Marnanel reminded me of this story with his post about Wikipedia vandalism.
When I was in grade 6, age about 11, my school had 7 Apple IIe computers. The staff knew very little about them; turned out, not very surprisingly, that I and some of my peers knew more than the teachers.
Now, my school was really into giving kids responsibility and letting them learn by doing and stuff. Plus, if you were in the top percentiles for academics, they tended to give you other activities so you wouldn’t get bored shitless in class.
I was generally in the top percentiles, and often bored in class. I was good with computers. They put me in charge of the Apple IIes. My job was basically tech support. Tiny kids would come trotting up from other classrooms and say, “Our printer doesn’t work!” or whatever, and I’d get to duck out of yet another class on fractions and fix it.
My title, in this role: computer monitor.
In their defence, that wasn’t the term used for the VDU at that time and place. I think we called it the “screen”, but I’m not quite sure.
