Hacker News Reader

Not that I entirely disagree, but the English teacher couldn't care less whether his/her charges understand, well, anything about Linux, but the English teacher cares a great deal whether his/her charges can manage 1-inch margins and double-spacing on whichever word processor is currently winning the mindshare war.

View on HN

I still do not understand this. If I were an English teacher I would tell my students to email me the assignment with the following format

Subject: Assignment 1 - Larry Jones - Romeo and Juliet Meets Robots

Body: [5 paragraphs of text]

Or even better would be for them to have it on a blog, so you get social pressure to do well. Parents might not go for that one though.

Why do we need to be good at margins, double spacing, etc. When was the last time I needed to change the margins on a Word doc? 3 months ago? Waste of time/resources.

I think it was so the teacher could write comments on the pages more easily. That was 10 years ago though, so I'm not sure if students still have to hand in printed hard copies?

>That was 10 years ago though, so I'm not sure if students still have to hand in printed hard copies?

They do. Schools are really backwards on this sort of thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com