Thread by @iam_anandv

I get triggered by mandatory attendance regimes, in colleges and schools. People beating these regimes through simple hacks is no surprise. But why do these regimes come at all? The problem is much deeper.

Warning: People won't like it.

Thread follows. 👇

https://twitter.com/digitaldutta/status/1065440733241446400

1. Year 1996. 2nd Year of Computer Science B.E

I had built my own PC and put Windows 3.1 and a Turbo C++ Compiler on it. While the person who taught us programming, wrote code in "Black board", I wrote it on my PC. He was five years older than me and knew nothing.

2. I pointed out how that person knew nothing because he was writing programs that won't even compile. A few girls sniggered and that bugger got angry because masculine pride and all that. So threw me out of the class, for "disturbing" syllabus and no attendance till I apologize.

3. 80% mandatory attendance regimes means I can't write my semester exams, till I apologize. I was in no mood to apologize for being right. So I did what every college student does - Cheat.

How do you cheat a paper based system where Face detection is done by "teachers"?

4. You can't. So I broke open the locks of the department on a sunday night, took the attendance register, burnt it on a mud pot by performing funeral rites by blowing a conch shell, dissolved the ashes in local alcohol made from palm tree extract and gave it as Prasad.

5. Needless to say, everyone was happy except the poor sods who used this authoritarian register to control behavior, kill creativity and peddling outright idiocy as "teaching". There is one more set of people who got very angry, when I told this story later - Parents.

6. We pay so much to make our children learn, but you destroy it by burning registers was their reaction. The irony is stark. The damn system for which they are paying kills learning through behavior control.

Idiots paying fools to peddle stupidity is why attendance exists.

7. And then we complain that we don't innovate, kids are not good enough to be employed, jobs don't exist etc. etc.

So instead of forcing people to do attendance to get scholarships because they are frauds, fix the damn education system.

deccanchronicle.com/nation/current…

8. And always always remember dim-wit parents, that your children will be intelligent, curious and sharper than you. Have a loving relationship with them than trying to control them through attendance regimes to force your outdated ideas about life on them.

9. After all it is more important to question and learn new things, than be a mere statistic to Pandeyji's #Aadhaar.

And if a student beats this idiotic biometric attendance through a thumb, know that you are looking at something wonderful and his "teacher" is dumb.

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