

Ask HN: Were you saved by a teacher? - mathgladiator

In thinking about a recent comment I made ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059752 ), i was wondering how many of us have been given second chances by teachers.<p>It seems to me, being entrepreneurial or a hacker requires dealing with a massive amount of daily failure. Yet, the school system is very poor at enabling this (which is probably why we can't teach entrepreneurial/hacking).<p>So, I'm wondering how many of us were saved by a fair or progressive teacher (as opposed to a crazy pedantic person)?
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elliottcarlson
When I first moved to the states and started high school I was really bored
since everything we were learning was way behind the education I received back
in Europe. I chose to be a teachers aide in the language lab, conveniently
during a period there were no classes there simply so I could work on the
computers (already ancient mac classics and a single IIGS) where I got to play
around with Hypercard and attempt to make programs... I think that teacher let
me get away with a lot - and it was a huge learning experience since all I had
at home was a Compaq 8086.

On the other side of things, I worked for Seton Hall Prep school for a while
when I moved to the east coast - managing the network and maintaining various
systems including the community machines as well as the classroom machines.
While the machines were locked down quite well, and we even used a desktop
replacement, one of the students had figured that running Help from MS Word,
gave them access to MS Access (not generally something they had access to) and
the student was writing a pretty basic VBA application with forms etc on top
of Access. I managed to figure out which student it was and made sure he knew
not to do anything bad with it and I would be more than happy to help him out
and pointed him in the direction of learning more advanced stuff. I do wonder
if he is a programmer now :)

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ericmsimons
Yeah, I was saved by a teacher. It's been pretty amazing actually because we
ended up becoming good friends and co-founders!

