Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

> But I consider Planescape: Torment to be a better work of art. It isn't in a standard poetic form, though.

Mmm. There's some of that, yes, but I think it'd fail for not being so entirely sublime as the best canonical works of prose and poetry (and art, generally). It avoids some of the drudgery of its genre, yes, but while much of the "waiting for the pathfinding to take The Nameless One from one side of this room I've already seen 10 times to the other" might be fine in a narrow sort of way, given enough of it (and there is enough of it), that probably takes it out of the running for any sort of grand cross-medium canonical great-art-of-all-time collection.

Unless you cleverly add constant wonder and discovery or some kind of emotional connection to the gamey-because-this-is-what-games-do bits (or cut them, somehow, without making it Not A Game) it's like a film with a great story and acting, but poorly-selected shot framing and uninspired editing constantly working against it.

Say it's in a genre you like a lot, though, and maybe you'd feel put-out that it's not being shown in film courses, because you don't notice the parts that aren't so good or could easily have been much better and better served the film's purpose, and besides most of the movies in the genre you like are that way, so what's the big deal? Certainly you like it much better than Kurosawa or Truffaut or whoever's in the curriculum.

FWIW the only real masterpiece of a game I can think of that I've played, in that kind of broad all-of-human-art sense, with a real understanding of its sources, its direction, art in a larger sense, the games that have come before it, and the way games work and how it can use that constantly to its advantage for more than just occupying the player's time, is Kentucky Route Zero. I've never seen the game-parts of games used in such a literary fashion before, with everything else also coming together nicely. Just beautiful. And I've played and enjoyed lots of games.

[EDIT] The Witness shows signs of qualifying, too, but I haven't played enough to be sure, and it's the kind of thing that needs good follow-through to fully work. Gotta get back to that one and finish it.

Really sucks to hear this, I might have just got lucky but I had a great teacher. I started learning programming on Q basic. I remember learning about Boolean and keywords like 'IF' for the first time, ah how far we come along... He did a great job of applying the real world and other classes to the class room. Most of the programs we created were to improve current software that was already released. Not sure if I just got extremely lucky but most teacher that I had in HS were really fun and interactive.

The best example I have was when he brought in other classes into his. Our classroom was small about 5 people and all of us were taking Physics and Uni Math (In Ontario you have different streams of Math and physics is an elective). We created a small gravity / momentum / acceleration and deceleration game. We had to apply certain formulas from physics class and math. As the course progressed we started doing more complex tests and implementations I think it really help solidify the physics course because we where going through documentation more and reading outside of course material for the resources which then applied back to the classroom afterwords.

But the main reason why I really got into programming was a story that he told the class. A power plant of sorts was having issues with hydro costs. the prices would increase at certain times throughout the day and decrease in others. This facility didn't need all the machinery working all the time so he was brought in to build an optimal solution which sadly was simplified to a y=m*x+b and checking it's slope then based on a bunch of different conditions certain machines would be powered off and then when the slope started to balance back out and go below a certain value it would turn on machines in the expected order of importance.

I'm not sure why, but I guess this story to a 9 grades just made this field feel like we can apply theory from a bunch of different fields and If I ever get bored in 1 area I can always take time to learn another field and apply programming to it. But programmers will always be employed for the foreseeable future and that was a huge worry in my mind at the time but seems everything turns out alright.

Probably because people don't view walking 500 steps at 1.5 mph, standing for 5 minutes, then returning as exercise. Unless there are stairs or a significant incline, there isn't a readily noticeable change in heart rate nor breathing pattern. So most people probably view moseying around the office for a couple of minutes as a waste of time.

One of the best things I did was setting an alarm to get up every 60 minutes. But then I followed it too religiously by getting up damn near immediately. That broke productivity. I found a happy medium by finding an adequate stopping point and then getting up.

My middle school kids have English Lit as a block.

Honestly, as a grade school kid if I was reading something I enjoyed, 90 minutes was not much of an achievement. You can will yourself thru something you hate for 45 minutes, gym class perhaps. You probably have to be a grown adult (or older) to tolerate something like a worthless 90 minute class or business meeting.

Consider bigger companies where the enemies of middle managers are all other internal departments. Technically IT and engineering work for the same company. In practice you're more likely to get cooperation with a competitor company. I'm not exaggerating in that its easier to serve on standards committees than to get an exception to "policy" from another department. The "dog eat dog" happens at middle management not grunt front line level, but it's there...