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Admin
throw new InvalidUserException(new Teacher());
Admin
Just wait until she's forced to mark papers on the mobile phone, because that's the trend these days. Everything shall be done on mobile, bruh.
Admin
You're using "Frau" like a first name, but it means "Mrs.".
Admin
TRWTF is the author thinking that "Frau" is part of the name - it's just German for "Miss" or "Mrs."
"It was Frau and she was in a rage."
Admin
I really really hate online grading. As a student you have no tangible proof that you actually pass something.
We had an incident that due to a network / storage failure an entire test we took was gone. Just gone, not to be found anywhere. I had passed and made a screenshot which I stored at in my own folder. But because I was the only one with proof it had to be doctered. So I was suspended from class for a month and had to do the retake with everybody else.
Admin
"It was amiss and she was in a rage."
Admin
Reminds me of a sales trip I went on many years ago. I was to demonstrate a simulator for a particular sort of, ahem, military application. Never mind. But anyway, while the software was portable enough for me to cart it around on a little package I could carry in my pocket, the application itself made use of a highly specialised piece of hardware: a colour graphics display, specifically designed so as to be able to display the output of our simulator. (This was from before the days of cheap high definition colour monitors, and all programming was done on a screen holding 24 rows of 80 characters, you see.)
So I was happily trundling through international airports with a colossal great cardboard box of the order of a metre on a side with this ungodly chunk of hardware everywhere I went. All very well till they had to unpack it at Customs and leave me with the job of packing the damn thing back up again.
Admin
i can attach a red pen to mobile phone with sticky tape and hand it to teacher to put marks
Admin
Possibly "Frau" is a term of, er, endearment. It's likely that all the other teachers were happy enough to be called by their first names (Birgit, Anja, Stefan, Uwe, whatever), but Frau Fritzenberger was the only one who insisted on her title, and refused to let anyone use . So, as referring to Frau Fritzenberger by her given name (whether it be Bertha, Gertrud, Lieselotte, whatever) was anathema, and Frau Fritzenberger being an unbearable mouthful, she'd just be "Frau".
In the same way, a pompous old bat who insisted on her surname and title in the UK, for example, would possibly acquire the nickname "Madam". Different cultures would have a different "honorific".
Admin
A solid theory - slightly marred by the fact that I - as a german - would still have to come across the usage of Frau in that way in real life. The cases i witnessed were using either the archaic "Fräulein" that comes with a free side of belittlement or borrowed from english for the mentioned Madame (carrying connotations of dominance in a faint BDSM way).
Especially the usage in the article - directly translated: "Es war Frau und sie war wütend" sounds like a horrific grammatical abomination not like a ironic title to my ears.
Admin
The real WTF is assuming that a visceral hater of computers would have one at home.
Admin
Of course you haven't come across it in German - it's an English text! The first thing you (should) learn in a (foreign) language lesson is never to translate directly, word by word. As you yourself have now witnessed, it offers about as much pleasure as currency calculations on a holiday abroad.
Yes, we learned people can take delight in sneering at Charles for his use of Frau, but I for one think it works just fine in the article.
Admin
Exactly. That usage of "Frau" made me cringe every single time I read it, and I assume it's going to be the same for all german speakers -- it just sounds utterly, completely wrong. Probably doesn't matter to ze americans, though... ;-)
Admin
throw new InvalidUserException(old Teacher());
FTFY
Admin
Maybe she's a character from The Secret Show?
Admin
Anyone else disappointed the character wasn't named Frau Blucher?
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It matters to this American, who learned enough German in high school to recognize this egregious mistake.
Admin
Yeah. That was my thought too.
'You can even do this at night from the comfort of your own home'.
Right. On any one of the high-end gaming PCs that she obviously has in every room in her house.
Admin
Boy can I relate. It was only 10 years ago that I started my job to teach programming and web development shop in a public vocational technology high school. At the staff meeting before the first day of school, I learned two things: The 10 year accreditation cycle was next year, so this year we were able to input all our documentation via Word. (Go, us!) No, it was stated, Kelly girls would not be hired to help this time. The second thing was that the project to put a computer on each teacher's classroom desk had been completed. Everyone had e-mail! At that point in my career, I had used e-mail at college and work for 21-years and Word for 19.
To some teachers, the availability to parents, students and administration was the real problem with grades being on-line. Doing it on paper in a book meant they were the only ones who could see it until they were due-- at mid-term for warnings, for a review or end-of-term of course. It also tightened up justifying them to everyone who could see them.
Admin
Exactly! You are assuming the set of all computers at her house unioned with all accessible Internet connections there is not null, which it likely is. So if she managed to get the computer home, it still would not have worked to enter the marks because she has no way to connect with the server when there.
Admin
"you can't teach her that the same web application can be accessed from any computer" - actually, it sounds like you didn't even try.
Admin
Yes, Frau Fritzenberger. And what would you say to the teacher who remarks "cuneiform works just fine like it has for centuries! How else can I throw a blob of clay to shame them for everything they get wrong!"
Admin
Of course she could have used the computer at home, as the article states that the screen became a web. And also that it was a web application.
Admin
Is it just me, or does this seem more like a NAW/NAL story than a WTF?
Admin
I wonder if maybe it’s a subtle Dr. Evil reference...
Admin
I seriously doubt she had a web enabled computer at home or that she'd even be able to get to the site and log in even if she did. As hellish as it would have been, they should have set her up with one if they really expected her to so drastically change her workflow.
Admin
Education is rarely improved by forcing educators to use tools they don't want to use. The one-size-for-all solutions that voters and administrators like so much (after all, it's hard to THINK, and even harder to accept that someone else might think differently, just let me vote for a feel good slogan please!) are bad no matter how good they are, because they are inflexible. Good teachers use flexible teaching tools and methods.
Admin
TRWTF is dispatching a system administrator to sell her on the idea of a radical process change. That's the principle's job. Maybe the vice-principle.
Admin
Cue: Frightened Horse Sound.exe
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Hello, this is Herr :)
Well, yes, maybe it was all precisely this way. Could be.
But maybe the narrative got a little spin?! It would not be the first project of that kind, with a terrible UI in the end. Maybe full of immature experiments the trainee had seen on Twitter or FB? Maybe something Netflix-alike, with that rather comfortable horizontal lists - on a Desktop PC? Or "let's see how many so-far-unknown js frameworks we can learn in that project"? I'm not sure, but I think I can feel that level of professionalism between the lines, a little bit... Maybe it was an open secret, that the data backend is not really secure and data breaches and privacy issues are likely to occur? Somebody with the strong idea that all those sensitive data must be uploaded into one of the giant US clouds? In Germany, there is a small and constantly shrinking, but still alive fraction of people, who are actually concerned about those and think that those clouds are not the best place for such kind of stuff...
I also like that stupid name... What should NotenWertung mean? 'Noten' is gradings, (Be)Wertung is rating. Both words mean more or less the same in that context, don't they?
Admin
If you were my student, I'd smack you with my stylus!
Admin
Ah, the old “oops, it broke” trick.
Admin
1, the TDWTF login broke. 2, I'm wondering if Frau can cook a good schnitzel. If so, I can forgive and overlook her unwillingness to start using new technologies.
Admin
I think I hear a horse somewhere.
Admin
Computer grading? Do you want global thermonuclear war? Because that's how you get global thermonuclear war... or a nice game of chess.
A kid gets some practice hacking into the school's system to change his grades, and then the next thing you know he's playing strategy games against an AI that uses the actual USA nuclear arsenal as game tokens.
Admin
Yea, but you need to get a good acoustic coupler for that to work, and you just cant get those these days :-)
Admin
Keep taking the cuneiform tablets ...
Admin
Um, Argle, don't laugh too hard. I had a teacher, during the course of teaching us pre-teens about the history of arithmetical notation, who insisted that we all learn to add, subtract and multiply in Cuneiform. And Egyptian. And Roman. And Greek. All this based on a short chapter near the beginning of our "fun" textbook (basically full of cartoons for the intellectually challenged morons the textbook writers expected us to be) which was supposed to be no more than a "this is how they used to have to do arithmetic before we learned placeholder notation" -- of course, she went to town on how important it was for us to be able to draw the symbols precisely and neatly. This went on for what I remember as being a few weeks (although was probably only a few days). I remember more than one occasion where some of my classmates were reduced to tears of frustration.
Admin
This reminds me of an issue a German client of ours had whilst opening a UK bank account.
"We need a utility bill for Luis Muller. This bill is addressed to Herr und Frau Muller. Who is Herrundfrau?"
Admin
Handling children is stressful enough. In addition most tech people do not understand how difficult it is for many people of previous generations to "get" technology, because they did not grow with it; more specifically they are not used to changing their ways every year according to the latest and the loudest. (Of course exceptions exist.) Neither do they see the need. Check your score from anywhere? Why? Share it with your Facebook friends? Why TF?
The teachers' most important job, or the job in fact, is to help children learn and grow. If they are good at that, the data-entry can be done by data-entry-specialists; one may be enough for the whole school. Of course if a teacher is taking pride in pointing out students' mistakes in red, that's altogether a different matter...
Admin
Frau Blücher!!!
Admin
I also took German in high school, and our teacher insisted on us calling her "Frau". I'm wondering if that's just some archaic and very regional thing, like a few small rural cities did it a long time ago. I don't know where in Germany she was from, but she left as a kid around WW2.
Admin
My wife, who's a high school teacher (USA) says students usually refer to her as "Miss". "Miss! Miss! I didn't do the assignment 'cause I had to meet my probation officer." is a common phrase, apparently.
Admin
The author of this post really needs to submit it to Computerworld's Shark Tank!
Admin
TRWTF is replacing a perfectly fine working system with some fucking web based bloated inflexible crap. Blindly adding technology does not always result in 'productivity gain'; in fact I have a strong guess this system resulted in a lot of productivity loss.
Admin
Is that simply the equivalent of me calling most of my teachers "Miss" or "Sir"?
Admin
Laura Staton: Do you have a first name I can call you by? Lt. Columbo: Yeah. "Lieutenant."
Admin
In my language, "Mids" would be a perfectly cromulent term of address for a school teacher/ As in "Please Miss, can we go now?" . Use of Frau indicates a miss-translation, but not that the author thought that "Frau" was a name.
Admin
Not one person has realised that the teacher ke exactly hat she as doing & deliberatly took steps to ensure the process would not work whilst not apparing to be actily obstructive.
never atribute to incmpetence that which can be explained by malice :-)
Admin
"You seem to have mistaken me for whoever made the decision to switch to the computer system. If you prefer to use the legacy paper based system I suggest you take it up with management."