HN user
Hacker is such a loaded term... but the point is they have some technical skills that are actually valuable and can lead to decent paying jobs as well as additional study/development if they choose to... vs. cosmetology or some of the other vocational ed being offered.
Bummer! But your school is way more advanced than the ones around here where the closest thing they have is Intro to MS Office :( P.S.My daughter's in IB too and she thought it was pretty cool that you are too :) Now if I could just get her interested in programming....
Having done the startup thing and lost my shirt in the process - you can read my Lessons from the Land of Hard Knocks - http://wp.me/1pqm - realize there are no guarantees of an ROI in monetary terms. However, as a teacher you have a much higher probability of actually making a difference and touching peoples lives than getting excellent an excellent Karmic ROI.
That said, I'm still working toward my entrepreneurial goals, just a little wiser and in a little more measured fashion - and this time I'm focused on working on something that I really care about whether I make a dollar on it or not.
I'm fluent in Spanish and can butcher French & Portuguese pretty well, but the reality is I've needed technical skills much more than I do language skills.
If you're interested in changing the world, I've got a public service project MyRepresentatives.com in need of a developer(s) to help me take it to the next level. It's your one stop shop for engaging with your political representatives online. Find your political representatives, subscribe to their updates and give them feedback. Currently, version 1.0 is live today for the Memphis, TN area, but I'm working on expanding both the functionality and geographic reach.
Bootstrap looks pretty cool and I really like the way its designed to integrate with the math concepts students are already using. And as for the language thing, agree with your comment about languages coming and going - the basic point is that need that we live in a multilingual world which requires learning multiple languages in order to speak to people and machines.
Organizations are designed to do what they did yesterday. In order for schools to attract and retain highly-skilled professionals they need to begin to offering more flexible work schedules/careers for people like you.
And while startups can offer great financial rewards, just think of yourself as an angel investor mentoring hundreds of startups each year! Even ycombinator can't match that output!
What I've discovered over the years is that organizations are designed to do what they did yesterday and that people and institutions follow the cheese. In order to get high schools to begin offering programming as a core offering, colleges need to recognize it as meeting a core educational requirement. Second, schools need to be provided funding to offset the cost of offering a new subject. And finally, the educational systems need to have the flexibility to hire people who haven't gone through the traditional certification process, i.e. masters or bachelors in education.
Until those change, it's unlikely we'll see significant changes.
Software for collision repair shops....
Getting people to change their habits is hard. After all shouldn't you be going to gym instead of watching mindless videos on Youtube? But are you? Read my post for some key product lessons http://kevinjmireles.wordpress.com/2006/08/03/product-adopti...
Fail quickly doesn't mean let your company fail. The goal is to figure out what doesn't work.Too many people try to develop a perfect product, etc... instead of investing the minimum amount required to get feedback and test the concepts with customers, stakeholders etc... It's better to discover that your great idea won't work with a paper sketch than to discover the issues after you've invested 6 months in development.
So fail quickly is about taking risks, making mistakes and learning as rapidly and as cheaply as possible - so ultimately you can be successful in the long run.
Check out my posting Product Adoption: Lessons on how to maximize product adoption and avoid common pitfalls: http://kevinjmireles.wordpress.com/2006/08/03/product-adopti...
I appreciate the encouragement and challenge to write some more. I'll see what I can do to live up to your request but no guarantees as I'm trying to put some of the lessons to use=).
The problem is when you're the sole bread winner with 3 kids...When I was much younger I chucked it all and spent a year biking through South America. People asked me how I could leave everything behind - and my response was, "what behind?" I had no girlfriend, no fancy stereo (pre-ipod days)a VW bug, whose steering wheel would loosen up after every few hundred miles, so it was easy to leave it all behind because I didn't have much to start with. So my advice is don't wait - take risks when you're young and the consequences aren't that great and your cash flow needs are fairly limited. Don't wait because it doesn't get any easier.
I guess that goes to the old saw about don't bet more than you can afford to lose. The losing the life savings generally happens in chunks and you keep hoping things will get better - and then they don't - and suddenly you have the new problem of finding work, which takes more time and burns through more cash. So if you follow some of the lessons in the blog, you won't burn through your life savings. More on that later.