A Science Guy’s Almanac #1: My First Computer Re: 6/19/1983

A Science Guy’s Almanac #1: My First Computer - Re: 6/19/1983

July 6, 2015

Re: June 19, 1983

When I first started teaching, grades were hand-written in a gradebook. Then, at report card time, we used a manual calculator (we always had an electric one at Monte Vista). The machine added and subtracted. You took the final total, determined the letter grade by hand dividing by the total number of points possible. 

On Progress Report days, you called each student up, one at a time, and hand-wrote the academic, conduct, and effort grades on the yellow top sheet of a two-sheet document with carbon paper in between the original and the copy. You could also write a comment in the space at the end of each line. Today, having a last period preparation period is kind of a perk. Back then, however, you wanted to have a last period class because you got to have the students tear the report cards apart and collect the copy with the carbon paper. 

Free carbon paper—now that was a perk!

Owen Miller, my closest colleague, and I went together and purchased a KayPro computer in June of 1983. It used a CP/M based operating system. Memory was 64K RAM and 195K storage on each of two floppy disks, although the A-drive was where you put the software disk. 

The computer itself was a metal box that housed the actual computer and a 9” green screen. The keyboard was attached to the front of the box and had to be unlatched to be functional. The back of the keyboard was placed under the box to provide the proper viewing angle for the green screen. But it had a handle, so it was a portable computer. The total cost for this technology was almost $2100, but we did get dot-matrix printer with cable and a box of 5.25” floppy disks in the deal.

Our software was “perfect”: Perfect-Writer, Perfect-Calc, etc. The software was based on old mainframe software, so you had to write command codes for whatever you wanted to do. @B{text} was the code to boldface any amount of text. If you neglected the closed parenthesis after your selected text, the rest of your document, from that point onward, was bolded in the printout. 

Owen and I both went to the word-processing class. I was chosen to learn the spreadsheet and Owen went to the database class. I learned less of the database than Owen learned about the spreadsheet. However, it is amazing how much I learned from Perfect-Calc transferred over to Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheet programs later in my computer-life.

The effect of having computer-calculated grades was both immediate and astonishing. We would post grades by student-generated codes about every other week, something no teacher I knew at the time would have considered because of the intense manual labor involved in all grade calculations. We expected that the ability of students to track their grades would be one of the results of our computer. 

What we did not expect was the second effect: Kids almost completely stopped questioning grades. I guess they figured if a computer calculated it, the grade must be right. They were blissfully unaware of the reality of operator error at that time.

Because of the blind faith of students when it came to computer-generated grades, I found myself checking my accuracy more often than ever. While that was easy, it was a pain. So, once, for an assignment in one of my better classes, I just put random numbers in as scores with absolutely no basis of fact, past history, or current grade. 

It took a couple of weeks before one student finally wondered how she got such a poor score, when the paper she had gotten back had only positive comments and a higher score than on the printout. I apologized for my “mistake” in recording her score and changed it to the correct number. As others came forward, I decided to “fess up” and told them of my plot. From that time onward, I admonished all my students to keep all returned papers at least long enough to check the recorded score on the grade printout.

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