John Olinda I'm surprised how much resistance I encounter when teaching high school students to use computers. I'm not talking about anything sophisticated. Things like sending email, using office software, basic programming, and scripting. There's always a chorus of "I don't need to know how to do this!" or "I'm not going to use computers for my job!" I just wish I could somehow show them how much tech really overlaps with the jobs they're considering. Maybe I need to have them shadow someone at work and document his or her use of technology?

Nkrs Maybe you could try showing them something where they could save a lot of time. In my second year at uni we had to calculate errors using the least squares method, which is very tedious to do by hand; I had an Excel spreadsheet where I'd just enter data for X and Y axes and it would spit out results as soon as I typed them. That got my friends interested enough to learn more about Excel; perhaps showing them a practical side of things could help out.

John Olinda True, maybe something I could tie in with the math teachers. See if there's something they're working on that I could teach in my class as well.