Self Educated - Represent!
A discussion about books yesterday on Mastodon led into some of us talking about our learning styles and educational backgrounds. One fellow, a successful business owner in the UK who makes educational materials for digital and blended learning told us he left school at 16 and that he loves having books around him because books and libraries got him to here he is in life. I can certainly relate to that.
I managed to hang on until I was 18 but that was it for me. I had two children by my 20th birthday so going to college the conventional way was out. I managed to find a career in an industry that was changing so rapidly that experience counted more than formal education and I was never motivated to seek a degree when I worked side by side with people who had them. If I'd gone to college and they made me take "Introduction to the Internet" or a class on Microsoft Office, I would have gone insane.
For the first half of my time in public education I skated by because I read constantly and had a good memory. I found most everything about school interesting and I enjoyed it. Once I got to middle school the enjoyment started to subside, particularly around mathematics which started to baffle me. My younger brother caught and passed me in math levels, which was humiliating but not motivating, unfortunately. From then on, I managed to ace classes where memory and comprehension made for good grades. I struggled with math, chemistry and advanced biology. I finished high school in the exact middle of my graduating class.
During my early working life, in pre-Internet times, I had jobs that didn't require formal education. I was in the Army and transitioned from that into Corrections. My exit from the prison system coincided with the dawning of the Internet age. I bought my first computer the month after I quit at the prison. I bought a copy of Windows 3.1 for Dummies and started from there. I was fascinated by technology, reading everything I could get my hands on, magazines, manuals, expert forums on CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL. I taught myself to build computers and to configure and fine tune DOS and Windows. I jumped at a chance at work to do some technical writing just so that I could use the technology behind it, digital cameras, color laser printers, one of the fist Pentium computers in the company and CorelDraw! design software.
I moved on to a technical editing job where all I did was read computer training material all day long, that being the product of the company I worked for. Finally, I started applying for jobs in the IT and got one at a medical training clinic near my house where my job was to provide software support and teach medical types, nurses, PAs and doctors how to use late 90s era Microsoft Office applications. I had to learn Access on my own in order to teach it to my students. I moved on to a pure support role in the insurance and banking world before finally landing a job in K-12 education where I stayed for 20 years.
I had no Mac experience before working there, but was expected to support Mac workstations and servers. It was right at the dawn of the Mac OS X era and with the help of a great Apple support engineer I got to install and configure the copy of the new server operating system. I lived and breathed Mac computing for the next decade, learning a new edition of the workstation and server operating system each year. Then, as now, I loved learning new software and many of my favorite programs came to my attention while I was in the process of becoming the go to guy for Macs in our school system. I studied on my own to obtain Mac certifications and through that process advanced at work.
I never wanted to manage other people, so being a network administrator or anything involving supervision wasn't in my sights. I was content being a specialist until finally in the last few years on the job I transitioned into PC support as Apple got out of the server business and enterprise management was turned over to third party developers like JAMF. Today, in my post-retirement job at a small private university, I'm still doing PC support and learning Microsoft Admin Tools via OJT and exploration, although hy heart remains in the Mac world. Despite my own lack of enthusiasm for sitting in classes, I have enjoyed supporting teachers and professors over the years and take pride in knowing that I've helped whole generations of students to learn using technology.
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