On the topic of doors. I have a hack that speeded up transit and benefited many many people daily.
There was a main entrance gate at my old high school. There was four sets of double door that opened out, that allowed students into the campus. These doors are damn heavy and one night I was cruising with my friend and I told him, I got an idea. I refused to answer any of his inquiries.
We arrived at the high school, I climbed up onto the top of the gate. On each door was the little hydraulic system to stop the doors from slamming shut ( know what I'm sayin?)
These hydraulic arms were just little planks of metal. I pushed them down with my foot. This created tension when the door closed on the two arms. Instead of sliding freely(and the door closing), the arms rub and create enough friction to hold the door open.
Now instead of the doors swinging close, they remain open daily, until they are closed for the night. Every day I would walk through them, and see every other student walking through my simple little hack that got the doors to stay open all day.
tl;dr: Hacked some doors at my old high school so they would stay open instead of closing.
Edit: My logic is: I used the doors... four times a day average. Took three seconds to open and walk through vs one second to just walk through. So two seconds to open. About 180 days of school times four years.
180x4x2/60= 24 minutes
While not substantial, I just saved a person 24 minutes of their life.
Here is a hack for you: Doors that are hung slightly off center or with self closing hinges close mostly for convenience. Hydraulic or electrical closers like you encountered are more expensive, and only installed when they are required for some reason (security, child safety, fire doors, etc).
You mentioned four sets of double doors, which also indicates the designer knew the requirement for positive closure would be a flow issue and added extra doors. Had there not been a really good reason for having the doors be closed they probably wouldn't have planned for the extra doors.
I know you believe your "hack" was innocent enough, but essentially you vandalized a system someone carefully thought out to save yourself 24 minutes over 4 years.
I don't know the architecture of your high school or the reasoning behind the positive closure doors, but I hope to god they were not part of a firewall (walls and closed doors designed to prevent fire from spreading through a building faster than it can be safely evacuated).
Like. I do these type of time-saving calculations in my head whenever someone like the bus driver drives too slow and fails to make a light, thus costing everyone on the bus an extra minute of their lives.
You actually saved 24 minutes times, say, 3000 students, which is 24*3000/60/24 = 50 human days saved over the span of four years. Not to mention, this hack may well have lived on since you've graduated, so that's many more days of savings. Nice.
I'm not trying to sound extra cool, if that's the reason why I'm being modded down. Those are just hacks I did when I was a lot more foolish than today. As with many things, the actual implementation is quite lame and dubious...
Escaping classes: we had these forms where we were supposed to enter our missed classes and then present them to the various teachers for signature at the end of the month. The weakness of this concept was that teachers had gotten so used to the forms that they didn't keep records of their own when people failed to show up. If you simply "forgot" to fill out and present the form 80% of the time, they would happily sign the other 20% without getting suspicious. Of course, after about a year of this, some of them were on to me, but since I always showed up for exams I guess we came to a silent agreement. One time, a teacher figured out what I was doing and asked me point blank; I admitted everything and to my surprise he said it was OK but I shouldn't tell anyone.
Skipping phys ed was harder. We had several sub-groups with different teachers. Turns out, when you left one sub-group for another, but failed to show up at the new one, nobody noticed because the new and the old teacher didn't ever speak to one another. This only worked because I didn't even show up once at the "new" teacher's lessons so she didn't know who I was. It sounds cool, but it almost got me expelled when school administration found out after two years. However, maybe I got lucky, they were simply incompetent, or they just decided to not care, because after the "formal investigation" was announced, I never heard from them again. Maybe they were ashamed that something like that could actually happen and since I never bragged about this exploit they just chose to ignore it.
Getting past assistants: this involves flat-out lying, which is why I don't do this shit anymore (nor do I need to at my current job, thank the gods). I believe assistants are in constant fear of screwing up. They're supposed to screen the calls and weed out people who just want to sell stuff to their boss, but at the same time they're terrified of false positives. So I basically implied that I knew their bosses. It worked almost every single time, the lies just had to be bold enough. Like, "oh, when we were playing Tennis the other week he said I should coordinate with you about getting an appointment in this month". Stuff like that.
Getting girls: leaving aside the classic wingman tactics at parties (most of which involve either distracting a girl's friends in order to isolate her and/or putting on a show to appear cooler), this one is actually more of a self-hack. It involves faking confidence and importance, and saying things that sound smart because they're prepared in advance.
Not only is it written by the author of the epic ender's game series ( which is a must as well), but it mixes genetic mutations of time control, ancient(objectively, not subjectively.) civilizations and plain ol good sci-fi together for one hell of a ride.
But kids are lacking motivation for a number of things. One of which is the mandatory, boring subject matter and the way it's taught. It's also common society's mindset to think of "learning" as bad. Or at least that's what a lot of kids think. Some figure it out, but many remain with the attitude that learning is bad. These students also get so accustomed to being given every piece of info, they don't know or care how to find and learn on their own.
Is slides really worse than lugging a ten-pound book around all day and reciting emotionless, boring, seemingly irrelevant information? Perhaps the slides will be no different.
If any benefit of online education, it's the saving of our next generations backs. Most backpacks average 30 pounds. Is their a reason to carry such large amount of weight on our back through out the day, for 3/4ths of the year?
> Is slides really worse than lugging a ten-pound book around all day and reciting emotionless, boring, seemingly irrelevant information?
Yes, a thousand times worse.
Because it's not fixing the problem that the subjects are boring :)
I do a lot of work with kids and education; you simply cannot, from my observation, teach from a screen - unless the participant is highly capable of research it doesn't work.
We need to fix the physical teaching - not replace it with a worse unfixed method!
ErrantX, I don't think slides are a problem. They are simply one more medium teachers may use to communicate knowledge. Now, they are certainly not a replacement for actual textbooks, but they do have their uses.
I do think you hit on a very important topic, although indirectly. You state that the subjects are boring. I've had my share of bad teachers in all different levels of school (I'm a graduate student right now). The problem is not that the subjects are boring. The problem is that you have teachers that either have no interest in teaching the subject, or you have teachers that don't know how to teach the subject. I spend most of my time studying financial mathematics, but the most interesting class I ever took was one on American History in high school. Everyday was a brand new story, something intensely interesting. I certainly learned my American History, as I got a 5 on the AP test way back in the day. I also have to give credit to the same teacher for giving me a deep respect for all of history.
Kids need to be able to work at their own speed. If a kid can and has the will to complete high school in one year, then he should have the choice. School need to stop being mandatory in the sense of actual school time.
When the teacher unions are causing halts of online schooling, you gotta think... Who really cares about us students anymore?
If people want to change the world, start where everyone begins, in the school system.
There was a main entrance gate at my old high school. There was four sets of double door that opened out, that allowed students into the campus. These doors are damn heavy and one night I was cruising with my friend and I told him, I got an idea. I refused to answer any of his inquiries.
We arrived at the high school, I climbed up onto the top of the gate. On each door was the little hydraulic system to stop the doors from slamming shut ( know what I'm sayin?) These hydraulic arms were just little planks of metal. I pushed them down with my foot. This created tension when the door closed on the two arms. Instead of sliding freely(and the door closing), the arms rub and create enough friction to hold the door open.
Now instead of the doors swinging close, they remain open daily, until they are closed for the night. Every day I would walk through them, and see every other student walking through my simple little hack that got the doors to stay open all day.
tl;dr: Hacked some doors at my old high school so they would stay open instead of closing.
Edit: My logic is: I used the doors... four times a day average. Took three seconds to open and walk through vs one second to just walk through. So two seconds to open. About 180 days of school times four years.
180x4x2/60= 24 minutes
While not substantial, I just saved a person 24 minutes of their life.