Ask HN: Were you saved by a teacher? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Were you saved by a teacher?

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.

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).

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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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 :)

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

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