You misunderstand my motives. I'm trying to teach Computer Science to my students. That's a little hard to do on a system where everything is locked-down so tight that you can't even compile anything. Further, linux is much more programmer friendly than the evil os....
Well, my response was really directed at the person who started this thread. However, if you are a teacher who's not able to do your job... it would seem that the first approach I would take would be exhausting all options for GETTING the tools I need to do my job, before trying to circumvent security on my own and possibly creating worse problems for myself. Since you say you were able to get them to give you half of each machine's partitions to do with as you please, it seems that approach worked!

Boy, am I glad I work in the private sector!