11-Year Old Becomes Network Administrator For Private School
When I was 11, which puts me in 6th grade, our school had a couple of Apple ][e’s in the library. There wasn’t any network connectivity to speak of, but I knew then I had a future in them.
However, this just blows my mind. A sixth-grader in Millbrook, Alabama becomes the network administrator for a small, private school. He puts in a firewall, upgrades PCs to run Windows 2000, and generally tries to make the computing life better for the students and faculty of his school. And he has to justify certain expendetures in front of the school board. Talk about a hardcore lesson in the school of the IT business.
Both my kids have been in front of computers ever since they had enough of an attention span. I don’t know that they will have any exceptional aptitude at this, but if they ever want to practice their IT skills, I’ve got the equipment here at home they can practice on. 
The scary thing is, this will likely be the most useful part of Jon Penn’s education he will receive. Certainly was for me in college when I was one of a couple of students helping to maintain the main engineering computing lab. Hopefully, he will continue to hone his IT skills and become certified. I bet he’ll make a mint at it, too.
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Related Posts: Tags: education, Microsoft, windows, Windows 2000 Fnord
Comment by anon
at the age of 12 i was not only teaching small groups(of children much older than myself) to use computers at my school at the request of teacher but was also regularly help the computer teacher for the school learn more about apples and ataris and trs-80s. he had been hired with knowledge only of cobol, fortran and mainframes. this have changed a bit in the last 25 years but i believe that a child’s mind is still a bit more willing to take the experimental plunge that results in faster learning.