas and start sharing experiences. With this i would like to give my 2 cents to schools in this country.

When i was around eight years old my brother was studying electronic engineering and he was learning pascal. I didn’t like computers at all but i loved the idea to start writing smth that only me and a small group of ppl would understand, so i started seeing him code. When he was out i used to seat infront of the computer and started writing non-sense stuff. Pascal was smth difficult if you don’t have any guidance so i quited.

I hated computers until i was 15 years old. I didn’t even like to play with them. I knew about internet but i was more interested in sports and music by that time. I remember this computer class in where we started learning html. The good thing about this class was that we learned to code html in notepad and not in a fancy wysiwyg editor. haha a class mate was always way more advanced that the other students, at the end we found out that he was using frontpage without others noticing it. LOSER! ;)

The possibility to right click other webpage and view the source code was smth i found really interesting. I started coding with a buddy which now works with me (he’s one of the best coders i have met) and started doing a school community. We called that community elcolegioesunamierda.com (schoolisshit.com). We needed to open several geocities accounts because of the amount of stuff we had. The site at first had a very low amount of visits (around 100 visits - not unique -) per day. I’m pretty sure that all those were done by both of us LOL We started changing the focus of the website and one day we started having 1 million visits, then 3 million visits per day! (adsense didn’t exist at that time :S ).

My school teachers knew about the site because it appeared on several local newspapers. They did a little research and found that we both of their students were responsible for it. Other schools started to talk about us so my school expel us. We argued that all the work was done at home on our free time but they didn’t care. That was our last day at school. That day a lycos representative visited us in order to promote their free hosting service. They offered more space than geocities but they displayed a banner over your content. My buddy and myself asked if it was ok to remove it. The representative said that it was impossible to do it so we started working and in half an hour we sent him a javascript piece of code that was able to remove it completely. He was surprised and congratulate our computer teachers. The school director called us and we didn’t get expeld LOL

Our relationship with the computer teachers started and we were in charge of preparing the classes for them to teach. They were really good ppl and teachers but they really lacked experience and knowledge.

I started learning javascript and php and later i started coding Actionscript for flash 4. My friend started coding asp and learning some sql.

One of my school teachers started learning macromedia software with me on a supposed authorized training center (which we found out they weren’t later). It was a great experience but i remember doing my teacher’s homework hehehe

To make the story short (what a huge post!) I started doing some conferences locally and in other countries. When i was at my last year at school i started working, and i worked so much that my school didn’t like it. They made me repeat my last year without much explanation. I had a contract to work on a great agency but they didn’t care. Next year i sat down with one of those teachers and he told me privately that they made that decision because they felt i was to young to start working. what an idiots!

I didn’t learn english at school because my teachers didn’t care, i didn’t learn math because teachers were centered in better students, i didn’t learn computer stuff because my teachers sucked, etc.

I know some english, i know math, i know how a little bit of computers but because of my desire to learn though internet.

Teaching methodology in this country is wrong. And i want to focus my rage into a personal project that is supposed to change their minds and start giving a better importance to internet and technology.

School killed my creativity and made my progress difficult just because i was a different kind of student.

What are your thoughts/experience on this?

—fernando