Lately I've been involved in projects to put Linux in the schools.  Along the way I've run into a lot of teachers, administrators, etc. and I've asked a lot of questions about computers and education.

One thing strikes me when I talk to these people.  They seem to be involved in an abusive relationship with their computers.  Worse, the humans are the ones being smacked around.

Remember, these are school teachers and schools have miniscule IT budgets.  They can't afford good equipment or good IT support.  The result is a lot of barely maintained old equipment loaded with viruses.  Imagine you're a teacher and charged with dealing with 30 unruly elementary school kids.  Now Imagine that your classroom computer is running WindowsXP on a PentiumII with 128MB of RAM.

Imagine also that the anti-virus software (if it's actually installed) is old, out-of-date, and poorly configured.  Seriously, a lot of these computers have ebola.  The schools can't deal with it.  They wipe the systems regularly just to get rid of the malware.

Now Imagine  that your school district has gone with the full MS only solution and is requiring that you connect daily to their website to do your required paperwork.  You want to bring in your Mac from home to do your computer chores? Forget about it.  You have to have WindowsXP /Vista and IE7.  Don't even think about Linux.

Had enough yet? Well here's one last thing: the district has installed an insane dysfunctional firewall to filter out the bad ideas.  Do you want to find out who wrote that bit about '...Music has charms to soothe the savage breast...'?  Forget about it, no boobies allowed here.  Doing a report about France?  You'll have to omit a certain region in the northeast of France (Champagne).

Think I'm exagerating?  I'm not.  The things listed above are just a sampling of the computer annoyances that teachers at my son's school are forced to endure.

It's time to stop doing this sort of stuff.