Angle grinder scare

[John Rumm]

they do in our junior school....

word and publisher mostly it seems.

[Bob Eager]

And some schools do use OO....the National Curriculum is actually vendor- neutral.

BTW, my wife has been an ICT teacher for some years....!

[Tim S]

John Rumm coughed up some electrons that declared:

Damnable woofters. Make the young'uns learn LaTex!

[TheOldFellow]

've been avoiding this thread - misread as Angle grinder care! Darwin award candidate for sure. God bless him.

R.

[Andy Dingley]

Lots of single-cylinder non-battery engines.

Otherwise the last carburettor production car was a Yugo in the mid '90s, and a pretty simple carburettor at that. The aberration of carbs with servo-controlled idle and single point injection was a temporary phase where local emission regs outstripped factory capability (Rover, I mean you) and hadn't applied to the backwoods makers anyway.

[Andy Dingley]

Yes, they do.

[The Natural Philosopher]

every single lawnmower and garden machine I have, has a carb on.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Rover were in the special situation of owning SU carbs. I had a Montego with the 'electronic' SU carb and it worked very well indeed. But catalytic convertors - and the need to control the fuel air ratio so to avoid damage to these, rather than producing the most efficient engine - pretty well mandated injection.

[David in Normandy]

Looks like things may be improving then. When I was manager of an I.T. dept back in the UK I was presented with a kid on some sort of "experience of work" scheme from a local school and he was clueless on anything Microsoft related. Apparently the school had its own strange operating system and applications software that wasn't used in the real world outside of the education sector. He was completely useless in the workplace as a result. I didn't have time to teach supposed ICT students the basics of computing, so he got kicked out back to school again.

[Bob Eager]

After I posted that, I realised I should have said 'car engines' - which is what most people have experience of!

[Andy Dingley]

So you not only expect your free cannon fodder to be pre-trained, you see "training" as so narrowly vocational that it's not only restricted to the tiny world of office apps, but even further constrained to those from one single vendor.

I doubt there was much to be learned from experience at your workplace anyway.

[Clive George]

I'd rather have somebody who knew the basics of computing, rather than vendor-specific stuff. I don't want a monkey who knows which button to press to put a bit of text in bold in Word, I want somebody who knows how to find that sort of thing out.

[David in Normandy]

Exactly. The kid showed neither interest nor aptitude. I got the impression he was there because his school had put him there. I tried in vain to get him playing around with some spreadsheets but it was clear he just wanted to idle away his time. No use to me or the company nor to himself either. He had an opportunity to learn some useful stuff with a number of people available to help him. But... I finally caught him trying to break into the mainframe system, guessing usernames and passwords. That was the final straw. Off he went!

[Clive George]

Yebbut that's nothing to do with him being clueless on MS related stuff, which was your original complaint. That's just general uselessness. Wouldn't have made any difference if the school used MS, he'd have still been useless.

[David in Normandy]

OK, so it was a combination of factors. However, the first thing that struck me was his computer illiteracy in general. He was supposedly doing an ICT course at school and all he seemed capable of doing was turning the power switch on and guessing usernames / passwords. Beyond that he was clueless. I expect school ICT courses to impart a certain basic level of computer literacy about computers, files, folders and programs and to include a generalised knowledge of word processing and at the very least what a spreadsheet is - whoever the vendor.

[Bob Eager]

My son has just gone back to school in year 9. They've just started the OCR National (GCSE equivalent which a lot of schools are moving over to) ICT course. First lesson yesterday was files and folders, and they were expected to go through the steps, do screenshots of each stage, and make a commented Word document out of them.

OK, not everyone did. I suspect that the IT illiterates are going to be illiterates in any sense. So, they do teach it, but some will never learn.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Can't think of an OS which doesn't use those.

Of course being proficient on any particular prog requires skill and practice.

[Tim S]

David in Normandy coughed up some electrons that declared:

At least he showed some interest!

[David]

Urgh, I am on that course, we have done two units in year 9 and we are still doing it this year, it's easy yet annoying.

[Bob Eager]

Depends on the number of units actually done. My son expects to do the lot! Mind, SWMBO is an OCR moderator and knows it inside out (when she's not teaching Java and databases elsewhere).

The problem is still the expectation (that I see) that an ICT course is any preparation at all for doing something like computer science - whereas in reality they are two different subjects!