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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I went to a Catholic high school. One of the only sisters left that worked at the school ran the computer lab.

Passwords were stored in clear text and it was common for students to ask her what their forgotten password was. She would look it up in the system, and tell them.

Eventually some of us figured out how to change other users passwords and of course we changed them to all sorts of unseemly phrases that a high school student boy would find amusing.

When that student would ask for their password she would simply change it to something pleasant...but amusingly maintain the general structure of the unseemly phrase changing only the bad words. We saw her laugh a few times.

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When I was in high school, internet was brand new and teachers got official emails for the first time ever. There was no password policy and the email clients were on the library computers. My friend decided we should become hackers so we sat down and spent 20 minutes guessing passwords until he actually got one right. Then we read a bunch of boring private messages from our social studies teacher to his father.

atleast she had a good humor about it.

Genuinely not how I expected the story to go! And the polar opposite from my catholic school experiences as well (the headmaster caught me logged into my Hotmail account one day, physically pulled me off the computer while he pried through and read hundreds of my emails and then after finding nothing untoward, used the entirely unread contents of my spam folder [which in the mid 90s meant mostly porn & dickpill spam] as an excuse to try and expel me from the school).

It's a strange thing the differences between my Catholic school experience and when other folks describe what to me seems like almost caricature-ish type Catholic school experiences.

I don't know how things are where you grew up but it was only years later that I learned that most of the people who taught at my Catholic school did not have the required qualifications to teach anywhere else (and those that did were total creeps, like the molesty kind).

Most of them weren't equipped for the job they were doing and I've seen that in others in my own career(s). An important lesson about authority.

Interesting.

I think the nature of catholic schools being a diocese to diocese (or grouping of them) thing tends to create a lot of variety.

My school had similar teachers (this one sister and one priest aside) to any of the other local schools.

Also unlike the schools near me now ... it was basically open enrollment like any public school and the costs were on a sliding scale based on income. Many students (myself included) paid very little in tuition. The diocese picked up the tab for the rest.

Meanwhile the catholic schools where I live now are ultra exclusive and bonkers expensive. They like to hint at a very 'classical' education and a lot of discipline.

But at my school things were very much easy going and by the time you were a senior you effectively were taking mostly college classes from the local colleges, and coming and going from school as you pleased as you might at college. It was a great experience (although I proved to be a terrible college student... so maybe not as effective for me, but I wouldn't blame the school).

I'm thinking, this is as expected? There's selection bias: people will write about their experiences, if weird things happened. Otherwise, not much to write about.

macneilr:yourmomlovessocksinhelloworld

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