Since [1] arguably counts as significant new information [2], I guess we'll leave that one on the front page and demote this one as stale.
I don't feel strongly about this other than not having the story occupy more than one spot on the front page, so if people have strong objections otherwise, we can adjust.
If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence - I should remind you of 3 events:
- A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the student was essentially distributing illegal copyrighted software - because no software is free [1]
- A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. There is a lot of controversy about this case - but I read one news article (that I can't find right now) where the administration said they would have been ok with cancer research folding@home rather than searching for aliens with seti@home. This combined with the backpedaling of "oh actually he was a bad employee, stole things, and cost the school millions in extra in electricity costs!" makes me believe that they just wanted to use it as an excuse to fire him and make the position open for a friend/relative. [2].
- Or an honor roll student suspended for buying candy from another student [3]. His statuses were only restored after it caught media attention.
I would go into my rant about the education system but you should just watch this video [4]
Running seti / etc on the school computers does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity. He was number one on SETI for years, running the client without approval on 5,000 machines. It's not surprising that people get fired for increasing costs by that much without getting approval first.
Yes, running 5000 computers on 100% CPU instead of idle is a lot of money and a lot of electricity spent:
If these were typical desktop computers, the CPU working at 100% can use some 50 W more than the one staying idle. 5000 computers at 100 % CPU produce then the load of 250 KW, resulting in 6 MWh per day which at 10 cents per KWh costs 600 USD per day, or 220000 USD per year. Finally, 9 years that he did it make almost 2 million dollars (!) for electricity that he managed to spend.
Thousands can be wasted on dumb stuff like bad office-supply purchasing decisions. Those folks don't get fired. Sounds overblown - folks afraid of anything they don't understand.
Having lived in the deep south most of my life I think I understand what's going on here.
It's not that they're afraid of things they don't understand. It's that there is a certain type of person they generally don't like. In this case it might have been a man that had some sort of intellectual curiosity, maybe a bit eccentric. And they will use their ignorance as a weapon against those people.
The police department knows full well they can determine whether this was a bomb or not. It's within their ability to interview every person he interacted with to find if he claimed it was a bomb at any point. Instead of doing that they will use their lack of knowledge to allow falsehoods to move the investigation.
It was within the ability of the staff to determine the monetary cost of this man's actions. In the very least they could compare the electricity bill during a month he was running SETI versus the next month when he was not. They could calculate the power consumption of the machines.
It's not that they are afraid of knowing. But that knowing or admitting the truthfulness of the facts makes them less powerful as people.
Irving, Texas is not typical of what most consider the deep south. It's part of the DFW metroplex which is in the nation's fourth largest population center[1], and it's in a county that went 57% for Obama in the 2012 election[2]. So let's just be careful about painting wide swaths of the country with an singular view.
Yes... I believe the Mayor of Irving is an elected position by the people. It's a better indicator then being the 4th biggest metropolitan in the country like that matters.
And going 57% for Obama also says something about the people. We're not saying they're bleeding-heart-liberals. We're saying it's a little more complicated than, "Oh well it's the deep South..." Too many people are dismissing this like it's just the norm. It shouldn't be. More people should be asking if Islamophobia is a bigger part of mainstream America than we're willing to admit.
It's actually not the ignorance per se, it's the self-confidence that comes from a mindset that allows you to believe things without evidence, or even in the face of contrary evidence. That sort of self-confidence can be very powerful (c.f. Donald Trump) but, of course, it can also be very dangerous.
Saying "don't worry, this group that currently holds power over large parts of the country only holds power currently, and only over large parts of the country" is not as reassuring as you probably meant it to be.
If you're stuck within such a group, you can wait your whole life for history to prove you right and still be disappointed - better to start planning your exit strategy.
> Or wait until that group washes out into the irrelevance of history.
That's all fine and good on a geological scale, but we've been waiting 200+ years for the irrelevance of this particular group, and there's not a hope in sight of it happening any time soon.
I did this when I worked as a network administrator for a new school campus. It was folding@home vs. SETI but same concept. Once the administration realized all the computers were running folding@home they compared the bills after turning it off and it was tens of thousands of dollars difference (granted this was 2001 and full-size desktops).
Now, one could say they overreacted, sure, in my case I just got reprimanded and told to uninstall it off all the computers. But firing for costing the district significant amounts of money isn't some testament to the ignorance of the South, unlike the "bomb" clock.
I still don't believe that - unless this was 10k computers+. I'll bet that if you used watts up on an idle computer, then used it on a computer running seti@home I'll bet the difference would only be 100 watt difference at the max (probably more like 50 depending on what is running on the computer).
See my other post here for details, 5000 desktop computers using 100% CPU all the time can cost some 18000 USD per month (1) more versus keeping them idle.
1) if 1 KWh costs 10 cents, which is reasonable to expect, and the load increases just 50 W.
His single computer uses 490 Watts when turned on and calculating Seti, and he's keeping it on for 18 hour more per day just for Seti. Only 500 of such computers and such usage patterns make 14000 dollars more per month.
5k is easily within an order of magnitude of what you would find believable, and he's only expressing an order of magnitude. I think your dispute is rather academic.
Would you still consider it "overblown" if he had run, say... a bitcoin miner on all those machines?
Sure, he didn't make profit from the seti@home instances, but he did it without approval, did ultimately cost the district money, and likely caused other issues along the way (like additional wear-n-tear on the machines)
I'd think administrators would have a very different approach to disciplining a "bad office-supply purchasing" decision versus a well-thought out choice to use school equipment & electricity for non-work related causes.
And should private sector employers fire their employees for using their computers to do the same? Obviously I don't want to see teachers goofing off on social media instead of teaching kids, but if they aren't actively teaching, why not? The idea that every second of your time on the job needs to be spent furiously working is an attitude from the industrial revolution - I would have thought these days we were more interested in results.
in the school where I most recently taught, there was an explicit expectation that teachers could use district computers for personal business when on break. Being on facebook when they had kids in the room would be an entirely different matter.
The internet was also heavily monitored, with a proxy server that required a login to get to forbidden sites. Our IT guy had a pretty good idea of when teachers were getting on facebook etc.
My wife was on the advisory committee for a local middle school that's struggling. One winner is that they bought SmartBoards for a bunch of classrooms but didn't get stands for them, so they just mothballed them for a year until they could buy stands with the next year's budget.
The obvious solution would be to buy fewer smart boards this year, along with the stands, and then buy the rest of the smart boards and stands the next year.
Sure, obvious. Until you're negotiating price points and you can save X% aggregate by purchasing Y boards at a time, and then figure you're only losing <<< X%*total_cost in depreciation... then it's just as obvious, but you're making a different decision.
It's much easier to justify wasting money on normal business things every day people understand, like buying office paper. Most people can relate to that, even when things go wrong and money is wasted.
Most people, be they in the deep south or the northeast have no fucking clue what SETI is and may even have very specific metaphysical opinions on how we should deal with the possibility of alien life that doing this violates. Most people don't care enough about paper to do more than write it off as a normal expense.
I personally think that alien life is everywhere and I can't wait until we discover more evidence of it. But I think SETI is a huge waste of resources that could be spent better elsewhere. Even though I'm pro science, discovery, and utilizing wasted cpu cycles, I still think searching for life this way is a huge waste of time and resources and I'd be pissed if some teacher decided he was going to use the resources I take a part in paying for to do this.
The benefits of this are external while the cost is internal. If you're going to use resources, at least use them to benefits the kids who are in your budge.
That's ridiculous. Now you're going to say I'm "breaking the law" for installing a bitcoin miner on all the computers I support and donating the money to charity (well, some of it;rent doesn't pay itself)!
Maybe not breaking the law, but if you're not the person ultimately responsible for the costs and they're not actually your computers, that's still a dick move. I'd fire you if you worked for me and caused a massive increase in my power bill for something that had no relation to what I asked you to do.
> does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity
Thousands maybe - definitely not millions as they are claiming. From what I read it was setup to calculate through the screensaver. For most of the day - the computer will be in use and I would imagine/hope that they turn them off when they leave.
Advice used to be to not turn machines off but let themgo into sleep. This avoided power cycling which some people though caused problems. A sleeping machine still costs money, but much less than a machine churning SETI.
5,000 machines churning SETI for nine years? I'd be interested in estimates of cost.
Well, far from being definitive, but it looks like a regular pc will cost around $227.52 (350 watt psu, $18.96 per month) in electricity per year to run 24/7.[1]
(calculated using $0.06 per kWh, which is rather low for most people in the US)
So, 5,000 machines running 24/7/365 would cost around $1,137,600 annually (5,000 machines * $227.52 per year) in electricity usage alone.
Of that 24 hours per day, we can assume 8 hours of each day the district expected to pay for them to run, so that leaves ~16 hours the district expected the machines to be asleep or off.
24 - 8 = 16 (about 66% of the 24 hour period)
So, the admin was consuming about $12.51 per machine per month the district did not expect.
This comes out to around $750,600 the sys admin potentially cost the district, for a single year. He ran this scheme for 9 years -- so...
$750,600 per year * 9 years = $6,755,400 in additional electricity costs
Keep in mind this is likely rather low, since most places in the US have a significantly higher per kWh fee than the $0.06 per kWh used in these calculations.
I'm certain that this sum alone was enough cause to terminate the sys admin.
Think about all the things the school district could have spent an extra ~$7MM+ on...
PSU's arent light bulbs. A "350 watt" psu doens't draw 350 watts. That's the theoretical maximum you can draw from it. Sure, SETI was probably drawing a higher load than idle, vs off, but I highly doubt it was drawing 100%.
Even more complicated is the heat. If they lived in a cool climate, at least some of the waste heat that was emitted would have been absorbed by the building, which they are (presumably) paying to heat at least a few months of the year.
Edit: also if it was a public school, wouldn't they be off for about 3 months over summer ?
You are right. I was just going off the source I found, which accounted for some of the aspects you point out, but not all. These numbers simply provide a rough estimate, and detail how the sys admin certainly did cost the school district real (and potentially very substantial) sums of money.
> Even more complicated is the heat.
You make a good case for the winter months, but the opposite would hold true for the summer months when the heat becomes a real issue and additional air conditioning may be necessary, etc...
> Edit: also if it was a public school, wouldn't they be off for about 3 months over summer ?
Not necessarily. Usually over the summer months (for a traditional schedule school as opposed to a year-round schedule like many public schools are these days) some of the staff is typically on campus monday-friday doing various administrative tasks, workshops, prepping for the next school session, moving classroom furniture, cleaning, etc... IT staff would be included in this, and therefore we can reasonably assume the sys admin was still running his systems.
Yes, it will draw even more than 350 Watts at full load. 350 is the output power, whereas incandescent lightbulbs are measured in input power. So a 350 watt power supply, depending on efficiency of the PSU anyway, is probably using around 400-500 Watts at the wall at full load.
But this completely misses the point. You can put a 1000 watt PSU in a computer and it won't draw 1000 watts at full load. That's just the max the PSU can supply. SETI is mainly CPU intensive so even if they had the absolute smallest possible PSU, SETI isn't going to cause it to produce the full 350 watts.
And that's a pretty awful efficiency you suggest. It may be that bad, but I'd sure hope not.
SETI also runs (or did, from what I remember) a 3D screensaver. It's not doing nothing on the videocard, anyway, but I don't know how close to fully maxing out anything it gets.
Talking about power load, though, I have a Kill-A-Watt pass-through power meter, and I have measured power at the wall exceeding the rated output power capacity of an 80% efficient power supply on a computer running at full load (running a graphically and computationally expensive computer game).
A lot of PSUs are pretty inefficient. You can look up the stats. It wasn't until recently that you even had a lot of them earning the 80 Plus "bronze" rating, which is 80% efficiency. There's still plenty with worse efficiency than that. A decade ago, you're probably looking at 60% efficiency on average.
He lived in Arizona which is hot and a school full of space-heaters (humans) will probably run AC more often than heat.
What grandparent commenter showed was the school district's numbers are plausible. I doubt the district entered into a legal battle without first consulting an engineer or two about the electric costs.
Speaking only for myself, in Phoenix we barely ever turn on heat, even in winter, whereas the AC is currently running and will be for another month or two yet.
I have. I tested 3 models of HP that we had on campus which are kind of aging. Here's my results in Watts:
HP 6000 Pro SFF - Core2Duo E8400 @ 3GHz -
100% CPU: 70,
Idle: 26,
Sleep: 2-3,
Off: 0-1,
HP 6200 Pro SFF - Core i5 3470 @ 3.2GHz -
100% CPU: 83,
Idle: 31,
Sleep: 2-3,
Off: 0-1,
HP 6300 Pro SFF - Core i5 2400 @ 3.1GHz -
100% CPU: 100,
Idle: 30,
Sleep: 2-3,
Off: 0-1,
It's been a few months now, and I can't remember what I used to max out the CPU. It wasn't SETI @ Home, but it should give you a pretty good approximation. When it was off, it had Wake on LAN enabled, so it still drew some power. But it would fluctuate between 0 and 1.
It's definitely worth pointing out, but his electricity estimate is so low that the numbers effectively work out for Tier 1 in the SF bay area. I'm sure a school is not in tier 1. But maybe they get beneficial commercial/educational/government pricing, I don't know.
They may be off for 3 months over the summer. Which might mean they were actually off, or it might mean that they ran 24/7 and NONE of that time was for 'educational' purposes.
Just one data point, but I have a machine I run Folding@Home on most of the time, and that is plugged into a Kill-A-Watt. The difference between idle and full folding power is about 70W, as I recall. Not trivial, but 1/5 of what you've estimated here.
15 years ago, the power difference was probably smaller, maybe quite a bit smaller -- modern CPUs are better optimized for low idle power.
You're probably running a much more powerful processor than the school's computers were. The report is from 2009 at the earliest based on the cited forum post. There were some very low TDP processors during the 2000-2009 time frame that were very common in education systems.
Core 2 Duo was <35W TDP and was pretty popular from what I remember. P3 was in the same neighborhood too.
Something is wrong with your math. $227.52/year is $0.62/day
Also, bear in mind that PSUs do not use their full rating unless the hardware they are powering requires it. [0] Your number could easily be double what the machines actually used, if the PSU was somewhat oversized, as they typically are.
> Think about all the things the school district could have spent an extra ~$7MM+ on...
That's assuming they didn't use computers. Your calculation assumes that the computer uses a full 350+ watts of electricity. If it had a 350 watt PSU and was drawing that full load - it would shutdown (I've had this happen). Even then the CPU doesn't require 350 watts of power [1]. The only device that I know of that will use and designed to use a full load is a bitcoin miner.
Taking in consideration that these computers might have been left on already. I would argue that he used MAYBE an extra 50 watts of electricity [2]. So assuming $0.10/kw/hr (which is the cost of where I live) - he wasted a whopping $0.12/day or ~$50/year.
You have to take into account if the computers were already on. He didn't waste electricity because someone left their computer on - his "waste" would be electricity use that is above that of an "idle computer". It should also be pointed out that if the computer has Mcafee or some other crappy AV the CPU usage would be 100% anyways due to poor programming of the AV software (I have personally seen this many times and you don't know how many times people complain about their slow computer because the AV is using 100% of the CPU).
There is no way he wasted $7m - and even if he did and no one noticed that is part of a larger problem. Besides they only claim he wasted $1.2m - $1.6m [3] - with no evidence of how they came up with that number. That is saying he managed to waste over $100k/year (over 9 years) in equipment purchases, electricity etc - and NO ONE noticed this? I find it hard to believe that the people managing the budget were like "$100k unaccounted for this year? no big deal...". And even if it was accounted for and signed off - there should be 2 people fired - his and the guy who approved the purchase.
Even from the article:
> would find that in a middle of a lesson, the SMART Board had turned off.
This has happened to me personally on my own laptop. Not because I was mining bitcoins or running seti@home. In fact I've seen them installed and they are such POS that no instructor I know actually uses it as a SMART board.
> No matter what way you run the math, he blew millions of the school district's budget.
And the school blew millions by not turning off the computers when not in use. Power management is built into Windows - this can easily be done/managed with group policy.
> $250,000 per year * 9 years = $2,250,000 total additional electricity costs
This is all assuming he went around in a ski mask before he left every day and turned on all the computers across the school. Sure he might have used WOL but from the article I don't think he was that devious. From reports of what I read this was something the previous system admin guy did and just passed it along what to do.
I'm not saying he could have wasted money - I'm just giving him the benefit of the doubt and trying to make sure we don't frame him as some sort of criminal mastermind out to rip off this school district. There are a lot of reports out there about this and it's obvious the school wanted to spin it to look like he was the bad guy.
He was the IT guy, so for all we know (and can likely safely assume) he had a GPO to not turn off the systems, but instead schedule this app to run after students left for the day.
I do believe somewhere someone stated the district had wanted the systems put to sleep (not turned off) and believed it was happening.
Let's say 100W per computer running at full blast, and assume 12 cents per kWh for electricity. Running for 9 years straight, that's about 5 million dollars. If they're running for 16 hours/day then it's more like 3 million dollars. Adjust other factors to taste, but "millions" sounds pretty reasonable.
All of that extra power really only amounts to tens of dollars per year.
Running a processor at an extra (grossly exaggerating here) few watts + an extra 5-10 watts for fans, LEDs, etc don't amount to much. Especially when you consider that all electricity is paid for by the Thousand-Watts/Hour.
Were the machines always on regardless? Wouldnt they have consumed some portion of the said electricity no matter what? Or was he preventing the machines from being shutdown or sleeping?
> Wouldnt they have consumed some portion of the said electricity no matter what?
Some yes, but there's a lot of difference between a machine idling at 0% CPU and one fully loaded with SETI or Folding and running 100% all the time.
Would be even more worse now with deep sleep states and GPGPU, but even back then the difference between an idle and a fully loaded machine was absolutely significant.
During the winter months, the electric heaters that were also performing computation would supplement the normal dumb heaters. The cost of electricity or fuel saved on heating should therefore be subtracted from the cost of running @Home. Likewise, additional cooling costs would have to be added for the summer months.
Once those kWh are used in the CPU, they don't just disappear. They become heat.
The software runs on lowest priority. So when people are using the computer the software just sits there, not doing much. After a few minutes of inactivity the seti software (which sometimes was a screensaver) would kick in. Rather than sleeping or idling the computer would be doing computationally intensive work. Some distributed stuff (especially Prime95) is used specifically because it makes the computer work hard - it's a reliable stress test. This causes extra power to be used for the processor and the fans.
Running Folding@Home, SETI@Home, Prime95, and other CPU intensive applications requires much more power than simply running idle. For example, I have a processor that when running Prime95 will use more than double the idle load wattage. [0]
Even if they were always on running *@home increases their power load a lot during non school hours when they'd normally be at dead idle. The way @home software usually works is once the CPU has been at low utilization for a certain period it cranks up it's computation. If he was top of SETI@home then the computers were definitely up 24/7.
LATEST NEWS: Terrorist-sounding-named boy Ahmed Mohamed gets into White House with ticking device! The boy was given safe-passage from a guy named Hussein. Both are being investigated.
Great list. How about teacher Julie Amero, whose browser was apparently hijacked, possibly while students used it while she was out of the room resulting in students seeing nudity briefly and uninentionally [1]
> Amongst the most noteworthy, Detective Lounsbury stated in the trial that a red link proved that Amero had deliberately clicked on the link to visit a particular pornographic page. Huge blown up pictures were shown to the jury. In fact, forensic investigation showed that the link visited color for the browser was olive green. The link was colored red because there was a font tag on the page turning the link red.
Wikipedia says she pled guilty to disorderly conduct and handed in her teaching license because the school board wouldn't pay for IT support that would have kept the naked ladies off her computer. Incredible.
Trust me the "Technical Experts" for prosecution are a joke. long story but my friend was jailed for 6 years based upon stuff like this concerning his IP address and it 100% identifies him though it wasn't the same IP address. What jury knows anything about IP addresses and how they don't identify a person?
Holy shit, that is one of the most insane stories I've ever heard of. How was this not made into a prominent national news story? How have tons of school administrators not wound up in prison??
I know I remember at the time talking to a couple of friends who are school governors in the uk.
Overhear both the Head and It guy responsible would have been fired and be on the "not allowed to work with kids and vulnerable people" list for the rest of their lives. They would have been lucky not to get prosecuted for child porn as well
>A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers.
Actually, I agree with this. I remember when this got big and suddenly every IT department, school, etc had these things installed, clearly without permission. If you tried talking about wasted electricity, added pollution, and the social cost of running power hungry processors 24/7 for "alien points" on their forums (or any forums) you'd be shouted down.
The reality is that sysadmin and helpdesk staff shouldn't have this kind of power. If they want to run these types of things on their employers hardware they need to get permission.
You occasionally hear about this nowadays with Litecoin and Bitcoin mining, but it seems we've learned our lesson here. Power doesn't grow on trees. There are real costs and environmental effects here to seriously consider. This attitude of "fuck you, I understand computers and you don't" really needs to go the way the way of the dodo. Real professionals don't act this way. Also, comparing this guy to a 14 year old who was pulled out of his class and handcuffed for making a clock is fairly weak sauce.
In an environment where kids are literally arrested for sending popup messages over the network, I think that attitude has some value. People are overreacting based on things they have no understanding of.
If public schools are going to succeed, then many states need to "catch up" when it comes to funding. More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool.
If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point.
People HATE TAXES. People HATE paying school tax when they don't have children in school or never had children in school.
We under value in society
1) Education (We make fun of smart people who lack social graces)
2) Science (Scoff at all science and under fund Space Programs)
I ran for local School Board in my city. We are a school district with over 90% qualify for free lunch and extreme poverty. Parents pick Charter School over Public Schools (But Charter Schools under perform on test scores and under pay teachers compared to Public Schools (Money goes to the top in Charter which gets 100% of the child's local funding)) My city per student was the state's lowest at $5,700. The next county over some districts were paying over $28,000 per student. My state has the greatest disparity between haves and have nots.
Our school board loves to point to Teacher Union and Teacher Pensions as the problem. How about just give us the money. We need a change in priorities and not freak out about taxes for education. Sadly I don't see this changing and I don't think funding is the number one factor for educational success but it is an easy thing to measure.
First, no, they do freak out for paying taxes for education, and it's pretty obvious that the hostility increases with age and as the elderly rely on social welfare programs. They get out and vote. Traditionally they vote down any education funding, as a cohort.
In my experience the people who claim the public schools are "broken" the loudest are the least qualified to make such an assessment. Also, public schools reflect the public, as in, you know, society at large. Saying that public schools are broken is essentially saying our basic local systems are broken, and that opens a whole new can of worms regarding inequality, poverty, and social priorities.
The significant problem with your "End of story" type solution is that there are schools which are tantamount to educational fraud based on their religious priorities, and there's no way public monies should enable that type of selectivity. Pay into the public system. If you can afford to keep your child ignorant through religious pursuits, or can afford the opportunity for a selective population experience by way of a private school, that's totally fine, always has been and always will be.
"Saying that public schools are broken is essentially saying our basic local systems are broken, and that opens a whole new can of worms regarding inequality, poverty, and social priorities."
No one I know has ever freaked out about paying taxes for education. They are, however, skeptical that the local school system which receives those taxes is wisely using those funds to provide education.
They have good reason. Much of the money poured into public schooling in the U.S. goes to administration and overhead rather than the direct costs of teaching and student evaluation.
Many parents in this country are desperate to get their children the best education they can, within a certainly dysfunctional, and possibly also corrupt, system.
Part of the problem is that the funding is largely dissociated from effectiveness. The people spending the money have no vested interest in seeing that it is spent appropriately, for the benefit of the children--and the community they will be a part of when they eventually cease to be students.
I am not proposing any fixes. I am simply agreeing with my parent post. Every parent knows that raising local taxes to throw more money at their local schools will not solve anything. Richer neighborhoods will have to subsidize the schools in poorer neighborhoods in order to provide equal access to educational resources to all children.
If you want your kids to have extra opportunities, you can voluntarily give your own money to the PTA for the school they attend. Clearly, having to pay to remove the dents in the school-owned band instruments is a problem of a completely different order of magnitude from students in the classroom not having textbooks, or paper and pencils. Equally clearly, it is a disservice for Louisiana students to get pseudoreligious instruction in science class, as Massachusetts students learn without political interference.
I'm not a socialist, but it is blindingly obvious to me that if the state is to provide public education in any form, it needs to provide equal resources to everyone. It cannot select winners and losers by giving more money to schools where the children of richer people attend, and less money to schools where the children of poorer people attend.
As PP stated, attaching an equal dollar amount to each student, for the sole purpose of paying educational expenses, is one way to improve upon the existing system. It is not necessarily the best way, but better is a good first step on the voyage to good.
>Every parent knows that raising local taxes to throw more money at their local schools will not solve anything. Richer neighborhoods will have to subsidize the schools in poorer neighborhoods in order to provide equal access to educational resources to all children.
It depends on where you live. In Silicon Valley, they have local measures to raise parcel taxes to fund the schools. All money stays in the district and none of it goes to administration.
>Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story.
I was given this option in the third grade. I got a letter from the State Board of Education saying that I had performed exceedingly well on their standardized test and that I was invited to change schools and go to a special program in another town for smart kids.
My parents told me I should do it.
I regret it to this day. I was not equipped to understand the consequences of this choice, was not aware what I was getting into and it basically ruined my education.
Our class was separate from other students at this school. We started at a different time and ended earlier. In general, the rest of the school knew us as "those smart kids" and it took a major toll on my work ethic throughout high school.
No. Please do not give students the choice of which school they go to. They need to learn to get along with students different from them, not self-segregate into classes based on wealth, intelligence, etc.
We all make decisions we regret. That doesn't mean all decisions lead to regret. Nor does it mean that we should take away the ability to make decisions.
Fundamentally, we already have school choice. If you have enough money, you can choose your school district by purchasing a house wherever it is that you want to send your children.
That's absolutely revolting.
We are giving choice to those who can afford it and taking it away from those can't. Is that what a public school system should do?
> we don't need University of Phoenix brought to elementary schools.
I realize that from your perspective, the world if full of imbeciles ... but just for a second, consider that {insert for-profit college name} is providing a service that people want and that's why people are choosing it.
Those people don't care how the money they are paying is divvied up afterward. Whether it goes into the pocket of some administrator or a sports program at a non-profit institution, or into the pocket of some CEO or shareholder at a for-profit one.
They are getting something they want and that's all they care about.
If we had an education system that as a whole, gave people what they wanted, we would all be better off.
> Are you aware of how extremely predatory many of these for-profit colleges have been? Their students aren't getting something they want.
I don't know what this statement means.
If you're suggesting that people attend these institutions and then aren't able to find work in that field, I would say that's true of many other institutions as well.
Those majoring in English in a standard non-profit college aren't likely to become authors or English teachers. Those going to law school aren't likely to become lawyers. So what?
>The Bureau alleges that Corinthian lured tens of thousands of students to take out private loans to cover expensive tuition costs by advertising bogus job prospects and career services. Corinthian then used illegal debt collection tactics to strong-arm students into paying back those loans while still in school.
> Corinthian Colleges, Inc. is one of the largest for-profit, post-secondary education companies in the United States. The publicly traded company has more than 100 school campuses across the country. The company operates schools under the names Everest, Heald, and WyoTech. As of last March, the company had approximately 74,000 students.
> Because a teacher's job is customer service and the customer is always right? ;)
Yes?
Good customer service is making sure the customer walks away happy in the long-term. Sometimes you do that by giving homework and tests. They might be miserable in the moment, but they'll be happy in the long-term.
Viewing students as customers may not be ideal, but it's certainly better than seeing them as a burden.
> Attach a specific dollar amount to a student. Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story.
Allow it to go where there is little to no public over sight, no public school board or checks and balances, under performing scores, teachers paid $20,000 less with no pension, and CEOs making millions. Charter Schools are a part of the problem with American education. Sure some Charter Schools are good so are some Public School but as a whole Charter Schools are not for America's children but for the non-profit and for profit companies that run them.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS are the back bone of our educational system and democracy. Sending to school that take monetary advantage of our tax money with no over sight is wrong for everyone but the people who get the money.
Public schools also do plenty of dumb things. It's not as though charter schools have a lock on this.
A lot of people want "vouchers" so that private schools are more affordable. And plenty of private schools have a good track record, while having similar per-pupil costs as public schools.
If it costs $1000/student/month irrespective of if a child goes to a public school or a private school, why does the state really care which one the child attends? Why not let parents choose the school?
> If it costs $1000/student/month irrespective of if a child goes to a public school or a private school, why does the state really care which one the child attends? Why not let parents choose the school?
Except it doesn't. In fact, at-risk children going to poorly performing schools cost more per dollar: they need more extra curricular activities, possibly counseling, lower cost lunches, a lower teacher:student ratio, and so on and so forth. More children at poorly performing schools have more problems with their home life, and school is about the only thing other than organized crime that can give them structure.
There was a whole season of The Wire about this.. :)
> If it costs $1000/student/month irrespective of if a child goes to a public school or a private school, why does the state really care which one the child attends?
Because it doesn't cost a flat amount per student. The fact that funding is fixed per student doesn't mean that all students are equally costly to educate, and private schools that don't have a universal acceptance mandate impose selection criteria which tend to select for students which are less expensive to serve, increasing the per-student costs (but not funding!) in the public schools if public funds are used on an equal per-student basis to support students going to those private schools.
In addition to the per-student cost-to-educate not being constant, but charters only admitting the cheap students (as mentioned in sibling posts), charters also tend to have much lower salary costs, because in most states charter school teachers aren't part of the teachers' union. They have lower pay, worse benefits, and trend quite young. The charters, for the most part, are only making use of the cheapest, least experienced teachers in order to educate the students who are most likely to do well no matter what school they attend. After those teachers are chewed up and spat out, they're replaced by other fungible TFA folks who are just as inexperienced and just as willing to work unpaid overtime until they burn out.
As a predatory move to extract value from a very large market, it's commendable capitalism. As a general trend that undercuts the quality of public education nationwide, well, it's very distressing.
I find it funny how you completely ignored the most important aspect of the equation.
The student.
The students are choosing to attend those charter schools. People choose things that are better for themselves. Not always, but often enough that you can safely assume it's true for the majority.
Why are they doing that?
Could it be, that in spite of everything you mentioned ... charters are a better option for the student? Isn't that's what's important?
What's broken with the public education system isn't the funding, not the teachers, not the unions, not the administrators, or the facilities. It's none of those things.
It's demented notion that the system exists for the sake of the teachers/unions/administrators/etc. It doesn't. It exists for the students. Do what's best for them. Let them choose where they spend 12+ years of their life.
> The students are choosing to attend those charter schools.
Generally not the case. The parents are, usually, choosing.
> People choose things that are better for themselves. Not always, but often enough that you can safely assume it's true for the majority.
You might reasonably make that assumption for cases where the people making the decision are making it for themselves, and with sufficient information and skill to make a reasonable prediction of the utility that will result from each available choice. (A stronger form of this is a central element of rational choice theory, so its common to Econ 101 models of behavior -- and lots of people have internalized these models without understanding the assumptions underpinning them, and how limited they are in the real world.)
I think its far from evident that school choices under the conditions they are actually made meet that description.
For what it's worth, I'm not usually one to do credential comparisons and stuff, but I'm going to prefix this with: I got a Ph.D in science education over ten years ago from UC Berkeley, and have been working in and around the world of education, schools and schooling for that entire time. I happen to also do technology stuff, so in addition to being deeply engaged with this content, I develop software and hang around on hacker news. Anyway.
The point is: (as dragonwriter mentioned), the student rarely makes this decision. Furthermore, even when the student does, or when the parents of the students do, the decisions that are being made are pretty heftily influenced by advertising, gut instinct, and in-general wrong thinking about education. Take, for example, the weird and broad anti-common-core movement. Parents don't want their kids thinking about mathematics, they want their kids memorizing math facts just like they did when they were in school. Parents are swayed by images of tons of technology being used in these charters, when it turns out that most schools don't use tech all that effectively (they just reproduce old behaviorist models of instruction in an attempt to automatize teaching - recreate the teaching machine as Audrey Watters puts it).
In fact, the recent OECD report about use of technology in classrooms around the world was just making news earlier this week: in schools where there's a lot of 1:1 use of computers, students actually fare more poorly. This isn't surprising to me, or anyone else who studies education and the school systems, because of the point above: those computers aren't being used to improve or extend interactive learning, they're being used to deliver memorization-based, fact-and-repeat instruction. That's the same kind of boring teaching that turned off generations of kids in the past, and we're reproducing it again in classrooms with computers. However, those classrooms are shiny, filled with young, idealistic, often very poorly-prepared teachers and are very photogenic to parents.
Even worse- the charter movement (broadly speaking) has subverted most of the assessment process by ensuring that what is tested is the most flat, boring, and fact-based material around. (This is, incidentally, my own objection to common core- not the standards, but the terribad implementation of those standards in untested and regressive assessments). The assessments are bad, tend to not measure good learning, and instead measure a student's ability to memorize and repeat factual information. When charter schools do well on that front, and when the pro-charter movement gets the entire narrative framed in terms of "bloated, failing public schools", it is not surprising that parents (and grandparents, and students, and so on) are generally mislead by this narrative. It's not surprising that people choose charter schools.
People choose to give their money to University of Phoenix, which is objectively a terrible idea. Marketing works. Shiny pictures of happy kids with laptops learning the basics works to motivate people. The truth is, good education is complex - not even complicated, but complex - and asking the general public to really grok the nuances of it is difficult, especially since everyone has their own experience of what worked for them and things were good enough for me when I was in school, darn it.
A brief aside: there are plenty of good charter schools and charter networks, which are striving to bring high-quality reform-oriented education to everyone, especially underserved minorities. However, these charters aren't the ones I'm talking about. There are plenty more that take district dollars and provide sub-par education, and somehow manage to keep either getting renewed or just change names every three years when they come up for re-accreditation. There's also plenty of poorly-performing public schools and districts. Teachers' Unions aren't a panacea.
Ultimately, the problem from top to bottom is that our school system is in the hands of people who don't actually know much about education. Many board of education positions (especially state levels, which exert a lot of control) are political appointments or elected positions. How many times do you read about stupid stuff some board of ed is doing - rewriting history or requiring creationism or other crapola? Education is complex and nuanced, and people seem to engage in the discussion thinking that there's a Simple Fix for everything.
Charters are just vouchers in disguise, and vouchers are just saying "let the Free Market fix it", because the Free Market is super-great at fixing things like the banking, energy, health care, and housing systems in the US. Other charters have "let's let Technology fix it" ideas or "we're super-rigorous, require dress codes, and provide Discipline by calling all our students Mr. and Miss Lastname instead of having real relationships with our students". There's dozens of silly simple fixes floating around.
And you want parents to navigate all of this? It may be arrogant of me to say it, but I honestly don't think most parents can parse through all the crap. Again, people are still paying money to University of Phoenix, people buy guns thinking it will make them safer, and do dozens of other things that are just plain foolish because people aren't experts in everything. If you could assume that someone had enough understanding of how people learn (at least having read the book... How People Learn, which is still a great primer), you could maybe assume they're going to make good decisions. But this is a decision that (as you point out) will stick with the kid for 13 years proximally, and influence their opportunities for the rest of their life.
That depends; there are lots of different kinds of charters. Charters are public schools that have some exceptions -- enshrined in a particular charter, hence the name -- to the generally-applicable rules for public schools in the jurisdiction. These can be exception in terms of administrative process, specialty curriculum, alternate non-geographic admission criteria, etc.
They can also be exceptions in that the whole operation of the school is contracted out to a private entity, making it essentially a private school where tuition is entirely publicly paid for a cherry-picked student population with less accountability to the public than is usually the case with public schools. But that's not always the case.
True, I was being a little reductionist there. But I think that the charter school movement took off shortly after and directly because the voucher movement sunk. There's a lot of isomorphic economic policy between the two, although if I had to pick I'd say charters are better than vouchers.
> But I think that the charter school movement took off shortly after and directly because the voucher movement sunk.
I remember both taking off in parallel with very different support basis; the movement for privately operated charter schools has taken off when and where vouchers-for-private-schools haven't succeeded, but the publicly-operated charters that function as alternative-model public schools still exist and are still something that reformers that aren't supporters of the education privatization movement push (and sometimes nearby areas -- possibly even the same districts -- will have both kinds of charters.)
> There's a lot of isomorphic economic policy between the two, although if I had to pick I'd say charters are better than vouchers.
Between vouchers and privately-operated charters, I don't think you can make a useful of which is better; it mostly comes down to conditions, management, and accountability measures; charters probably make it administratively simpler to avoid the worst problems, but also tend to be greater single-point-of-failure systems.
Charter Schools = They take 100% of the money from the public school and the money follows the student.
> why does the state really care which one the child attends?
Well I as a tax payer cares. If those school fare even worst and the administration and CEO/President of the foundations makes millions at the expense of children there is a concern.
Public Schools work and have worked for decades. We have a problem with inner city schools and a big part is unfair funding, but killing public schools and give it over to various schools with no public oversight just government over sight is scary. We vote on our School Boards and Directors. We can protest and get Administrators removed. Can't do that to these Charters School. Also privatizing schools will make being a teacher an even worst job.
You're not making very coherent arguments. What's wrong with a voucher system whereby the PARENTS of the children being educated are the ones who determine which child the school goes to? Doesn't that make it very easy for the parents to shut bad schools down very quickly? It seems like that solves all the problems you're worried about, while also providing more choices to parents and students. What's the downside?
Voucher and Charter School are two different things. Charter Schools are taking over Public School System. Vochers are evil for many social reasons. I'll just focus on one.
So Vouchers really will be the new segregation tool for the 21st Century. Your money will be used to send kids to religious schools you don't like teaching Islam, Christianity in all its forms, or who knows what and if they want to teach the children ignorance and hate and you as a tax payer just flipped the bill for this and can't stop it. I can't see a good voucher system that would answer my fears of miss used funds spent on poor education back by people groups that will not teach based on various world views that are not politically correct and just wrong. Our Brain Drain in America will go into Nuclear Meltdown.
To quote the 2002 Supreme Court Voucher Dissent:
Justice Breyer on Descent “... all religious institutions cannot be given equal opportunities to the government funding and trying to do so not only turns back the clock on the Constitution, but creates a powder keg in our society.” http://www.pewforum.org/2002/06/28/judgment-day-for-school-v...
Back ground: I went to private school and graduated with a Theology Degree and worked as a Pastor for years. I absolutely know that many in the voucher movement see the Government footing the bill for their Christian Education. You have no idea how deep Crazy Christianity can get (Westborogh is just the tip of the ice berge). They will spew their version of crazy that they got with no academic or logically training to children with your tax dollars paying for it.
I've never been able to make sense of these arguments. Can't parents already teach their kids that without sending them to a special school?
And what about the people who don't have some religious agenda, but simply want to get away from crazy school administrations like, well, this one? "We're worried that you might be religious, so we're adamantly against leaving you any option whatsoever to avoid a known bad local school" doesn't exactly make a compelling argument if it's your kid suffering.
FWIW, I did go to a normal, public school. Mine wasn't so bad, but some of the usual idiocy was still present, like getting punished for "fighting" when I was attacked, unprovoked and had not even touched the other party.
So the money for education can only be spent on the kind of education YOU like, and not the kind of education that the parents like? You do realize that's incredibly arrogant, right? You and other enlightened people know what's best, but everyone else who disagrees with you about what's best is unenlightened swine? That's tautological.
Your missing the point. They can spend their money where you would be mad. So if they go to a school where history is through the lens of white supremacy and teach that science is evil because it contradicts their narrow version of the Bible and that God created black people because of the curse on Noah's son for having homosexual sin with Noah your fine? By the way a LOT of people believe this especially in the south. (Also BTW Noah's son Cush who did this "looking on his father naked" the scriptures say they went to Persia and NOT to Africa but that is another matter of facts getting way to their fictionalized bibles)
Also show one example where vouchers BETTERED students education? It didn't in Switzerland it actually made their scores worse since 1992.
I am saying that if you apply that argument inductively, then nobody should be able to do anything because there will always be someone to object to it. Public money can't be used by anyone for anything because someone will have a problem with it. You do see how that could be, don't you?
I am in group X and I object to things that you value in group Y. You in group Y object to things that I, in group X, value. What do we do?
Once you have a particular group that claims to have the moral high ground for some nebulous definition of "the high ground" the whole argument is lost because so few people agree on so few things.
I get that creationists are annoying, but I'll give them credit for not demanding that science not be taught, just that they wanted their pet theory taught too. That looks a lot more reasonable (from a certain perspective) than the evolutionists who insist that evolution is the only possible explanation ever, with quite religious zeal, despite having only circumstantial evidence. Evolutionary science is nowhere near as rigorous as physics and won't be for thousands and thousands of years of highly accurate recordkeeping. At that point the creationists will have suffered a thorough defeat, but until then, well, truthfully the science isn't settled. At least to the degree of rigor that I would personally care for.
> I'll give them credit for not demanding that science not be taught, just that they wanted their pet theory taught too
This was largely demonstrated to be a ruse by so-called "Intelligent Design" proponents in the Kitzmiller v Dover trial[0].
I would respectfully suggest that you haven't really looked into the evidence that carefully if you question the degree of rigor that underpins evolutionary science.
Large parts of evolutionary theory are indeed based on circumstantial evidence. But the quantity of such evidence is so overwhelming[1] that questioning its explanatory power is rather foolish. It's the sort of evidence where coming up with any alternative hypothesis besides evolution quickly becomes an exercise in futility. Unless, that is, you don't care if the hypothesis is testable or not, in which case creationists have many.
Moreover, evolution does not only have circumstantial evidence. You and I are living through the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria - an evolutionary change that is being observed and documented as it occurs. Fruit flies from the same species have been split into physically isolated groups, allowed to breed over many generations, and subsequently reintroduced, only to discover that they had become reproductively isolated.
Look I'm not suggesting that evolution is completely unfounded or anything like that. And I agree that we're witnessing it unfold with antibiotic resistance and the like.
But what I am saying is that physics has a lot more rigor for the claims by virtue of how it works, and what people are looking for there. Evolution is punctuated equilibrium and human beings haven't directly witnessed this to the same degree that people have in physics.
I think the direct witnessing aspect is important, even if others may disagree. The reason I think it's important is that there are other possible though highly improbable explanations for various physical phenomena we see on earth.
If there really was a "guy in the sky" he could have absolutely made a bunch of stuff and "planted the evidence" all over the place to fool people. But if also for some reason, he always handled the laws of physics just the way things are now, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
To me it's kind of like the people who suggest that we should try and see if reality is just a simulation being run in a computer. The odds -- at least in my mind -- are absolutely astronomical against. But just because it's a "crazy idea" and there's "no way" it could be true doesn't mean I get to dismiss it offhand and maintain my intellectual integrity.
> Evolution is punctuated equilibrium and human beings haven't directly witnessed this to the same degree that people have in physics.
I don't think this is really true. For most important effects in large domains of physics, directly witnessing the underlying processes is as impossible as directly witnessing the history of evolution (to the extent that "directly witnessing" is even meaningful -- on a detailed level, all witnessing other than of ones own internal subjective mental states is through several layers of indirection.) We witness them indirectly, through various media whose mechanism are explained by other well-tested scientific theories.4
> If there really was a "guy in the sky" he could have absolutely made a bunch of stuff and "planted the evidence" all over the place to fool people. But if also for some reason, he always handled the laws of physics just the way things are now, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
IF there's really a "guy in the sky" exercising arbitrary power over the physical universe, even if he had not always handled the laws of physics in the same way, we couldn't necessarily tell the difference, since he would also have the power to make it so that our perception of evidence we examine at any given time (including our present recollection of what we might have done in the past) is always consistent with physical law always having been the same, even if it wasn't, and even if our actual observations in the past would have differed.
How is the idea that our whole universe is merely a simulation inside someone else's computer practically much different than the idea of there being a "god"? From a certain perspective, they're one and the same. They can both change the universe arbitrarily either by changing the rules of the simulation or the state of the simulation.
I agree that both are incredibly unlikely, but you can't say for certain that it is not so.
Just for the record Charter Schools have a purpose BUT not to replace Public schools.
1) I think in experimentation charter schools do serve a good purpose, but right now it is the battle of not having another New Orleans (New Orleans has ZERO public schools and its school board has dissolved).
Are Texas public schools not proof that public schools are not immune from this "teach the children ignorance and hate" thing you speak of? You have to think past stage-one if you want to meddle with peoples' lives on such a grand scale.
I graduated from a Texas high school in 2008. Never heard a peep about intelligent design and the school was 1000% better than the school I moved away from in California. The two weren't comparable—the CA school was a prison, the Texas school was a palace of education.
In many cases, that's not true. Until recently, charter schools in my district received 17% of the per-pupil funding compared to district-run schools. That's changed recently, but who knows how long that will last.
Then why don't the Obama kids go to public school? Citing security would be silly. A school is a school. Even the President doesn't believe in public schools. If he does, he sure isn't eating his dog food.
While this has great rhetorical impact, it is still an appeal to authority. To me, the Obamas are just like any other rich(er) family. The PotUS has no special expertise in this domain.
They can afford to send their kids to private school, they believe that school to be superior to the public schools their kids would otherwise attend, so they pay the private tuition. As a parent, I agree with this. I, however, do not have a $400k income with a $169k expense account and a sweet pension plan, like he does.
In short, his kids don't attend public school because he can afford for them to go somewhere better. I am not willing to penalize any child for the sake of their parents' political views (or offices), nor am I willing to restrict people from spending their own money just because they might buy something I don't like.
it is true that the president may have no special expertise in assessing whether private schools are better than government schools, but it strikes me that any support he expresses for public schools is going to ring hollow if he isn't personally invested in the success of government schools.
I could be mistaken, but as far as I am aware no politician (from either side of the aisle) sends their kids to a government school. At least, no politician at the national level (president, congress, etc.).
I am not a fan of having a centralized governmental school system (I think the indoctrination risk is greater, because then there aren't competing institutions around to teach anything different) but it strikes me that any voter who does believe in government schools should demand that their representatives send their own kids to governmental schools as a sign of good faith.
> no politician (from either side of the aisle) sends their kids to a government school. At least, no politician at the national level (president, congress, etc.).
About half of Congress sends their kids to public school.
> Then why don't the Obama kids go to public school? Citing security would be silly. A school is a school.
In the matter of experience in dealing with the issues (and dealing with the Secret Service on security is far from the only one) that attend children of major public figures, no, a school is not a school. And Sidwell Friends, the school that has been attended by every school-age child of a US President since the Nixon Administration is, arguably, sui generis in that regard.
The President not sending his kids to public schools is probably, as much as anything, a service to the public school that they would go to if they weren't going to Sidwell Friends.
It's really not that easy. Location and transportation logistics factor in greatly and are hard problems to solve for the disparate network of connections a system like that might create.
>People HATE TAXES. People HATE paying school tax when they don't have children in school or never had children in school.
Or maybe I hate paying school taxes because the schools promote sports as far more important than academics. End of last year I went to the awards ceremony for top performing students in academics and sports... the difference in treatment left me feeling ill in my gut.
Exercise serves a purpose. I've even remember seeing evidence exercise helps improve learning. And in no way am I against a group of kids playing ball together. But I do not like funding an educational institute which does more to foster sports are being more important than the very stated purpose.
Think about some other good goal. Say feeding starving people. Now imagine if you were forced to pay some charity that was grossly incompetent in how it actually worked. Yes, people got fed, but often after they were negatively impacted in other ways. And that is money that could'be been going to better charities, but you aren't allowed to make such a choice.
In high schools in the US, academics are intimately linked to funding. Sports are not. I guarantee you no teacher or administrator gives a shit about how much money the Friday night concession stand is bringing in. It probably doesn't even cover the electricity bill for the flood lights.
But they do all care a lot about test scores and other (mostly academically-related) metrics that determine how many millions in state/federal funding they receive.
Sports are one of many ways that students can use their free time to learn to socialize, lead, and work in a group. Those are all important skills that are hard to teach in a classroom, and running a sports team (or robotics team or programming competition team or chess club) is a hell of a lot cheaper than running a classroom. And often far more enjoyable for everyone involved.
>or robotics team or programming competition team or chess club
And yet these are rare and never given the same prestige that sports does. Being a member of many of those clubs will likely negatively impact your ability to socialize and learn social skills as you will be ostracized by the larger groups.
They are too rare, which is why it's important for (even/especially childless) engineers to be actively involved in the after-school activities offered by surrounding schools.
> and never given the same prestige that sports does.
This might be true in some schools, but in every school I've worked with (which have included everything from blue collar suburb to pretty depressingly poor urban), academics are values much more than sports.
Kids who do well at sports get validation. And they should. Performing well in a competition -- any competition -- requires equal parts skill and dedication.
So why don't academics get the same sort of social validation from adults as sports?
It's worth remembering that the social validation is probably the only validation high school athletes will receive.
In contrast, most people assume that academics will be validated by scholarships, and that the intermediate social validation is therefore unnecessary. That painfully over-estimates the maturity of the typical high schooler (even a bright one), but it's a common mindset.
So it's not that academics isn't valued over sports; rather, it's more like the value of academic achievement is perceived to be self-evident and therefore doesn't require social validation, whereas for sports that's not so much the case.
> Being a member of many of those clubs will likely negatively impact your ability to socialize
That's not true at all! It will absolutely improve your ability to work on problems with a group. No one on a robotics team is going to ostracize someone because they are on a robotics team...
> as you will be ostracized by the larger groups.
Bullies are everywhere in life. Knowing how to live life and get work done in spite of bullying is an important skill.
> People HATE paying school tax when they don't have children in school or never had children in school.
Recently (well, a few years ago), there was a controversy in my home state about the removal of funding for bus transport to and from magnet schools. I went to one of those magnet schools - as did my two older siblings.
I brought it up talking to my dad (who still lives there), and he said, "well, I don't have a horse in that race anymore."
Meanwhile, those schools' academic ratings are plummeting...
I know, I know, sample of 1 does not a study make, but I am single, don't have kids and live alone. I wish more of my tax money went to education, if this meant I was taxed a little bit more, then so be it.
Education is so incredibly important, and honestly the education system here in the United States is abhorrent. Not due to the teachers mind you, but due to the requirements that are being made by legislators.
Testing requirements don't allow for a wide variety of curriculum anymore, students are all taught at the same baseline (lowest common denominator because otherwise it's discrimination) and students are no longer allowed to excel for fear of making their peers uncomfortable.
As a country the United States is not teaching students to think for themselves and challenge viewpoints, instead they are becoming complacent followers. Which is perfect if you want people that can easily be controlled.
Did you know that the US spends more on education than almost any other country? Only Switzerland spends more per capita and only Switzerland, Norway and Austria spend more per student.
I'm always find the "more funding" idea to be somewhat dubious. Don't we already spend a ton of money on education? Perhaps even more per pupil than other developed countries?
At the teacher level, they are underpaid. My girlfriend is a high school teacher w/ 4 years experience, a masters degree in her topic, and works 12+ hours a day (not kidding, seriously all day).
She makes $35k / year.
If she wasn't lucky enough to have an engineer paycheck behind her life, she simply wouldn't be able to do the job.
It's likely that funding gets allocated in stupid ways, but the whole process is inherently expensive. Managing thousands of employees, dozens of buildings, updating equipment, training, etc, etc. It's a hard problem, and we've basically just decided that only "dedicated" workers should do it, which is code for "willing to be underpaid compared to qualifications".
At the teacher level, they are underpaid. My girlfriend is a high school teacher w/ 4 years experience, a masters degree in her topic, and works 12+ hours a day (not kidding, seriously all day).
She makes $35k / year.
How much do teachers in her school system who have 25 years experience make?
The union-mandated tenure system, which prevents young, talented teachers from making even vaguely competitive salaries, but rewards older, mediocre teachers with "time served" is part of what's stopping "more money" from being the answer. Higher teacher salaries under the current system would largely reward the oldest, not the best.
In my school district[0] teachers start at $43,500 and max out at $63,688 (after 30 years and a PhD)
You can pick up some extra stipends if you coach or work in certian departments (STEM) but good luck getting into 6 digits as a Teacher.
When I taught in Massachusetts (where we have a teacher union)[1] pay starts at $36,400 and maxes out at $74,000 (with a PhD) after 19 years.
Turns out that public school salary information is public information. So if you "know" a teacher that is making 6 digits, I challenge you to look up their pay scale and see if you really know what you think you know.
Your link says it's 6 hours and 55 minutes, including lunch. So 6 hours and 25 minutes is a work day.
Plus there's 150 minutes a week (2 and a half hours, or 30 minutes per day) for training, professional development, teacher collaboration, parent engagement and other professional activities.
150 minutes for all of that is a joke, and if any teacher was actually following that rule (union or not) then you'd be hearing about it.
What are "other professional activities?
Students that need extra help?
Students that need to make up work/tests?
Grading homework/tests/quizzes
I have about 150 students. If I give a test, that's 150 tests to grade. If it takes me 1 minute to grade each test, then I've just blown that entire quota of "other professional activities"
But I still do my job.
I grade all those 150 tests. Then I grade the homework that I gave all those students. Then I write my lesson plans for the next classes and I write the next test. And I email/call parents. And I meet with parents. And I see students before/after school to answer their questions and have them make up their work and tests. And I answer emails from students that have questions about their homework.
I spend 6 hours and 25 minutes a day teaching. I spend plenty more time making sure students learn.
But at least I get summer vacation, right? Sure, it's just full of mandatory Professional Development (so I can keep my teacher license up to date) and lesson planning for the next year.
But hey, in New York you can make up to $105k! After 22 years AND earning a PhD (which you paid for with your own money ... and where did you find the time to get that degree?) Rent in NY is 3x rent where I live, but the max $105k isn't even 3x the starting salary of my school district.
That's for nurses, etc. It's 6 hours and 20 minutes for regular teachers (including lunch). Actual instruction hours per day are quite a bit less of course.
Even for someone without more advanced degrees (fyi you do not need a PhD to cap out.) you cap out at $93k.
Agreed that teachers (particularly beginner teachers) put in a lot of hours outside school. 10 hours a week? More? So a 40-50 hour workweek during the school year? (But with predictable scheduling, which not all professionals have.)
A roughly $1 MM dollar annuity when you retire isn't so horrible either.
Lesson planning takes less time as you get more experienced, plus you reuse your old lesson plans.
I've worked for a big insurance company, a medium sized company that went public, and a couple startups, and two school districts.
I made waaaaay more money working in industry and never worked anywhere near as hard or long as I do being a teacher.
Sure, lesson planning gets easier. And you can reuse old lesson plans (although, the standards get changed fairly regularly and in my district you need to use "data-driven metrics" to improve your lesson plans year after year, so if you're just reusing lesson plans you get put on the "bad teacher list" in a state with no unions which means no tenure).
Without the PdD, you don't cap out at that 6 digit number. But $93k isn't bad. That's about the entry level salary of a Software Enigneer, right? And you only need to be a teacher for 20 years to earn that. What a deal!
That's probably all a teacher deserves though. As a society we really need incentivise our best and brightest to use their skills to build new ways to share photos.
All I'm saying is that you get what you pay for. If you pay teachers $40k, then you're going to get $40k value.
One of my bêtes noires about the system is that it does not differentiate between a high school teacher getting an advanced degree in STEM versus a kindergarten teacher getting a secondary development blah blah from University of Phoenix.
My personal opinion is that some teachers are underpaid, and some are overpaid. Senior teachers should not be making twice as much as junior teachers, and high school physics teachers should not make the same as kindergarten teachers. Additionally, schools should have some leeway in rewarding better/harder working teachers, instead of the unionized lockstep pay scales.
Yes, programmers make more than teachers, on average. (Though the mean hourly wages are not that different, actually-- http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl1614.pdf for NY/NJ/CT). So?
Programmers make more than teachers, so someone that is any good at programming is better off being a programmer than a teacher. Which leaves people who don't know how to program to teach high school kids to program.
Which is why everyone is a "self taught" programmer.
Imaging if you took everyone that posts to Hacker News about how they were the only person in their school that knew how a computer worked and they did all sorts of hacks and had all sorts of fun subverting authority and you went back in time and you gave them a knowledgeable mentor (read: teacher) how much better would they be at programming now?
It's 2015 and we don't have those teachers in our schools. What we have are Math teachers that are being told "We have to have a Computer Science class and we heard that programming is like math, so you're going to be teaching Computer Science next year. Go take a Java course."[0]
Also, unions are not keeping the pay scales the way they are. Texas does not have unions. Texas does not have tenure. Texas still has "lock step pay scales". Unions are not the problem.
Private schools pay teachers less than Public Schools. Private Schools don't have unions. Unions are not the problem.
I don't know what the problem is. I think it has something to do with there being very little respect or prestige for the teaching profession among tax payers (or anybody, really). But the problem isn't unions. If unions were the problem, then the problem wouldn't exist in places where there are no unions.
[0] 100% serious. I had a training this summer where 6 of the other 7 teachers were Math teachers that were told at the end of the year that they would be teaching AP Computer Science and were sent off to take their first ever Java course over the summer.
Why shouldn't it be 'not too bad'? For NYC that's the lower end of middle class- comparable to being in a (unionized) trade. And I can guarantee the teachers put up with more shit than a plumber.
lol if you think teachers have a "shorter work day/work year"
My girlfriend is a High School teacher in NY, and easily works more than I do. You have to factor in planning and grading which is all done after "work".
Well, average actual hours worked in the US is around 1800 (that's net after sick days, vacation, personal days, etc.)
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS
Given (in NYC) a school day of 6.33 hours (including lunch) and a school year of 18x days, then subtract personal days and the like...well.
Also, most teachers don't need to do as much planning after a few years. Is if fair that longer serving teachers get paid twice as much as new ones, when new ones put in more hours usually? Well...
Most teachers aren't teachers after a few years[0] so most teachers do not benefit from having old lesson plans, most teachers are not making the upper levels of salary, and most teachers will never collect on their not-social-security-pensions.
The school day may be 6.33 hours (including lunch) but do you only count football players as working 3 hours a week when you watch them on TV? Teachers have to do a lot of "under the table" work to make those 6.33 hours (including lunch) happen.
When are those tests getting graded? When are those struggling students getting extra help? When are those lesson plans getting written? When are those parent-teacher conferences happening? When are those teachers going to football games/plays/other events to make connections with the students? When are those teachers writing letters of recommendation for those students? When are those lesson plans being modified to meet the needs of students with IEPs? When are those lesson plans being modified to meet the needs of ESL students? When are the formative and summative assessments being analyzed to modify lesson plans to better meet the needs of the students?
Those 6.33 hours (including lunch) are just the hours that teachers spend in front of the camera. There is so much more work involved to support those 6.33 hours (including lunch). Even for the long tenured teachers. If a teacher is resting on their laurels and just rehashing old lesson plans, then that's one of the "bad ones".
It is a crying shame that there is so much teacher churn...why is that? In the article you reference, it's actually not primarily related to compensation, but to autonomy, support, and student behavioral issues.
Yes, of course, like I said, there are many outside the class hours. And in fact, 6.33 hours/d are not the "hours in front of the camera" (I assume you mean instructional hours.) The exact number is a bit hazy, due to self-reporting issues, but it seems to be about 700 h/y.
http://cbcse.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The-Mi...
It's hard to say why there is so much churn. The churn related to changing schools pretty much can't be about pay because you get paid the same amount no matter where you teach unless to change districts, and even then you might only get a couple hundred dollars a year more. But changing schools can get you a better administration or a better pool of students to work with.
However, if you get offered a 9-5 job for $100,000 and you are looking at making $48,000 after several years experience ... you start imagining what you could do with an extra $50,000 a year. Just think of the compound interest!!!
If you can make lots of money, you almost owe it to yourself to get it. But who does that leave us to educate the kids that are going to run the country when we are old? Do we really want to leave that job up to people who can't do anything but teach (so they live and die by the dreaded tenure system) and people who don't have experience teaching (and will soon leave to make money in industry)?
Also, not all states have unions or tenure (my state included) and those states to not have industry-competitive salaries and they do not provide better educations. If unions were the problem, wouldn't we see better results from non-union states? Wouldn't it behove non-union school districts to out perform/compete union school districts to keep teachers from unionizing? (or is the fact that they can get laws passed saying that teachers cannot unionize better than trying to be competitive in the job seeker market?)
For the record, I didn't make the "6 digit salaries" claim. I'd be thrilled if world-class (or even top 5-10%) teachers could command those kinds of rates without having to teach in the richest school districts for decades.
I'd also note that those are salaries (and similar for others in this discussion) are for 187-day school calendars, or 37.4 weeks/year. Generously applying the same rate to a 46 week/year "full time" calendar puts the top end in Round Rock at over $78,000. The median household income in Round Rock is around $70,000[1], suggesting that it isn't outrageous for a couple of married teachers there to earn well above average, even without summer income.
Also, at least in MA, many teachers are not required to pay Social Security tax, but instead pay into a much more generous pension system. Other benefits are also competitive relative to the private sector.
Again, though, I'm all for teachers making more money so more talented people are encouraged to teach. But the tenure system is not the way to get that result.
First: teachers typically work days not on the student's school calendar, so it's more like 39 or so weeks by your calculation.
Second: they work WAY more than an 8 hour day. Last night she did 7am - 4pm in the building, then 2 or so hours at night grading. (and that was a light day since she had gotten her planning done previously this weekend).
Third: summer is where you can finally catch up and plan classes. Girlfriend did a major revamp of her AP US History class so she was in-line with the new standards. Last year was Western Civ revamp. Next year will be the standard US History class.
You're right, benefits are in-line (not better, just in-line) with corporate america. Mediocre, but existing health care. A pension style retirement plan that's reasonable, but at the mercy of underfunding by politicians (which seems to be expected at this point).
How much do teachers in her school system who have 25 years experience make?
In my state, which has comparable starting salaries, $56k assuming they obtained some professional certification along the way. Otherwise, $50k. (For comparison, an engineer straight out of college could expect to make maybe $75k.)
I find the idea that we should destroy the entire school system to ensure that a small handful of undeserving people are not able to serve out their career on a still-very-modest salary quite mad.
Given 20 years, and a doctorate degree $65k. Beyond 20, it goes to letters on the pay scale, and I'm not sure what the requirements are to move up that.
No teachers in this district are making money suitable to their training and experience.
If you put more money into the system, you could be pretty sure that the teachers would not see more than a dime of it. Tenure is what prevents schools from removing a higher cost experienced teacher and replacing them with a cheaper no experienced teachers.
Microsoft and Google don't fire all their higher cost experienced engineers in favor of cheaper fresh graduates every year. They also don't forbid new engineers from making more than any longer-tenured ones.
Why is tenure-based compensation an efficient use of dollars in primary education but not elsewhere?
If unions aren't strong in your state generally, then teacher's unions are no different. Too many people jump on teachers in New Jersey making $100K at the end of their career as an excuse to not even try to aim above the bottom of the barrel.
> It's likely that funding gets allocated in stupid ways
That's exactly what it is.
When I was in high school we got a shipping pallet of new $100+ calculus textbooks that sat unused because they were the same as the old calculus textbooks but with material cut out because the curriculum had been dumbed down.
Thank god our teacher saw them as the worthless turds that they were and continued teaching us prohibited advanced material like gasp integration from the old books.
Meanwhile our CS teacher was actually a history teacher who stayed a chapter or two ahead of us in the book because who in their right minds would become a teacher making $50k if they actually knew how to write software?
Well, here's anectdata to contradict yours. A new teacher in my fine town starts out at $43K/year plus benefits. 9 month work schedule. Here in the Midwest of the USA, $43K to start with nothing but a degree and teaching credential is a perfectly good salary, above the median for the city and state.
If your girlfriend feels she is a better teacher and deserves more she needs to help start a movement to de-unionize schools. We should not have incompetent dinosaurs teaching our kids. We want brilliant, dedicated, hard working, up-to-date teachers who are worth every penny they earn in front of our classrooms. And, yes, they should make $150K per year or more. And, no, it's not free money. They have to be that good. Everyone else needs to be fired.
Imagine building a company where you cannot get rid of incompetent, mediocre and down-right caustic employees because some third party (a union) gets in the way. This company will never amount to anything and will never be able to compete with one where excellence is the goal and people are well paid because they are worth it.
For some reason we seem to be OK with the idea of supporting the unions and lose sight that our goal should be to ensure the kids come out of school with absolute genius level knowledge, experiences and enthusiasm across a range of topics from arts to engineering. Kids ought to leave school with a hunger to succeed and contribute to society resembling a massive buffalo stampede with a purpose. Today a huge swath of them leave school with a "thump" and no passion, direction or real knowledge to guide them forward.
There are no teacher unions in Texas. Texas can not only get rid of incompetent teachers, it can also get rid of any teachers that rock the boat or question the administrators or make someone look bad by going an extra mile for a student.
Public schools will never pay $100k+ to someone to teach Computer Science, so how will they ever get someone that actually knows Computer Science to be a teacher[0][1]? Instead they are offering a $1000 stipend to current Science and Math teachers to take a 1 semester course in Java so they can pass the Computer Science Certification Test and teach Computer Science.
So the future computer science high school students will be getting taught computer science by 10+ year Physics teachers that took a 15 week Java course.
[0] I left a $100k Software Engineering job to become a Computer Science teacher... hoping to make a difference with the diversity issues in our field. Luckily I am married to someone that has a job that can pay the bills.
[1] There are at least 3 open Computer Science teaching positions in my district right now if anyone is interested! And in the next 2 years we will have enough students that we will need another CS teacher at my school.
Well, the other thing we need to do is look and treat schools differently.
To me every dollar legitimately (with a HUGE emphasis on the legitimate part) spent in schools is a valuable investment in the future. I hope that is a statement that cannot be disputed.
However, we've performed badly enough and have wasted so much money that we are in a situation where someone who thinks teachers ought to be able to make $150K per year would be laughed out of the room.
We are slowly destroying our country from the inside. And a big part of that is in how we are not educating our kids. And perhaps even our population in general. I mean, the fact that the Theory of Evolution is cause for debate in the US is down-right shameful and a sad indication of just how backwards some of our population is in their thinking.
The problem of schools and education is simple. It get's complicated when we are not united in an understanding of what our objectives should be.
What are they? In my view: science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and entrepreneurship. Arts belong in school as well but we are not going to float the boat on arts alone. STEM+E need to be our strong suit and our kids need to be exposed to the arts in order to see, feel and experience the beauty in the human condition.
I totally agree with you. I don't necessarily think that people who are currently teachers should make >$100k. But if teacher pay was competitive with industry pay then we would have more smart people competing for teaching jobs.
The problem with education is that old saying "people that can, do; people who can't, teach" but it's more like "people that can, do even if they would be really good at teaching because teaching doesn't pay nearly as much as anything else you can do with the same skills"
The way things are right now, who cares about tenure! If you fire all the bad teachers who are you going to replace them with? The only people that want those jobs are the applicants that weren't as good as the people that just got fired!
And like you said, an additional problem is that every state gets to decide what the goals for education are and those goals can get very political (see: evolution vs creationism, civil war vs war of states rights).
And the biggest blind spot for HN readers concerning education is that most of the students in school are not like you! Public (and some Private) Schools are full of students that would stare blankly into space all day rather than watch one Khan Academy video. It takes a lot of work and effort to provide an education to both the low achieving and the high achieving students, especially with 25:1, 30:1, sometimes 35:1 student to teacher ratios.
I would love to teach. I am very good at it. But I am also an entrepreneur to the core and hate, hate, hate bullshit.
I am one of two engineering mentors for our local FIRST FRC robotics team. Brilliant kids fully motivated to learn. I love it. We've built a bunch of neat stuff. I happen to own a lot of nice manufacturing equipment so we've taken advantage of that with the kids learning such things are running CNC and manual milling machines as well as soldering SMT, using DSO's etc.
Anyhow, one day I get hit with this business of having to register as an official school system volunteer in order to be able to be a mentor for the team. Mind you, FIRST has no such requirements, this is the school system bureaucracy meddling with things.
What did it entail? Filling out a bunch of forms that nobody could email me. I had to go to the main office and get them. And then they need to do a full-up background check, blood test and other crap. The process takes months. Oh, yes, and I have to pay for it.
Being that part of my work is in aerospace there are certain things I just can't do, at least not without involving certain checks and balances.
I flat out told the school system folks to go stuff it. I further threatened to fully fund the robotics team myself and pull it completely out of the the school. FIRST does not require teams to be attached to schools, so, technically, we could run it out of my warehouse and we'd be fine. The school folks took a few steps back and figured out a way to allow me to continue to be a mentor (after two years of doing it) without red tape. I suspect someone is making money somewhere by having this team be at the school. We are required to have a teacher associated with the team (one who knows nothing about nothing). My guess is he is getting extra bucks for having his name on a list somewhere.
This is just one example of why they don't attract better talent. We could have a lot more engineering mentors in this team but everyone recoils at some of the red tape they toss in front of you.
I know I and other practitioners could be amazing teachers and sources of inspiration for students. Yet, none of us has any interest in dealing with bullshit. And the school systems are permeated by it.
I mean, imagine the idea of having someone like Elon Musk do a physics lecture at a High School even once per semester. Think of the inspiration and effect that would have on kids. The effect would be very similar if you had passionate practitioners, perhaps less well known than Elon, yet passionate about their work, contribute to the education of our kids.
Money, to some degree, isn't the problem or the solution. We just don't have a good system. Teachers could be professional "inspiration organizers" who pull-in from the local and distant communities with the goal of blowing away kids with the passion, wonder and possibilities of the subject at hand, whether it is music, mathematics or physics. That. Something even a little bit like that. Would be amazing.
Elon Musk is an engineer and entrepreneur/inventor, not a physicist. He stopped being a physicist the day he dropped out of grad school at Stanford. Why would you call a lecture he gives a physics lecture?
I took computer science at a high school in Texas (graduated in '08). We were taught everything from basic imperative programming to analysis of algorithms (and this was just a public school, not a magnet school).
I keep in touch with my high school CS teacher and that school now offers four years of CS education with multiple CS teachers. Your profile says you're in Round Rock, I graduated from Seven Lakes near Houston. My experience does not match yours.
:-/ Yeah, deunionizing would be great.... Private school teachers get paid much less than public [1], with the bonus of being fired any time. Instead, when school districts attempt to bust the teachers union, they do it in order to funnel money to charter schools, often religious [2]. These charter schools have selective admissions, and often won't keep children with any sort of difficulty [3], which artificially raises their test rates, and hoses kids who need the help.
Maybe you have more info but... Somehow, if I understand correctly. The USA spends more per student than any other country. Yet, somehow, other countries have better outcomes.
Is my info bad or does that suggest that more money isn't the problem. Is the problem how the current money is being spent or is it that we need more money. Are those articles making stuff up?
As for salary I also think it's a crime that teachers get paid so low. At the same time low is probably relative. A teacher in Berlin making $40k a year is doing a lot better than a teach in NYC/LA/SF making $40k a year. I've tried to talk myself into becoming a teacher but salary is a big reason I can't quite get myself to take the leap.
One takeaway from the film "The Street Stops Here" ( which is a documentary of an extreme outlier teacher/coach, so caveat caveat ) is that it takes a strong sense of dedication to make a difference in education.
The person in question - coach Bob Hurley, in a decaying New Jersey town - is a retired parole officer, and he's there to keep kids out of prison. So this is is his white whale.
I don't think you can buy that, but you might be able to buy furniture - support systems, assistance, the like - to keep it from being killed off. Instead, we get six-sigma metrification which may well make it worse. At least it Heisenbugs the curriculum and distracts from actual teaching.
Something must be done, this is something, this must be done...
Then again, the canonical teacher is Socrates, and he was forced to drink hemlock...
I think people get embarrassed by being discarded by the sorting-machine and resent the system, even when it's their kids in it. We don't really value education for its own sake - it must be shown to be in service of other societal goals - mainly economic goals. That can get out of control quickly.
So true. We allocate lots of money to education. Just it goes to administrative, consulting and testing expenses, rather than to improving the education provided.
"If public schools are going to succeed, then many states need to "catch up" when it comes to funding. More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool.
If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point."
I used to think on these lines too. After talking to two teachers in different districts, they both said the same things. More money is fine, but it usually goes to Administration.
The two teachers I knew, and talked to, lived and taught in California. They were both tenured. I talked to them a decade ago. They were both making, I belive 150k a year. At the time, they weren't complaining about wages. In fact, they had no complaints. Maybe, they just got lucky? I don't think money is the answer?
(Actually, I just remembered--my ex'es mother-inlaw was a school teacher, and she told me countless times the money always goes to bloated Administration. I don't know why I just remembered her? She taught high school back east.)
Public schools are not going to succeed. I spent 12 years in some of the best public schools and two at an elite boarding school. People are too attached to the good intentions behind the model to accept that a new one has to be found.
A lot schools/districts that are better spend less money per student than schools that are worse. You should ask David Tarver about it.
> More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool
Without the ability to get rid of bad teachers as quickly and easily as one can fire bad engineers in the private sector money isn't going to fix a damn thing. It might even make it worst.
In Colorado teachers can be fired at the drop of a hat (or, more likely, not be asked to come back next year). I can assure you this hasn't kept the state off of the bottom of the academic performance lists.
Wouldn't more funding in public schools just eventually lead to more expensive private schools which leads to there being new standards set for education? We've seen this recently with a college degree becoming the new high school diploma in regards to the job market.
That has nearly as much to do with changing standards. While I was completing my teaching credential I watched the standards process dumb things down so schools could achieve an "acceptable pass rate"
So it's kind of unfortunate that when people see a system full of ignorant jerks, they have been trained to always think "let's give the ignorant jerks more money," and never think "let's fire the ignorant jerks."
The incentives are completely upside down when one's entirely avoidable screwups are used as an excuse to ask for more money. That's how we get the current state of public education and, frankly, most levels of government in the United States: hideously expensive bureaucracies run by ignorant jerks for their own benefit.
I think thats a very cynical view point which reduces to a platitude an extremely complex issue especially when your evidence primarily appears to concern a smattering of cases among a system which serves millions of children a year.
Technology is very esoteric and almost brand new in a sense. It's been as little as two decades since the advent of schools even having computers.
The fact there are misunderstandings, growing pains, and abuse associated with the system that results should be a foregone conclusion.
The answer isn't to give up on the school system or assume bad intentions by administrators, curriculum developers, or legislators. The only thing that can come of that is an even more broken school system.
Perhaps, but each family with a child will need to make a decision about how to school that child, and one family doesn't have the power to fix the system.
Tragedy of the Commons and all that. Maybe it's best for society if we don't give up on the public school system, but for my kid, today, given the options I have, is sending them there the best option? Rarely is the answer yes.
It seems we're talking about schools' failure to support exceptional students -- those most likely to make outsized contributions to society when older. So of course we are only looking at exceptional cases.
In my day we called unschooling homeschooling. And it's a lot of work. It's a fix for those families that can afford to do it.
However the families most harmed by public school policies are precisely the people who can't afford to unschool or homeschool which is perhaps the saddest part of all of this.
Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling. In ordinary homeschooling, the parents set a curriculum, and direct the learning. In unschooling, the student decides what to learn, and the parent provides resources to support that.
If the kid gets into dinosaurs, a regular homeschooling parent might add a dinosaur module to the science/biology part of the curriculum. The unschooling parent might ask, "How would you like it if we took a trip to Utah, to visit an actual dig site?"
If the kid gets into robots, a regular homeschooling parent might add mechanical engineering and electronics to the curriculum. An unschooling parent might bring home a LEGO Mindstorms set and sign the kid up for the robot soccer league run by an adjunct from the local community college.
As I understand it, successful unschoolers rely rather heavily on a whole-family lifestyle commitment, to subtly discourage the kid from choosing to become the world's foremost expert on Minecraft, and learn nothing else. I would, at the least, be compelled to suggest that perhaps my kid should play all the computer games in my personal collection, in chronological order, starting with the Infocom library, progressing through the Sierra/Dynamix era, running through Black Isle and LucasArts titles, and ending with access to my Steam and GOG accounts. I could also hook up my old console systems.
Then I might, ever so subtly, suggest that an encyclopedic knowledge of video gaming, past and present, might be useful to a heavily-followed and well-monetized text or video blogger. Because I am certainly not going to unschool if it won't eventually get the kid out of my basement (and pantry).
No, Unschooling is a subset of Home Education. So is Home Schooling. The distinction is important, since while both count as education, only one is school-at-home.
The rest of the post is rather accurate though, although I would say that with the robotics, the unschooling parent would probably take the kids to a local Radioshack (Or Maplin's, if you're in the UK!) and buy a book on electronics, along with a few bits and bobs (motors, etc), encourage the kid to experiment, and encourage them to join a local engineering group :D
Homeschooling may encompass a lot of different methodologies but as I said Homeschooling back when I did it which was a long time ago it had a lot of similarities to unschooling as it's defined now.
The point here though is that whether you call it Homeschooling or Unschooling it is still a labor intensive process that will likely require sacrifice on the part of the parents. Sacrifices that many times a lower income family can not afford to make.
From a survey of adults who had been "unschooled" (homeschooling without a curriculm):
> Almost all of the respondents, in various ways, wrote about the freedom and independence that unschooling gave them and the time it gave them to discover and pursue their own interests. Seventy percent of them also said, in one way or another, that the experience enabled them to develop as highly self-motivated, self-directed individuals. Many also wrote about the learning opportunities that would not have been available if they had been in school, about their relatively seamless transition to adult life, and about the healthier (age-mixed) social life they experienced out of school contrasted with what they would have experienced in school.
Vouchers. Socialistic Denmark use them. It would only cost me slightly more than 200 usd/month to send my (non-existing) kid to a private school. Scaled to US cost it would be something like 50 usd/month more.
Sure those are not the super fancy private schools, but they will always be out of reach of anything but the very rich.
I wasn't allowed to do my high school science scholars project on electromagnetic propulsion because it was around the time of Columbine: "You could potentially make a gun out of it".
Exactly. Exploiting his race to further a political narrative as the author has done, is both intellectually feeble and misdirects away from the real issue: authoritarian government behavior targeted at school children.
You mean the non-specific 2nd-hand quote from the officer that makes up the entirety of the justification for the race baiting and exploitative behavior?
"Yup. That’s who I thought it was."
Like I said, it's an intellectually feeble argument.
So, you focus on attacking my point with insinuation and equivocation, yet ignore the exploitative anti-intellectual (fact-less) position of the TechCrunch author, whose sole contribution to the story was to inject race?
Conveniently, you ignored the facts and in doing so implicitly mischaractered me as equally lacking in factual basis for my "narrative", which, of course, is absurdly wrong, since my first word, "Exactly" presupposes the parents' citations.
Perhaps surprisingly, to a small amount of people, "Exactly" isn't the source of the irony that I pointed out, but the fact that you are referring to the real issue, by which you dismiss that there are any other real issues involved. You did so without making a factual argument and without sharing any of the reasoning that had you arrive at that conclusion.
The mystical real issue for which no other explanation is offered is like a textbook example of a political narrative.
The only irony here is your complete failure to understand my original comment and your own failure to provide reasoning for your own false conclusion.
Based on the facts in the OP and parent comment, I was disassembling the race-baiting rhetoric as anti-intellectual and fact-less (which, since you missed it, is itself a fact), to refocus on the original issue.
Meanwhile, double-ironically, you again ignore context and facts, equivocate ("real issue"), and wildly mischaracterize me to make an increasingly invalid point based on a fundamental misunderstanding of my comment.
The only irony here is your complete failure to understand my original comment and your own failure to provide reasoning for your own false conclusion.
Which exactly is my false conclusion? Weren't you referring to the real issue? Doesn't the determiner in that mean that there is a only a single such thing? Did you offer any basis for the assumption that it was indeed the single real issue? Those are the assumptions of my conclusion.
It's fair if you wrote "the real issue" and actually meant something else, in which case my conclusion would indeed be invalid, but not writing in clear terms hardly puts you in a position to accuse me of equivocation.
You falsely conclude that I have a singular (implicitly subjective) "real issue", to which I "offer" "no other explanation." In fact, despite your projecting, by "real" / "original" issue, I meant the mistreatment of children by authority in schools, which is both the context of the parent comment and the original article from which the TechCrunch article derives.
Again, for clarity, I am asserting that the original article focuses on student mistreatment and not race, TechCrunch subverts it, and the parent comment refocuses on it. In other words, the "real issue" was pre-established as the context for and precedes my comment. All my comment served to do, was concisely articulate the issue of the preceding contexts, which is self-evident when reworded to be less generic, "Use of institutional force by the police and school officials to suppress or punish divergent student behavior."
> I doubt you could concisely articulate anything if your preceding contexts depended upon it.
Umm.... My "preceding contexts depended upon it"? First, as stated, the preceding contexts were not mine. Second, concisely articulating someone else's stance or summary, or a current context, while not easy, is trivially simple.
Here's an example: Contents of Moby Dick => "A whale fishing allegory about the idolization of man's desires and its limitations."
The police made repeated mention of his surname. You might want to ignore race but thischild's religion was clearly a factor for the investigating police.
I neither appreciate the defaming mischaracterization resulting from your mistake, nor do I appreciate the casual and irresponsible manner in which you do so:
police made repeated mention of his surname.
Neither the original DallasNews article nor the TechCrunch article makes any such assertion about . The only person who draws that assertion is his dad, for which he provided no supporting evidence, and has a history of political provocation on this specific issue. (Not saying it's not true, but he's definitely not citing anything or anyone, so as presented, its only an opinion.)
EDIT: I believe you are misunderstanding the meaning of my previous comment based on its use of indefinite pronouns and how it was physically structured relative to the quote block. Rather than rehash it here, please re-read it.[1]
EDIT 2: Looks like my Edit window timed out. I meant to also update this line as follows:
Neither the original DallasNews article nor the TechCrunch article
makes any such assertion about the officer's use of his surname.
I'm not going to call him a liar, because that presumes malice. He was wrong and irresponsible in his defaming statement.
EDIT 3: One last time for clarity, the kid felt his name to be relevant (which still does not mean his name was in fact relevant), but did not assert that the "police made repeated mention of his surname", which, apart from the mischaracterizations, was specifically what I was refuting.
It was a response to the original comment of - I'm not going to call him a liar, because that presumes malice. He was wrong and irresponsible in his defaming statement. - which I still think merits sarcasm.
I believe the parent was calling you out on your BS. You claimed to care about the truth, but actually misunderstood and mischaracterized me. Then when the ignorance of your original statement became obvious, rather than acknowledge your gaffe, you immaturely deflected with glib sarcasm.
Not surprisingly, consistent with your weak intellectual arguments and preceding dishonesty, your comic forwards bigotry and ignorance while ignoring every meaningfully accurate portrayal of the truth.
I'm all in favor of seti@home but it's not like running that on the school computers is free. If he didn't have permission to do it, then setting it up on those computers without getting that authorization was inappropriate. Obviously firing him is an overreaction, but I tend to believe their excuse that if he was fired for that, it wasn't just for that. He was already on thin ice before that incident and it was just the final straw.
My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.
From a previous news article I've read (not linked) - he claimed the previous system administrator told him to do it and he continued following their instructions. Again this has to have some other side to it - because if someone told me to do that and I googled what it was I would definitely question it and bring it to the administration and let them decide what to do (which some reports claim he had permission from previous administration). Originally they reported firing him because of running seti@home - but then they changed their story quickly afterwards.
> My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.
It's a great compare because it shows how out of touch with reality school administration is. Yeah it's two completely different cases - but if common sense was introduced to both then we wouldn't be here discussing it. And this wasn't a teacher - it was a system administrator that was running it for several years. I find it hard to believe that if it truly was using that much more electricity that someone who does the budget for the school didn't catch it right away.
> I find it hard to believe that if it truly was using that much more electricity that someone who does the budget for the school didn't catch it right away.
How the fuck are the accoutants supposed to connect "big increases in electricity use" with "unauthorised installation of software on 5,000 school computers"?
Well, based on the 9 year / millions of dollars thing (and I agree this is a bit of a stretch), someone might say "Oh, hey, Jerry - are we paying $200,000 more this year for electricity than we did last year? Have prices changed? Not that much? Hm. Did we expand? We should look into this, I mean, that's a fair wedge of cash."
> How the fuck are the accoutants supposed to connect "big increases in electricity use" with "unauthorised installation of software on 5,000 school computers"?
Use common sense and ask people? Unless the school is doing something that requires that much electricity - it's probably reasonable to assume that it's the 5000+ devices that consume 300-1kw/hr of electricity.
> If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence
Unfortunately this is not a lack of intelligence, which in fact it was, but instead it is a Christian right society that fears everything and anything.
The USA has become a country that is now scared of it's own shadow.
The problem started when someone with a Muslim sounding name brought something clicking to the school and naturally everyone though it was Muslim terrorist with a bomb.
Luckily it was not a bunch disenfranchised white youths, carrying hand guns, machine guns and grenades as they would have walked straight through the security check, because they had the correct skin color.
Here is a simple lesson for the people of the USA. Clocks don't kill guns kill.
This hits way too close to home. Not because I have brown skin, or because I've ever been arrested for making "a bomb" that is not a bomb, but because when you're that age you're constantly surrounded and disciplined by people who don't understand you. Or what you're doing. Or why it's cool. I'd be willing to bet part of the reasoning around his arrest is, "Why would a student need to make his own clock?"
I wish I could reach out to the boy and say, "Hey, it gets way better. Later on you can surround yourself with people who not only understand but respect you. You get to spend all day building cool stuff, and you actually get paid very well to do so."
Exactly. To quote the Police spokesman; "He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation" and "The concern was, what was this thing built for?"
Why shouldn't he make his own clock?! Why does there need to be a 'broader explanation'? How can one develop an interest in anything if you must first provide an adequate explanation? sigh
Why are you trying to teach me English? This teacher should be arrested for trying to overthrow the government... What is the "broader explanation" for this English textbook?
And those guys learning to fly the planes without the landing, why can't that just be an interest! With terrorism, if you want to avoid false negatives, you are going to have a lot of false positives.
NB I totally agree it would be a douche move to charge this kid with some BS, but investigating unusual behavior is much more understandable.
Right, but this is a child who is an American citizen, not a Saudi who's been in the country for a few months.
I mean, I can't imagine what kind of monster automatically jumps to bomb when a kid makes a clock. Is that how we want to live, constantly being suspicious of everyone different?
Apparently the authorities have determined that the best way to stop terrorism is to discourage any manifestation of personal intelligence, so that the population turns into mindless sheep. "If you don't know how to make a clock, you won't know how to make a time bomb" is their reasoning.
It is seriously disturbing.
I am reminded of stories of kids opening a command prompt and being accussed of "hacking", only this is a far more extreme case.
"I recommend using this opportunity to talk with your child about the Student Code of Conduct and specifically not bringing items to school that are prohibited."
As a parent, can I see the list of "items... that are prohibited"? I'd be pretty shocked if "clock" is actually on there.
Remember the Boston Lite-Brite thing? (A more legit incident, since apparently quite a few people were spooked by the devices, but still a case where the authorities over-reacted and refused to back down).
Sticking to the line that something was a 'bomb hoax' keeps the responsibility with the accused: they shouldn't have perpetrated a bomb hoax; not we shouldn't have over-reacted to an innocuous object.
Stupidity adequately explains the initial reaction. Bringing charges is merely after-the-fact butt-covering. The whole world knows you're stupid, but if you can get the entire legal system to be just as stupid, it's no longer your fault!
Remember the Aqua Teen Hunger Force "bomb" scare in Boston? The city rigorously pursued legal action to spare their police department the embarrassment of having wasted millions of dollars carefully dismantling DIY Lite-Brites.
Once authority figures make a decision, they fear backing down from it, because they (unfortunately often correctly) believe that doubling down will force the far less well-funded citizen to fold, usually in exchange for a less severe "punishment."
This isn't limited to authority figures. Most people, when faced with evidence that they were publicly wrong, try to save face by doubling down on their original convictions.
I'd like to jump on the back of this and make the point that, referring to the clock project in question, it seems a lie to label the item as a "hoax bomb" as if it were actually intended to even be a bomb, let alone an article of the hoax variety. Not to mention the obvious claim of guilt by association that the prosecuting argument seems to imply, I would add that it also useful to distinguish the reality of the situation so as to ensure that "hoax bomb" doesn't catch on. "Clock thought to be a bomb" would be a more accurate representation of the situation.
Not sure if there's a formal definition, but this page distinguishes between a scare and a hoax:
"Though city prosecutors eventually concluded there was no ill intent involved in the placing of the ads, the city continues to refer to the event as a "bomb hoax" rather than a "scare." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
Ignorance easily explains this unfortunate, embarrassing incident.
The boy's father is from Sudan and is well known for being outspoken against anti-Islamic policies. To an unworldly south/midwesterner that spells "potential terrorist". It's not too much of a stretch to see that diagnosis extended to the son.
Ignorance that was likely being exploited for political purposes. As in, his father probably encouraged his son to do this. The father knew that it would likely cause someone to freak out, student or teacher; that it beeped helped and even better that it was in a metal case. There was no reason to bring the item in, let alone a the week of 9/11.
The school admins reacted as stereo typically badly as they could have hoped. It should have been assessed quickly and immediately removed from the school. Instead it just got stupid quick.
So this father will now get images of himself with his son with our President. We get some immediate attention to the horrible plight of Muslims in America (there isn't any horrible plight other than some people don't trust them)....
Hanlon's razor is a pretty stupid quote here, there definitely is no need to distinguish stupidity from malice here. The people responsible for this mess should probably lose their jobs. (Based on the story as it was presented here)
I think you overestimate the intelligence of the authority in this particular case. I think this is more a case of collective stupidity than authority turning people to mindless sheep.
What worried me is where is the engineering teacher he first showed the clock to? He or she could've clarified everything in 5 seconds.
that's exactly what I came here to post. I find it even more troubling that the teacher was clearly aware of this possible outcome - going so far as to tell the kid to hide it from other teachers. but for all we know maybe he did speak up and was shushed by administration? who knows...pretty frustrating either way.
My bet is that the engineering teacher is the sole adult geek in this environment and is used to those around him acting this way. I feel for him. There's a personality that's overwhelmingly common in schools, that seeks conformity and uses their own ability to be frightened as a weapon against the weirdos. Perhaps someone can describe it better than me.
I'd say this is a case of collective stupidity punishing original thought. So I would phrase this exactly as "collective stupidity in authority turning people to mindless sheep".
And why would you have to be an engineering teacher to presume innocence here? This is a school; anyone involved should have been able to clarify everything in 5 seconds, even without the child explaining himself.
Welcome to 'murrica, kid. You better learn to censor yourself.
"never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence" isn't the case here I think. I think this is more about racial profiling more than anything.
Oh my, I don't even want to think of the horrors I unleashed upon the various Apple ][, DOS, and Mac Classic systems in my public school. Nothing like malware--just really lucky I never bricked anything. On the other hand, I did learn some valuable lessons such as that LinuxPPC in the mid/late 90s was not appreciated as Mac OS 8 by my peers.
This is why it's often said that not just censorship but also mass surveillance are the killers of creativity and progress in a society. When you always have to look over your shoulder because the "state" might believe you're doing something wrong and punish you, that tends to make you not even want to try something anymore.
I find it striking that you almost never hear about such behavior occurring in Europe (correct me if I'm wrong). Any ideas why things seem to be very different there?
After living in the US as a European for 1.5 years, I've come to the conclusion that americans tend to be more afraid in general. For example I've never heard in Europe of recommendations like 'when selling stuff through craigslist always meet at a starbucks but never at home' either. Also being smart and/or nerdy actually is valued in Europe.
At least for your craigslist example, the fear is not unfounded. [0] That one example happened just last month in my town. The weapon in that case need not be a gun, a knife or baseball bat wielding friend hiding in the bushes would work well too. Perhaps better than Starbucks would be the police department parking lot. That is actually a preferred place for private gun sales - if the buyer is uneasy about conducting the sale at a police station, they are probably a person prohibited from owning a firearm. Our town has added a designated "craigslist zone" at a local fire department precisely to help deter robberies. [1]
So, in the craigslist example, many American people are afraid because there is overwhelming evidence that craigslist robberies A) really do happen with some significant frequency and B) meeting at a public place is a simple, low-effort way of mitigating that risk. I can understand people living in lower crime areas not worrying about craigslist robberies (though I would take the precautions anywhere because it is so simple).
However, in general, I would agree with you that Americans eat up FUD. You can see it in our DHS/TSA, the Patriot Act, collective disinterest in the Snowden leaks, and general anti-Muslim sentiments.
The fear is not unfounded of course, but I think there are two mechanisms at work here:
1. in the US the media blows these things up much more than in Europe. In fact there is a lot more attention for crime in general, while traffic accidents get much less attention.
2. Similar robberies do take place in Europe, but I think Europeans tend to shrug them off more, assuming there's only a very small chance it will happen to them.
Also, for some reason, whenever something bad happens, the US seems to respond with bigger countermeasures, more stringent laws and heftier punishments. Europeans are amazed when they read that children are sometimes threatened with tens of years of jailtime for relatively small incidents.
The funny thing is that people buy guns because they are afraid, yet that makes the whole situation more dangerous.
The reason why you don't have to be afraid when dealing with Craigslist in europe is that guns are rare, as is gun violence.
But I'm sure some will just buy another gun to feel safer. Isn't that the standard argument after a serial shooting? The first victim should have had a gun, then this wouldn't have happened... that's as perverse as it gets!
I suspect there are similar incidents with much less overblown outcomes.
There's no relative scarcity of ignorant and authoritarian schoolteachers, but consequences are likely to be confined to school, not involve law enforcement, and parents and pupils are more likely to knuckle down rather than fight or go to the press.
So, taking "such behaviour" much more broadly than this specific incident (and of course granting that Europe is a big and diverse place) - if a kid is found hacking school networks, or distributing a satirical magazine, or bringing possibly inappropriate or dangerous items to school, the schools are just as likely to crack down (even if it infringes the pupil's legal rights) but the matter is likely to end there without ruining the pupil's education. Or making the school administration change its behaviour.
Personally I think the situation as I have described it is favourable. Ideally schools wouldn't be administered by petty tyrants, but as long as everyone finishes their education with a blank slate it's fine. Keeping the police away from schools as much as possible would be a good start.
The sun of a (Dutch) friend actually 'hacked' his school network (he gleaned the password from his teacher). Grades were altered, he involved others, and they were caught. The police was not involved, and he was expelled. He is now attending another school.
He was punished, but it did not ruin his future.
The trend towards a "security theatre" and all that does indeed seem to be much stronger. Even where security measures in Europe were increased (i. e. ban on liquids), it was more on the behest of the Americans than intrinsically motivated.
I see a few possible causes:
– 9/11 was a much bigger attack than anything that happened on European soil
– there is a more influential lobby for militarisation/criminalisation in the US
– Americans are more fearful
– America is more democratic. As such, the unfounded fears of parts of the population (on both sides of the Atlantic) are less likely to be buffered by the more rational thinking of experts
and, my favourite:
– Americans love excitement and violence & it is amplified by the media. Nothing better than a bomb scare on FOX.
Yes, it is unfortunately. The kid couldn't explain why he just made a clock to show his teachers. So their assumption is that anyone making an electronic device must be up to no good.
"Irving police might still charge Ahmed with making a "hoax bomb." Police spokesperson James McLellan said Ahmed "kept maintaining it was a clock" when he was brought in for interrogation, but that he offered "no broader explanation.""
Somewhat related, for a little sense of perspective. I studied E/E in Northern Ireland in the early 90's. I was regularly stopped by armed British Soldiers and searched. Invariably I have some half finished project in my bag. Could easily be passed off as bomb material. All it took was a simple explanation and I was on my way in 5 minutes.
This was a place where actual bombs were being set off on a weekly basis. But, the 'keep calm and carry on' mentality is what persevered. The US seems like it's becoming more of a Police State than N.I. ever was.
About 10 years ago I was heading to a client meeting and was about to enter the 'Ring of Steel'[0] area in the City of London.
I checked twice before crossing the road and a nearby cop car spun around and stopped me saying I had done a double-take when I saw them and they needed to search me.
Turns out the client I was off to see was a porn magazine and I have a bunch of their product in my bag. The nice police officer didn't even blink when she saw that. Perhaps everyone i the City is carrying around lots of porn with them in the middle of the day?
They need to show intent. They cannot just show that others were in fear.
So it seems like they don't have a legitimate case, although "the ride" is often used to get guilty pleas out of otherwise innocent people (i.e. they would lock the kid up pending trial, delay trial, the parents may not be able to afford lawyer fees, so he might plead down to a lesser charge to get out even if the original charge is complete nonsense).
That is pretty standard fare for the US legal system these days. 95% plea rates, 7 minutes of public defender time on average per client, and so on and so forth.
These topics bring the tin foil wearers out in droves. No, the government isn't cracking down on the intelligence of youth, it requires it to progress and grow. I don't recall any black SUVs outside my door when I built an alarm clock that had selective electronic outputs for my school project. Hell, my teachers docked marks because I didn't take it far enough and they felt I could add more features and better design.
Probably not the whole story in this case. It seems improbable that little Johnny McFreckles III would have encountered as much trouble over his clock project.
I realize it may seem like fun to try to bring "discrimination" into this, but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too. Yes, including handcuffs and arrests, and at times, even court convinctions and orders for things like staying off computers entirely for some period of time. I see no reason to believe it would have gone any differently for any ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, or anything else. This stupid is well-distributed.
These administrators are so politically correct and political with how they get their jobs (usually favorites get promoted, etc.) My father was a teacher for 40 years and never stopped telling me stories about the people at the top. The school system is ran by circus animals.
> but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too.
Of course they have. However, the authorities everywhere don't consistently flip their wigs—certainly not as badly as this—every time a student does something like bringing in this project. So the fact that they wigged out badly in this particular case probably—not certainly, but really pretty likely—does have some relation to the fact that the student just happened to be Ahmed Mohamed.
(OTOH there pretty certainly is a selection bias in the fact that this particular case is getting so much publicity. It's the social-media catnip of the perceived (and again, let's be serious here, probably partly real) discrimination that has pushed this one up the charts while others go mostly unremarked.)
You can not assert a consistent behavior off of one example. You're finding something you seem to be looking for. I was not kidding about being arrested and getting ordered to not touch computers for some period of time. Wigs have been flipped.
I do not know that school administrators have "consistently" flipped out at white kids, either. I don't know what the baseline occurrence of these events are. My suspicion would be that every case we've ever heard of, including this one, is still an outlier, and thus not suitable for drawing sweeping conclusions from, and in fact kids probably do stupid stuff like this every day without making the national news.
I see a couple of paths to combating the way authority oversteps its bounds, sometimes fatally as we see in much recent news.
One avenue is to focus on those victims that happen to be a racial minority, and force the authorities to treat members of that minority group with kid gloves. This literally forces all of us to keep race and other divisive demographics at the forefront of our consciousness whenever we deal with other people. That's not a good strategy to reach of goal of everyone being blind to race.
Another avenue is to focus on the powers that are being wielded unjustly. By taking away to power to cause such damage, or at least imposing accountability when it's misused, we can force those with power to rein in their abusive behavior to all. This latter seems the winning strategy to me.
Funny you should use "McFreckles" as a stereotypical white name. Irish immigrants have historically faced a lot of discrimination in the U.S. on the grounds of both ethnicity (compared to English immigrants and their descendants) and religion (Catholics instead of the majority Protestants).
> I am reminded of stories of kids opening a command prompt and being accussed of "hacking", only this is a far more extreme case.
I remember a teacher seeing me type "BitchX" into a terminal and freaking out, he apparently thought I was doing something obscene in my terminal window..
The real question here is: how can we help this kid? I'm not talking about from the legal perspective, but rather what can we (me, you, the larger tech world) do to make it so that this kid and others like him keep tinkering. He needs to know that what he built wasn't wrong, it was awesome.
Perhaps we can all pitch in on an airplane ticket to someplace he can get a tour of a facility where people like him are valued and rewarded. SpaceX? Mountain View? Cape Canaveral?
Also, if/when he considers higher education I'm sure there are plenty of alumni who could consider opening doors for him.
Maybe there should be a fund to provide a workshop for the teachers, administrators, and police of Irving to attend and acquire some critical thinking skills.
Exactly my thoughts. Depending on the kid, this experience could be so traumatizing to the point of killing his enthusiasm and curiosity. We need more tinkering not less. It starts with teachers. Too many teachers turn up in body only. Teaching is a role that should be held in much higher esteem than it is but instead we irrationally hold high paying but stupid money jobs like finance in high regard and leave the teaching jobs to the 'failures' of society.
President Obama has invited him to the White-House in a very public fashion, and Zuck has invited him to visit Facebook. That, at least, show help show Ahmed, and other kids, that there is support for kids who like to tinker.
The one person I personally wish would extend a similar offer, is Elon Musk. I think a lot of nerds / hackers / etc. see him as one of the most prominent and awesome nerds around, and if he offered Ahmed a tour of Tesla and/or SpaceX... well, how cool would that be?
Also, I'm a member at Splatspace, the hackerspace in Durham, NC. I've just sent an email to our group list, soliciting ideas for ways we could make a show of support to Ahmed. My first thought is maybe send him a box with some parts, kits, tools, and/or books of some sort. Nothing is definite yet, but I have a feeling we'll be able to put something together.
If anybody else is in a hackerspace, let me encourage you to try and get your group involved, and do something as a group. Better yet, do it and send out a press release and announce it to the world.
He definitely needs some reparations, and shows of support are great.
But there are probably very many young people like him who could also do with a bit of mentoring, a bit of tutorship, some tools and equipment. It'd be nice if the publicity from Ahmed's case could be used to provide more support to a wide range of people.
I absolutely agree. That's one reason I encourage any group making a show of support to back it with a press release and a very public announcement. That way this story can be show as part of the broader struggle to preserve the 'right to hack" for all of us.
The downside, of course, is creating the perception that Ahmed is being used as a figurehead, and making him, as somebody else said, a "political football". At 14 I doubt he wants all of that. But his story is part of a larger story, and I think we should all acknowledge that and help make that point to the rest of the world who don't realize it.
Edit:
Also, FWIW, at SplatSpace we spend a lot of our energy on exactly that - encouraging young people. We do a lot of outreach with local public schools and the various local library systems. We have done a lot of things like offering Scratch programming workshops, and electronics demos using 'squishy circuits' and taking 3D printers to "math and science night" at local schools, etc. So yeah, I totally agree with the sentiment that we (in the broadest possible sense) should do all we can to encourage and support young hackers/makers.
So, this thirteen year old kid with a Syrian father once got flagged up by Hewlett Packard because he was ordering electronic components. I'm sure you can imagine what happened next...
Yeah, Bill Hewlett offered him a summer job, he got hooked on making stuff, wound up founding a company out of his garage with his buddy Steve Wozniak, and created the biggest electronics company in the world.
Thank goodness he never took a clock he'd built into school.
> Thank goodness he never took a clock he'd built into school.
Uh... From Steve Jobs's biography:
In twelfth grade he [Woz] built an electronic metronome—one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class—and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Later that day he got called to the principal’s office. He thought it was because he had won, yet again, the school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police. The principal had been summoned when the device was found, bravely ran onto the football field clutching it to his chest, and pulled the wires off. Woz tried and failed to suppress his laughter. He actually got sent to the juvenile detention center, where he spent the night. It was a memorable experience. He taught the other prisoners how to disconnect the wires leading to the ceiling fans and connect them to the bars so people got shocked when touching them.
Of course the difference here is Woz both fully intended mischief, knew he could get in trouble, but in general had the expectation that he would get away with it in the long term.
Ahmed will "get away with it in the long term" as well. He will probably be even better off after this episode. He is going to have the attention of all sorts of great people including the president.
But of course that isn't particularly the problem here. When something like this comes up and catches our attention, there is outrage until that specific situation is fixed. We all pat ourselves on the back for helping this one person and move on forgetting that nothing that allowed this situation to happen in the first place has been changed.
Well, among all the people who get treated unfairly, maybe some of them learn, but some others take revenge. I was once in a situation which couldn't be managed by laws, and since then I vote extreme right in my country. As much for learning from unfair situations.
There will be some change. Maybe not as much as there should be, but we shouldn't completely discount the effects this story will have. Next time a school administrator or police officer is about to abuse a kid for no good reason, they might pause and think, "Wait, what if this gets me in the national news like those guys in Texas?"
It's not going to stop all of them. Or most of them. Or even a whole lot of them. But there are going to be a few people reevaluating their approach.
They'll think those thoughts not before abusing students but before doing anything that might offend or hurt the feelings of somebody in a protected group.
The good teachers end up with students who should be punished but they're afraid to do it because they might lose their jobs for doing their jobs. The bad teachers will know to aim their abuse at the white males because nobody's watching for that and many who people picture that scenario think to themselves "Good."
Yeah... becoming a media celebrity and political football two weeks into high school is totally going to be nothing but rainbows and kittens for a geeky muslim kid who has made his town government and police look stupid.
Biological father. His (adoptive) father was white, and Jobs didn't look middle eastern, the key part. There's a whole spectrum of skin tones within ethnicities that affects how you are treated in the US more than where your parents originate.
> Jobs didn't look stereotypically middle eastern.
No kidding. Many people in the Middle East are completely "white", by every definition.
In fact, it's amusing that the word "Caucasian" has been corrupted into a euphemism for "white", given where the word comes from....[0]. (Most people who are Caucasian aren't even white!)
While we're on the topic, the most pale and fair-skinned people I've met in my life were not European; they were Indian (Kashmiri). People have this notion of what regions stereotypically map to which skin tones, and this doesn't actually reflect reality at all.
> There's a whole spectrum of skin tones within ethnicities that affects how you are treated in the US more than where your parents originate.
That is so true. Personal I look very very stereotypically Scots/Irish but I also have a lot of Native American ancestry. As sad as it makes me to say I've had a far easier path in live than my cousins who were undeniably Native but from an extremely similar background and level of income growing up, in a 10 mile radius of each other. I was certainly treated differently then them.
There are actually psych studies out there that take a photo of a person, darken one copy of it, and lighten another, and ask the volunteer subjects to form first-impression opinions of the people shown in the photographs.
The results typically show that lighter-skinned people are viewed more positively than darker-skinned people, even when the person providing the opinions is a darker-skinned person.
This can be trivially verified by testing the hypothesis, "In the relationship triangle, the protagonist will always choose the lighter-skinned person in the end," against all existing Tyler Perry movies.
And that's just passive cultural enforcement. I'm sure that the regular two-minutes hate on that one photo of Osama bin Laden as the quintessential, stereotypical terrorist mastermind did no favors to anyone sharing similar facial features.
His (adoptive) father was white, and Jobs didn't look middle eastern, the key part.
This shows your lack of knowledge of the Middle-East. People in Syria/Lebanon look extremely different from the people in Saudi Arabia. They just happen to speak the same language (heck the accent is quite different too)
Steve Jobs didn't look Middle Eastern in the same way that this kid's clock looked like a bomb. Which is to say, it's not true, but "looks like" often depends on what the observer thinks a thing is.
But yeah, I mean, I'm sure he was just there to tell them to use rounded corners on the circuit diagrams and meet girls.
Just cos Woz was the nerd's nerd, let's not crap on Jobs too much - he was geeky enough to hang out with Woz, that should be good enough for everyone else, right?
In this test, the subject to be tested is socializing with his or her normal social circle. During this activity, a potential romantic interest interrupts, and proposes that they go out on a date with the subject, immediately.
Responses are classified as follows. A: the subject leaves the gathering for the date. B: the subject declines the date. C: the subject counter-offers that the romantic interest join the existing social gathering in lieu of a date.
I propose that a true nerd's nerd would never choose response A. Geek Night is sacrosanct. And if you bring a date, they had better bring their own deck/controller/dice/pawn.
I think Jobs would have failed that test. It's not just about hanging out with nerds, but actually preferring their company to non-nerds. How many of the people in that photo did Jobs stay in contact with after he became Mr. Big? How many did he materially share his success with?
Don't worry about it. I rolled a 16 on my accept criticism check. According to the table, I shed a single tear, that slowly rolled down my cheek, then I got over it forever.~
You should share your failures with your friends, too. Not to the same extent.
A wealth differential can become a strain on a friendship. Some people who suddenly become wealthy reconvene their former social group as an entourage to overcome it. Others just drift away from their old friends and make new friends.
If you had more money than everyone else you already knew, combined, would you feel any obligation to do anything to make their lives better? It doesn't even have to be anything big. If I were CEO of Apple, I think I would, at the least, give away copies of the major hardware product releases to my oldest friends just before launch day, with prepaid support. You don't need to hand out cushy sinecures, but those are fine, too, provided it's from your personal bankroll, and not your company's.
I certainly wouldn't shut down my company's existing philanthropic programs, and never leave any public trace of charitable giving whatsoever.
Hell, I'm not even rich, and I put $500 into an old high school friend's first Kickstarter project. If I had more to contribute, I would have contributed more.
It may not be an absolute quality all nerds need to have, but some generosity towards friends and family is a requirement for me, specifically, to like someone.
Gifting etiquette varies by person, even within the same culture, but I expect rich people to give to charities and put their names on museum galleries and hospital wings and university buildings and zoo habitats and park playground equipment. I also expect them to show up to award ceremonies and accept their mantelpiece trophies with good grace and concise speeches. That's what lets the rest of us know they are not completely self-absorbed assholes. When your success rests upon so many people that you cannot possibly thank each of them personally for their support, that's how you show gratitude to "the public".
I think this kid is going to get quite a few summer job offers from people and find it easier to make friends with people that want to start big electronics companies off the back of this. Even the President of the United States just tweeted "cool clock Ahmed".
I suspect going to look back on those awkward handcuffed minutes answering stupid questions in a few years' time and think "bringing that clock to school was the best mistake I ever made"
Really, that's why? Or is it because most people would rather watch a movie where the actors look like the characters? I don't know of any Syrian actors that look like Steve Jobs. And I definitely don't know of any Syrian actors who could play him as well as Fassbender could.
I know this is slightly off topic, but after watching the trailer I just can't see Fassbender as Jobs. Fassbender is a great actor, and I can't think of any Hollywood leading man that could do a better job, but their personas are so different that it's hard to watch and not constantly be reminded that you're watching an actor act and not a character in a biopic.
My skin color is I guess white but my heritage is mixed between old European (possibly Scotland and/or Ireland) and definitely Native American Indian. If I were an actor and got a big role; are you saying a white person got the part because my skin is what people usually call white? I'm fairly certain a lot of famous actors who it sounds like you would categorize as white are probably more like me, mixed.
We would hire an actor who both looks reasonably like you. If you're mixed but have X-colored skin, it makes sense to have someone with X-colored skin portray you.
>Of course, people would rather that part of his heritage weren't brought up,
because it's completely irrelevant to what Jobs accomplished. It always seems to be the people implying that other are people racist who bring up his heritage.
Tell me about it. The county sheriff came and taught skeet shooting to my 10th grade Health and Wellness class. The pigeon thrower was mounted on the back of the police cruiser and we shot 20-gauge shotguns on the practice football field. This was rural NC in the 90s.
And so we come to the realisation that the 'war on terror' is now in fact a civil war we wage against ourselves and our fears.
Every incident like this is another damning victory for those who sought to change our way of life. They may not have taken us back to the stone-age but they sure as hell took away a lot of the freedoms we had.
I regularly brought my pocket knife to elementary school. Nobody blinked an eye. It was dull because I used it for digging and prying more than for cutting, but nobody would have cared even if it was sharp.
See Columbine and the influx of 'zero tolerance'. I was actually in school to see the before and after, unfortunately, the after has become less tolerant and more reactionary and so we have what you see here (and really just about every day in the school year in the US you'll find a similar story).
After the OK City bombing my school banned wearing camouflage. They were afraid of school shootings at some point so they banned coats that were "tool long" or "too bulky". A friend of mine got in trouble for wearing a leather jacket.
Maybe this kid WAS singled out because he had brown skin, but school administrators were overreacting to stupid shit decades ago, in ways that obviously weren't connected to "racism."
This whole situation screams a breach of the poor boy's liberties.
According to TEX. FAM. CODE §51.095 [1]:
In order for a custodial written
statement to be admissible, the following
sequence of events must occur:
1) the officer must take the child to a
magistrate;
2) the magistrate must then inform
the child of his rights to remain
silent, to have an attorney
appointed and present during
questioning and to terminate the
interview at any time;
3) the child must knowingly,
intelligently and voluntarily waive
his rights;
4) the officer may then take a
statement from the child; and
5) upon completion of the statement,
the child shall be taken before the
magistrate again and sign the
statement in the presence of the
magistrate (and outside the
presence of the officer), who will
then certify the statement.
This makes me sick that this kid was seemingly wrongfully interrogated. Sad to see that 'doing science while brown' results in him being treated as a second class citizen.
Well even if he did it wouldn't matter much. 5 police officers, multiple school officials in a room, he's the only child. And effectively being bullied, manipulated, into feeling like a guilty sack of shit that should count his blessings and admit their version of his intent and give thanks and apologies. Par for the course. Public school systems are ran by political patsy thugs when you inspect the few ranks below the top.
By having them explained by someone who is supposed to be impartial (a magistrate), and has a vested interest in making sure that the child understands the rights, because it's mandated by law that they do, and being known as the judge that takes advantage of small children is not a reputation you want to have.
What I have heard from similar cases previously is that in a school you basically have no rights. Previous cases the school has been determined to be within their legal rights when doing things like this(including involving the police). I don't know much more than that though.
Go into any Electrical Engineering department at any university and you'll find plenty of students with boxes filled with circuit boards and electronics.
Everybody who's played with electronics knows that stuff is brittle and needs to be protected carefully. One wire coming loose renders your entire work obsolete and unlike software, there's no debugger to tell you where you potentially screwed up...
That's not even the issue to me. It's like fine you "suspected" it. How difficult was it to not suspect it anymore? Like did the arrest and the accusations need to happen. It's almost like attempting to traumatize the kid and his peers for no good reason and for what? Security theater? Because he was brown or a Muslim and did not know that brown or Muslim people should not bring electronics that might be suspected with them to school because they should fear being suspected? Perhaps we can excuse his ignorance for not being old enough.
Well I guess they could logically suspect that he might be doing something more sinister than just bringing around a clock project. So fine get a court order to search his house while keeping him detained at school. Find nothing. Apologize and let him go.
I have a feeling a lot of this behavior from teachers and school middle management is driven by fear of having exactly the same sort of irrational punishment come down on them.
Didn't treat the clock like a bomb? Might get fired. Did treat it like a bomb, turned out to be wrong, apologized? Might get fired. Did treat it like a bomb, turned out to be wrong, uhhh... maybe if I get the police involved I can make this not my fault?
Reasonable errors on all levels are often greeted with harsh punishment and sometimes demonization by news media. It's not just kids who are subject to it. People are rightly terrified of being blamed for errors that anyone could make, and their behavior makes a lot of sense in that context.
It all stems from not having a backbone. Less weasels, more passionate people with some step in their walk. But all the political bullshit that educators have to waft through kills most passion and flare to go against the grain, to do what they feel is right. Unfortunately the nazi-effect is in full swing for most salaried office workers. No one wants to get fired, so everyone just obeys arcane rules and doesn't do anything the least bit outside the box. It's basically raining with grey skies every day.
It doesn't help that the consequences of losing a job are substantially higher in the US than in most other advanced economies. And we're easier to fire, on top of it[0]. It's harder to take a stand over small(ish) things when it can bring financial ruin for one's family.
[0] yes, even many teachers. The power of unions in preserving teachers' jobs is highly regional, and often exaggerated.
Who's the we? These administrators are put their by their buddies in city and state positions. They almost never are educators themselves. In order to get competent caring administrators, who know what education is about, we need reform that actually puts educators in the hotseats.
Right thinking people? Of course it only works to the degree we have critical mass. But it seems worth encouraging, that we might more quickly get there in more cases.
Exactly! Apparently it's really difficult for some people to admit they were wrong. How difficult would it be to just say: "I'm sorry, we screwed up."? Instead they still insist on calling his clock a "hoax bomb".
There were debuggers in the electronics shops that I remember. They were called multimeters. You debugged by deducing where voltage, current, and resistance levels were in your circuit.
I've also made my share of brittle programming projects where one errant line could act like a "loose wire" and take down everything.
To be fair it's a middle school, and most people don't really know what a circuit board is for. I don't think it's outrageous that they asked.
It should have never, however, escalated as far as it did. You're going to handcuff a kid who is cooperating and trying to explain what this thing he built is? Give me a break.
But worse still they're still not backing down. It's suspension of all logic and reasoning. They should have shown the clock to his engineering teacher and resolved the issue in minutes.
Nah, it's a high school. And the reaction really wasn't warranted. He did show it to his engineering teacher before he got nabbed, too. According to the Times,
"When Ahmed Mohamed, 14, brought the clock to MacArthur High School in Irving, Tex., on Monday, an engineering teacher suggested that he not show the invention to other teachers. But it beeped during an English class, prompting Ahmed to show his English teacher what it was, according to an account in The Dallas Morning News."
That's how it should go, in an ideal world. I think the engineering teacher did the right thing in suggesting he not show it off, given society today. He's aware of racial profiling in a post 9/11 world and how stupid some people are.
> an engineering teacher suggested that he not show the invention to other teachers. But it beeped during an English class, prompting Ahmed to show his English teacher what it was
Ok, I can't help but be reminded of my recent comments about English classes in high school.
It's pretty early in the school year, and judging by his stated age he's likely a freshman. Not much of a chance for a teacher to ascertain things like "character".
Man, I must have interacted with weird middle schoolers at my local hackerspace... Seemed like every last one of them had either some simple arduino project or something with a RasPi they were working on. I'd hate to live in a place where most people have no idea what a circuit board looks like.
Also, asking doesn't need to get the police involved: "Hey, what is this?" "Oh it's a clock I built" 'Why'd you bring it to school?" "Cuz I'm proud of it and wanted to show you"
If there was still doubt, ok, find someone who knows something about it (there's gotta be a tinkerer SOMEWHERE in the school district) and ask them to take a look. Maybe couch it as "Why don't we show it to X, I think they'd get a kick out of it?"
But arresting a 14 yr old tinkerer for a clock? Whatever happened to having sane reasonable conversations?
We're trying to promote stem in the U.S., not say, "middle school is too early"
Anecdotally; I was wiring together simple switches, electric motors, and solar panels in and out of the classroom in elementary school in the mid 90s. I was programming timers and games in middle school by the late 90s.
That picture is infuriating. GAH! How in the holy hell are we supposed to grow as a nation or people if we keep destroying the passion of the very people that will move us forward!? Sorry I know this sounds ranty but I just can't understand the depth of ignorance this requires. I keep picturing me as a teen or my son who is showing so much passion and love for learning and science and what this could do to him. The fact that because we are white and the actions would be so much less severe makes it even more disgusting to me.
Because in some schools unfortunately there are students who are violent. Can't expect teachers to deal with students who are bigger and stronger than themselves.
The workers in many careers tend to adhere to established policies and guidelines rather than exercising their own independent judgment. The policy in this workplace says that people who are under arrest must be handcuffed, and so the child is handcuffed.
The President doesn't control what officials in Texas do... But this is a cool move. It's PR, but it's the best kind of PR, especially from the President that called on the country to become a "nation of makers".
This hits close to home for me too, and I am as WASP-y as it gets.
Just over a year ago I was flying to the middle of US with some prototypes for an agriculural automation system in my checked luggage. Going through DTW and O'Hare to my final destination was fine and went without incident. On my way back, again with a checked luggage bag of protypes and tools, this little airport in northwest IA got evacauted and I was very forcibly questioned about why I was flying with these things.
What struck me was that the larger airports (DTW and O'Hare) couldn't have cared less, but this 5-gate airport in IA freaked out that somebody flying with three laptops in his carryon would also have a bag of tools and equipment.
The best part out of all of this was after everything was cleared up, I asked the head TSA person what I should do in the future to prevent getting searched and interrogated. His answer was "just open your bag and show the luggage agent what is in it." I still don't understand how that would help - I envision that the conversation would go something like "Hi, these look like pipe bombs. They aren't. You can trust me." and I would immediately be detained.
When I got out of the Army in the 90's, I had to fly back to America, and since I didn't trust the government's shipping contractor I took all of the guts out of my PC, stuck them in a carry-on bag, and went through security with it. The guy at the counter looked inside the bag and asked what it was. I told him it was a computer and he let me through. Oh, such an age of innocence!
I can only imagine the effect of an interrogation like that on a 14yr old. I was 24 and was completly drained by mine.
I was questioned by each of the TSA, the local sheriff, and the plane's pilot and an airline rep.
Three different interrogations all asking the same questions just to determine if I was going to be allowed to fly.
I also travel with custom imaging equipment that sometimes has exposed PCBs. My recommendation is to carry it on, so that you can open it and explain it. Twice I have approached the gate well ahead of my flight, and offered to show TSA the equipment. Both times they took only a cursory glance at it.
I'm surprised they don't just mandate the spectrogram swab on every piece of electronics that comes through, consumer or custom.
To be fair, your 'agriculural automation system' components likely could be used for an explosive device.
On the other hand, I once had an airport security agent delay me because I had a transparent purple Game Boy Color in my carry-on. He (an older Filipino gentleman) seemed genuinely confused about what it was. It was pre-9/11, coincidentally also in Texas.
Which is a double whammy considering all of the other ways schools crush enthusiasm and willingness to explore. Because grades are a measure of "achievement" that discourages people from exploring new subjects or taking challenging courses outside their comfort zone, since that could lower their GPA. And because all course work factors into your grade, not just your ultimate competency in the material, that creates even more incentives to not try anything new. Struggling with new material for even a week or two could irreparably harm your GPA.
What the hell is a fake bomb? How does a schoolteacher know what a "bomb" looks like? Are we talking about an IED here? That could be literally any fucking thing.
I really doubt that this clock looked even remotely like any of the industrially made ready-to-use explosives.
Sometimes I can't help feeling like some people should be forcibly removed from the gene pool.
The ignorant portion of our society thinks bombs have flashing lights and tick thanks to Hollywood. In reality anyone wanting to do harm is not going to make their bomb noticeable.
Even then, for an IED to actually be of any use it needs to have an explosive compound, likely in a container of some kind.
Anyone with half a brain would understand that you can't just magically make circuitry explode. That's a whole new level of ignorance, they teach this stuff in elementary school for gods sake.
That's the problem right there. These people have let their common sense be overtaken by their sense of fear, they're so afraid they aren't thinking.
That's why going after a 9 year old or MIT student with a t-shirt[0] makes sense, because they literally aren't thinking straight because they're so convinced there is a threat around every corner (thanks mass media!).
This isn't a "whole new level" of ignorance. If you think so, then you probably don't understand how stupid a significant portion of the population is. There are people out there who think that Google, Facebook, so on, are actually on their computer. It makes complete sense that some people think a bomb looks like some caricature envisioned for the audience's benefit in a movie or TV show. Many people's entire lives revolve around motion picture entertainment of some sort.
Of course, the best part about that Aqua Teen "bomb scare" was how the guys that were charged for putting up blinking LEDs (and their lawyer) handled the press: "That's not a hair question".
Incidentally, I was in Shenzhen (China) a short while ago, and signs like those were everywhere, and the sight of bare electronics not uncommon; but given that it's a huge centre of electronics manufacturing, I'd guess that almost everyone is accustomed to seeing such things.
we don't know wether the teacher made the bad call. (s)he could have updated the principal to ask if it's ok to demo electronics projects in a K-5, only to have the principal think it's a bomb.
let's trust everyone until they give a reason not to.
If you really want to tie them in knots, get a bunch of small "Amazon"-type (empty) cardboard boxes, and write "BOMB" in bold letters with a magic marker on the sides. Distribute the boxes in slightly-hidden spots, like Easter eggs. Fun times!
Instead, label them BOX 1, BOX 2 and BOX 4 and put "geo-location circuity" (it doesn't have to work, just make it look like it could) in it and place those at various points in the school, preferably with visible wires.
Then you can claim that you were trying to build your own local mini-gps to monitor your movements throughout the day.
Depends, my country had a long history of phone bomb threats, by students to delay or postpone exams. They were taken seriously - the classes were dismissed and the bomb squads checked everything.
What do the cops ever do with their time that isn't a waste? They only rarely and incidentally protect anyone from any actual threat. Mostly they hassle, ticket, menace, and otherwise inconvenience the public. If they all went on strike next week, violence and mayhem would decrease.
The "industrial-complex" you invoke includes all institutions that create, support, and perpetuate it. Maybe the cops don't write the laws, maybe they don't bargain the pleas, at any rate they don't join LEAP until retirement. The vast surplus of "criminals" in USA, that has existed nowhere else and at no other time in all of human experience, has been manufactured by the industrial-complex, for its own purposes.
Like other rational people who live or have lived in USA, I have minimized my interaction with both "sides" to the extent that I've been able. (Although frankly I elicited more sympathy for a stolen bike from an admitted bike thief than I did from any cop.) If you drop another "you just don't know how it is to be a cop" whinge on us, I'll be forced to assume that you are a cop or in the immediate family of one.
Not just cartoons but media in general. Pick a movie with a bomb involved, it's probably a mess of wires and electronic components along with a digital clock of some sort.
People are so worried about terrorists. Guess what: they won! If you don't believe me then try getting on a commercial flight, or try bringing a cool electronics project to school some time.
The hoax bomb charge that they are still considering doesn't make sense to me. As someone who has seen a lot of improvised explosive devices[0] "hoax" means something very specific. I occasionally encountered hoax devices which were deliberately placed to monitor our response. Finding one meant you could be sure you were on camera. Here the police seem to use "hoax" to mean someone got scared of an empty cardboard box, or in this case a cool electronics project. The difference is intent just like selling oregeno or baby powder can get you in trouble for selling drugs if you are portraying it that way. Having something suspicious means it should be investigated, but it shouldn't be a crime unless it is intentionally portrayed as an illegal object.
Of course the reaction to this is completely insane but what's even sillier is that they're continuing to assume that real threats would be things that they can see. If someone wanted to blow up a building they could hide a bomb in a backpack among hundreds of others and never show it to anyone.
It's the same crap they pull at the airport where you must throw out your bottled water; and then their solution is to toss this bottle, which was classified a minute ago as a serious threat, into a pile of other unverified "threats" in the middle of a densely-populated area of the airport. How this kind of thing has gone YEARS without any serious backslash is amazing to me.
It is so out of hand. While certainly bad things have happened and could happen, statistically modern society is pretty safe and we all have to stop being so damn scared of every little thing.
I think the liquids ban is dumb, but given that it exists, throwing confiscated liquids into a bin is completely reasonable.
It's one of those weird game theory things. Your goal is to prevent dangerous liquids from being brought onto planes, but you can't reasonably tell them apart from other liquids, so you ban all liquids. Because it's banned, you can be reasonably sure that nobody is going to try to bring dangerous liquids through security in the first place. (Not because people always obey bans, but just because they know it'll be confiscated.) So you can be confident that all the confiscated liquids are not dangerous, and it's safe to just throw them in a bin. Yet you still need to confiscate them if you want to keep people from bringing the dangerous materials through.
If someone wants to blow up a security line, there are much better ways to do it than allowing their liquid explosive to be confiscated, so you can be pretty confident that nobody is going to attack the system that way either.
The ban means little because the punishment is nothing. If I want to bring something bad on board, there are two outcomes: I succeed, or I don't, and maybe I have to endure a brief scolding. The difference now is that if I fail, I know my mixture will be stuck in the middle of a huge crowd of people for who knows how long, probably giving me time to go far away.
The decision to throw all liquids into a bin has created a danger that would not have existed otherwise, which means the confiscations have lowered security.
And collectively, unnecessary "security" measures slow down security lines, increasing the probability that more people will be in them and increasing the temptation to target security lines at all. The real goal should be to move people through so efficiently that there is barely a "line" to target in the first place, much less a massive crowd.
What danger is created that wouldn't exist otherwise? If people are bringing explosives through and they're being confiscated and thrown in a bin, then without the confiscations those explosives would be making it onto airplanes instead. Having them explode in a bin would be much preferable to having them explode on an airplane.
Again, I don't agree with the liquid ban, but it's a problem with the goal, not a problem with the methods. There's no real evidence that liquid explosives pose a threat that needs to be countered. However, if you take as a given that you're tasked with stopping them, the system as it's set up is a decent way to go about it.
The danger is that, thanks to the act of throwing everything into a bin, there is now a practically-guaranteed way to leave a dangerous substance in the middle of a very large crowd and walk far away with no questions asked.
If the person's goal was to bring it on a plane, they're suicidal so they probably don't care if it accidentally blows them up in the security line instead.
If instead they expect to set it down and walk away, they can do that anywhere (even if they clear the checkpoint without having their bottle taken). The difference is that the added "security" has given them a much more effective target than they could have anywhere else.
Before the ban, it was always possible for someone to do either one: get on a plane, or set down an object and walk away. It wasn't happening, which means the old security precautions were just fine. And if it had happened, there probably would have been security camera footage of one suspicious individual setting down an object instead of dozens of suspects throwing objects into a bin.
Wow, I never really thought if it like that before. I always had the same sneering reaction to the bin of "possibly explosive liquids" at the security line, but now it actually makes sense.
To be completely fair about the stupid liquid rule, it was prompted by fears about someone making TATP on the flight. The precursors are not particularly dangerous on their own.
Given that control of liquids was a reactionary measure to an event that didn't actually harm innocent people or endanger an airplane (and was incredibly unlikely to begin with), it's debatable if it warranted any attention at all.
But, between you and a buddy or two, that's still a lot of precursor. It's not like they've actually solved any problems; they've just made the 3oz toiletries industry boom.
You can't legislate intelligence. Yesterday I went to my daughter's school's open house. When I entered, I was cornered by an administrator and told I had to sign some paperwork before I left. It was the computer policy. After I signed it, the admin said my daughter had to sign it too. She's 4.
I had a similar experience when registering my sons for middle school: asked to sign a computer and network use policy. Being "in the trade", I stopped to read the five-page document. Wife got a little frustrated with me holding up the registration process. When I was done reading I signed, then instructed my kids to never use the school's network except where such use was unavoidable. Turn off WiFi on their phones when on school campus. They didn't need the kids to sign it, fwiw, because the goal was to make me financially liable for any action taken by MPAA/RIAA et al.
Similar thing happened when my son started kindergarten. His "signature" was in red marker that smelled like cherry, took up half the page and kind of looked like an alligator to me.
Not but you can severely punish idiocy, so that it doesn't dare act that way again (and I mean the idiocy of the police in the story, or the people having your daughter sign BS)..
The intent is not to legally bind her, which it obviously wouldn't. Usually the idea of having a child sign too is the idea having a child explicitly agree makes them more likely to be invested in complying. Whether or not there's any evidence that works, I don't know, but it's not quite as stupid as it might seem at first glance.
While the scenario described does sound ridiculous, I disagree that it's "not even understandable." (My understanding is that you meant the four year old wouldn't understand?)
Many toddlers younger than three could grasp the idea of signing something as a promise to do that thing in the future. A three or four year old could easily understand it.
sorry I meant not understandable as a blanket policy especially since this is at a school.
I would expect the school (being a place with lots of teachers) to understand that you get the parent to sign the document - with legally enforceable terms that the parent is responsible for whatever the kid does.
That's what a kindergarden - grade 8 elementary school field trip permission form looks like!
I'm sure they've made and processed hundreds of thousands of these forms before. It's just not understandable why they wouldn't do something similar with this open house.
This isn't a comment on whether the original scenario was ridiculous or not, but you'd be surprised by how incredibly aware very young people are.
Even a three year old can easily understand the significance of signing something. Especially if you, as an adult, place importance on the ritual.
Asking toddlers to promise things, to explicitly agree to future events, is a big part of preventing tantrums. Three year olds are very capable negotiators.
> Especially if you, as an adult, place importance on the ritual.
Yes, we adults really place a lot of importance in the ritual of "scroll to the bottom and click 'Agree'".
(In case my point is missed in the snark, it's that adults will often sign whatever they're told to sign, especially if worded like "sign this or else you can't [X]", and kids will sign whatever they're told to sign by their parents. If parents were actually placing importance on only signing things that were necessary, there's no way they should let their 4-year-old sign anything that could remotely be considered important.)
I agree that asking a four year old to sign something outside the context of a fun game is stupid.
But I just wanted to make the point that four year old — or even a three year old — can totally understand the concept of signing something and a parent could even use it to enforce a future event (e.g., sign this bath time contract which means you must have a bath after dinner).
> The newspaper quoted a police spokesman, James McLellan, as saying that Ahmed never claimed his device was anything but a clock, and the police have no reason to think it was dangerous.
But officers still did not believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story.
“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” Mr. McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.
“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”
Duh, the thing tells the time. And are they saying that if I don't explain why I made something it can be presumed to be a bomb? (especially given "and the police have no reason to think it was dangerous.")
I feel like the common sense explanation of why he built it, "because he could", is what scares them so much. Because they can't and can't imagine how to even begin. People fear what they don't understand and him being Brown, Muslem, and doing things that they can't understand is like the trifecta of terror and ignorance. Fear, bigotry, and ignorance this is what the the reaction to it looks like.
People tend to assume that everyone else thinks like them. Because the arresting officer couldn't wouldn't build a clock for the enjoyment of learning (as opposed to some "broader purpose" like blowing up a building), then nobody else should either. Simple explanation, but likely true.
What do I mean? You just said that had he left the device in a bathroom it would be more reasonable to charge him with the crime. They shifted the debate over and you followed with it. Instead of arguing if a kid should be charged over leaving a clock in the bathroom, you've now given them that ground and have moved on to debating charging them for having a clock at all.
Of course, on an individual level this doesn't do much. But they are pulling this sort of trick on the whole of society. At that scale, it is not ineffective.
It is definitely profiling and I bet his race had a lot to do with it.
But I think the same thing would've happened if I had brought such a device to school - having been a super dark dressed goth in school, the fear would've been it's a bomb.
Schools are generally very very extra worried about everything these days, suspending him was unnecessary but with it only being three days I don't see it being a terrible thing. The record will get set straight.
So then this just falls back to being unfortunate racial profiling.
The suspension is pretty minor. Dumb, but whatever. At that age I'd have been happy to stay home for three days.
But there's so much more here. He got arrested and put in juvenile detention. He was interrogated by the police without his parents being informed.
There's no excuse for this. The police involved should lose their jobs and spend some time in jail themselves. Not a lot, but perhaps a couple of days will get some of their colleagues to look up "probable cause" and "civil rights." The principal should lose his job as well, since he is clearly not mentally competent to supervise children.
> He got arrested and put in juvenile detention. He was interrogated by the police without his parents being informed.
This behavior happens ALL THE TIME. The police routinely will get away with what ever they can to get a conviction. The law is complicated and most people don't have a lawyer on retainer.
The police aren't your friend, and you gain NOTHING by talking to them.
> Schools are generally very very extra worried about everything these days
Maybe in the US, but where I live, and I guess that's going to be the case in most countries, no one would ever think that this "suitcase" could be a bomb, regardless of the person's appearance. It's saddens me to see a country becoming more and more paranoid and living in fear.
As an example, we used to chase each other in school with BB-guns (here they don't have the orange marker distinguishing them from real guns). When a teacher saw us I'm sure the thought that these could be real never ever crossed their mind.
in a Texas Highschool I was sentenced to In School Suspension INDEFINITELY with my laptop confiscated for having shortcuts to directories on the network that I "shouldn't have had access to." After about a week of that I'd had enough, asked for OSS - got it, which I thought was enough but apparently wasn't. They ended up wanting to reassign me to an "alternative school" (the type with a dress code, specific hours, locked down no talking etc). I managed to get "homeschooled" for 3 months (re: no school work completed) and somehow still managed to actually graduate High School. It was the most ludicrous situation I'd ever been in for navigating a folder hierarchy in Windows.
And getting only a few toes amputated due to gangrene would be lovely to someone who lost a leg for the same reason. That doesn't mean losing a few toes isn't terrible.
I don't think it would be hard to find people who would have rather have faced what you suffered than what they went through. (Kalief Browder might have been one.) That doesn't mean they would be right to say that what happened to you was "lovely."
And then he cant get any jobs. Gets so frustrated he actually builds a bomb..and well..you get the point.
The amount of stupidity perpetuated by these administrators and the police is astounding. Never underestimate the poor taste of public authority. Most of their reasons tend to be 'We needed to lay down the law first to assert dominance. That's how we could then subvert the broader scope of his actions. Then we teach him about sacrifice, plea-bargaining. And like a good boy, he says sorry, gets his slap on the wrist, and everybody wins because he learns to respect authority, and be a good little automaton Johnnyboy!"
If you're angry with the school's horrible reaction to this, let Jose Parra, http://www.irvingisd.net/Page/3010, know: (972) 600-5001 / jparra@irvingisd.net. He can fire the principal of that school - Dan Cummings
I think we're making too big of an issue of this. The trial has already taken place and the boy was found to not float... so it turns out he must be guilty.
God forbid that an officer drops his walkie talkie and discovers that IT TOO IS A POTENTIAL BOMB! I mean, it has wires and circuits...
The ignorance here is astounding. I suppose he's lucky they didn't also try him as a warlock for summoning electricity from a magical box.
If the school and the police had acted in the correct way this would be no big deal. Hey, we have a device here that could be a bomb. Police show up, call bomb specialist. Bomb specialist laughs in a few peoples faces, the school apologizes, the kid keeps tinkering.
But no they had to go and dig in. Which makes this really wrong on their part. I hate it when organizations take a stance around stupidity.
Or even better- start by quietly calling him to the principal's office. Ask him about his clock. Tell him people were thinking he might be wanting to pull some bomb pranks, and that would be a very bad idea. Ask him to tell his teachers the day before the next time he wants to show off his gadgetry. Send him back to class.
Or don't do that, either, because it is not right to assume people are going to pull off bomb hoaxes. (Doubly so when the only real reason for the suspicion is skin color.)
Yeah but you also don't want to be the admin at a school with a bomb where there were "signs a student was creating bombs before he went ape shit". I agree with the color statement, but not addressing the issue at all can be just as bad as an overreaction.
Obviously someone thought there was a sign, even the teacher told him not to show it to anyone else outside that class. I think saying that a homemade clock isn't a sign is greatly underestimating how the news is capable of skewing things to screw people over.
I looked at the pictures. Any adult with even the slightest understanding of how a bomb must physically work--like, "have something that can actually explode"--should be so utterly certain of its purpose that your concern trolling should horrify them.
So he has a Muslim name, which is why this story went viral. Because racism. I hope everyone is equally outraged by the nonsense that happens all the time[0][1] to kids who aren't named Mohammad in public schools.
Sending your high IQ kids to school with adults who are batting 85 should be regarded as parental malpractice. And the notion that people defend public schools and tell us taxpayers they just "need more money!1!!1" flies in the face of reason and the facts (per pupil spending since the 60s has tripled with no change in test scores).[2]
Public schools suck by their very nature as state-controlled entities. If education is so important (especially today), why do we allow our kids to be taught and schools administered by the equivalents of DMV employees? Of course the poorest kids with broken families suffer the most.
And what happens when charter schools actually succeed? The Teachers Union is there to try and shut them down, with the help of sympathetic politicians (see NYC and de Blasio)[3]
Personally, i wasn't surprised at the display of racially-biased fear at the sight of device that appears to a bystander to look like a bomb. People are people.
But why did it need to lead to arrest, hand cuffs, finger printing after an interview and a casual examination of the device clearly demonstrated it was a clock (there was an engineering teacher who could easily collaborate)? It was an outright excessive reaction to further compound what was a regrettable mistake.
In the article it mentions that his engineering teacher advised him to hide it from the other staff. Which is confusing to me. The teacher obviously knew it wasn't a bomb and obviously knew the other staff would misinterpret this. So why didn't the teacher preempt this whole thing by advising the school that "Yes, this kid brought in a clock to show me. No, it's not a bomb no matter how scary it looks."
This article is the only one to show that the kid did anything wrong. That was plug it in during English class, The appropriate response is to have it taken away for the rest of the day, and possibly a detention if it was really loud enough to disrupt class.
Not asserting fact here but merely providing my interpretation:
The engineering teacher may have advised the student to bring the device to school but to not pull it out in any other class. This could have been done to avoid distracting other students or attracting unwanted attention from other teachers. This seems like a straight forward request that may have been taken out of context. I have not seen a quote that uses the word "hide", which really changes the connotation of the statement. I highly doubt the engineering teacher thought specifically that the device could be seen as a bomb.
the teacher recommended he hide it from the rest of the staff.
However it's not a direct quote so I don't know the wording the teacher used. Regardless, this teacher seems to have known enough to step in at any time before this child was escorted from the school in handcuffs.
Perhaps he did and was shot down. I don't know but the details as shared stuck out to me.
I'm sure this isn't really an isolated incident in this school, it just happens to be one that got bad enough to make national news. The place is probably crazy even on a good day. The teacher probably didn't want to stick his neck out.
When I was in high school there was a guy there we all nicknamed terrorist because he always played for the terrorists in Counterstrike. When the school found out they expelled him and sent the cops out to his place. The cops found nothing, and the school didn't actually have anything to go on, but they still kicked him out for a week, all over a nickname.
> “We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” Mr. McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation."
Creative people don't need to have a good reason to make something. They create things because there is joy and satisfaction in creating things. It's a shame Mr. McLellan had such a boring childhood.
The Irving ISD Student Code of Conduct, which the principle alleges the student to have broken, can be downloaded at http://www.irvingisd.net/Page/5183.
I couldn't find anything in there prohibiting a clock or other non-communication related electronic devices. I didn't read every word so maybe I missed something.
I did find the following under the prohibited items section: "Any articles not generally considered to be weapons, including school supplies, when the principal or designee determines that a danger exists."
But that would seem to create a dilemma in this situation. If it was a bomb it wouldn't be covered by that stipulation, but if it was a clock then no reasonable person could consider it to be dangerous.
If we're being charitable we could assume the principled believed it was a bomb at the time, in which case it would have been covered by other stipulations in the code. But if that is the case then I would think the school should have been evacuated. I don't know if that happened or not.
Also, good lord, I don't ever remember having to sign something like that document (it's a 44 page document that reads like a contract) when I was in school. Is it even legally binding to have a minor sign that?
Many comments here on HN seem to feel that this is an issue with Education system or schools. But I as a non American feel is that a common American is too afraid of anything non American or anything strange. The main objective of terrorist organizations is to instill fear in the minds of people and I think they have succeeded in it to a greater extent.
Hell, the kid has a NASA shirt, is a thin nerdy type and brought a science project to school to show it off (instead of whatever illegal things kids bring to schools these days).
I really, really hope someone will pick this up and offer that kid some kind of internship somewhere, if only to keep his moral and spirit up.
What if the kid had gotten his hands on a detonator button transmitter thing? It could have been a disaster. I'm being sarcastic, but I fear that one of these tools might use a similar excuse if you questioned them.
Perfect trifecta of bigotry, ignorance and cowardice. And at a school too, where any number of apparently educated staff could have verified what the device was in a moment. Great job!
You might have a point if the device was for a school project. But it was his own "invention" which is own engineering teacher warned him against showing around.
He not only showed it around, but plugged it in during English class where it made beeping noises. Do you expect the English teacher should need to "verify" a box of wires and circuits? Who would she verify it with if the kid plays aloof when asked of its purpose?
Just because "authorities apprehend 14yo Muslim kid for home-made clock" doesn't mean you need to start making accusations of bigotry, ignorance and cowardice.
Presumably an English teacher has the communication skills to ask any one of the number of staff who were involved in the entire affair. You know, like the engineering teacher. Did he somehow go on vacation in between? And how about the police - they have nobody on staff who can tell the difference between a homemade clock and some sort of "unauthorized device"?
The accusations are justified. Your apologetics are misguided.
Bigotry, maybe. There's a chance (which I'd estimate at smaller than 1%) that there was no racial motivation here.
But I don't see how you can say there's no grounds to make accusations of ignorance and cowardice. Being unaware of what a bomb looks like is clearly ignorance, and being so terrified that you get an innocent kid arrested for it is clearly cowardice.
Handcuffs went too far. But that's a protocol issue for US lawmakers etc. We've all seen protocol out of control in the States for a host of different incidents.
No need to react so much in the other direction either, making this kid an ambassador of "freedom to pack electronics in a case and bring it to school" or whatever.
He made an error of judgement going against his teacher's advice, and a ton of bricks came down on his head way too hard. Hopefully everyone can learn something from this.
But you can't deny that "radicalization of young Muslims" isn't a thing these days. No point of covering your ears and insisting everyone wants to get along.
> But you can't deny that "radicalization of young Muslims" isn't a thing these days.
Radicalization of young Muslims is among the reasons why acts based on bias against young Muslims by authority figures in society is especially problematic, as those acts contribute rather directly to such radicalization, and directly serve the propaganda interests of those actively seeking such radicalization.
This would be problematic if radicalization of young Muslims wasn't a particular concern, but it doesn't become less problematic because such radicalization is a real thing, it becomes more.
So you don't think it's possible that authority figures can initiate acts based on statistics? On research, on scientific data? Or must their motivations always be grounded in bias, unfair discrimination, misguided old-fashioned racial profiling?
The point I was making about young Muslims - I wish it weren't true. But it is true.
Arresting 14yo kids isn't a solution, but neither is patronizingly inviting him and his suitcase clock to the white house.
I'd love watch the video of him checking into whitehouse security with his suitcase clock...
OK, what are the relevant statistics, research, and scientific data? What is the scientifically-determined probability at the time that this kid actually built a bomb, or was at least trying to scare people with a lookalike?
"I'd love watch the video of him checking into whitehouse security with his suitcase clock..."
It will probably be quite boring, because unlike paranoid local Texas policemen, the Secret Service knows what a bomb actually looks like.
The kid's error was merely in underestimating the danger posed by the authorities. Certainly we can all learn something from this, and the lesson is that a lot of authorities are catastrophically stupid and unbelievably petty.
Why should we not make this kid an ambassador of "freedom to pack electronics in a case and bring it to school"? That sounds like a pretty good freedom, and one worth fighting for. Kids should feel free to bring their (non-dangerous, no need to bring in guns or actual bombs or whatever) interests to school to share them. You might even broaden the horizons of some fellow students (and who knows, maybe even a teacher or two).
I tried to provide a balance point to this discussion, mainly due to the fact that packing the clock into the suitcase wasn't smart (even for a 14yo).
Google 'suitcase bomb' and you'll get endless results. Google 'Arduino enclosure bomb" and you won't get much.
I'm not convinced the kid didn't know it was looking like something from a movie, and I think he was aiming for that look, but he won't admit it. Why do I think this? Because I was 14 once too, and studied electronics just like him. Something that looked like a Suitcase bomb is something I'd want to show my friends.
His clock was mains powered too. Awful design even for a 14yo.
It's not a suitcase. It's a small pencil case. A bit biggerthan an Altoids tin. The photo is misleading. There's a battery connector that gives some scale.
The power plug is an even better indicator, since it's pretty much flat. Given the prongs are 12.7mm apart, that makes the whole case about 17cm wide. You could literally fit it in your pocket.
My favorite clip is of the police who said something to the effect of, "When we asked him what it was, he only said it was a clock he didnt tell us why he brought it to school..." so they arrested him for a hoax bomb.
That statement reeks of a story made up after the fact. You can imagine them sitting around their police station after they let the kid go.
Police A: "Oh shit, this kid was just bringing in a clock to show his engineering teacher. There are several witnesses who heard him tell us it was just a clock. And now everyone in the world is watching. We're fucked."
Police B: "Nothing's fucked, bro. Be cool. Think. Think. Wait, he never told us whhhhy he brought the clock to school."
Police A: "Why does that matter? he told us it was just a clock and it is just a clock! Did we even ask why he brought it?"
Police B: "I didnt ask why. Did you? Even if you didnt, its still somethin' you could say."
Police A: "That is so stupid."
Police B: "Still, you know... it is somethin' you could say."
Police A: "That is so stupid. You are stupid. And, we are fucked!"
...later at press conference
clears throat
Police A: "...he told us it was a clock buuuuut, he never told us whhhhy he brought the clock..."
glances over at Police B who has the stupidest grin on his face
What probably happened here is that the kid bought one of the many digital clock board kits available.[1][2] The problem is that these look just like the TV/movie version of bombs, because, of course, prop people use the same boards.
Not real bombs, though. Richard Marcinko, the founder of Seal Team Six, once wrote that he'd blown up a lot of things in his career and he'd never seen a count down timer with glowing numbers.
Thanks! I was curious about this, because having volunteered for FIRST robotics, I can tell you that the number of HS students in the US with the skills to design and build a digital clock is pretty much 0. Looking at the picture, I think that maybe he re-homed a commercial clock into a different case and added some leads to run it off a battery ... which is still beyond the capabilities of 99% of US HS students.
Either way, congrats to Mohamed for being curious about how things work, shame on his teachers for not doing due diligence (maybe asking the electronics teacher to take a look before calling the police?), and I wish there were more information available about exactly what Mohamed had done, because I find that to be the interesting part of the story.
Not that the response was appropriate, but I'm pretty sure that if I'd taken a similarly looking device into my very WASP-y suburban school, even though I'm white as a sheet, my school administration would have had a similar response. People are really paranoid these days, and right or wrong, we all have to deal with it.
Some true stories go viral because they "confirm" what a lot of people think is wrong with society.
Because they go viral, there is a lot of talk about them, which "confirms" even further that this is a Big Problem, and that it is caused by What I've Been Saying All Along.
In reality this is one single idiotic decision by some local knuckleheads. As a social science study, it has a sample size of 1 and a huge selection bias. The problems you think it "shows" may well be real, but retelling this anecdote does not prove that.
The real problem here is that everyone in positions of responsibility in the government -- the school and the police -- feel the need to justify their existence by doing... something. The default action of the school is to call the police, and then what? You have only 4 outcomes once the police are involved: 1) nothing, 2) citation, 3) arrest, 4) death. How many times do the police just walk away from something? That's right. So (1) isn't really an option at all. Citation? For what? They were trying, but you don't write tickets for making "hoax bombs." Killing a scrawny 14-year-old kid is extreme, even for the most jaded cop, so that leaves (3), arrest. Then the legal system has to justify IT'S existence, and, well, we know how this goes. Then the ACLU has to get all up in it, and probably CAIR, and the Justice Department. All because everyone has abandoned their common sense and replaced it with fear and deference to the State since 9/11. Thanks, Bush AND Obama.
Honestly, more and more, I challenge the idea of ever having a child: bright and smart kids have never been so intimidated.
Many of the hacks I did as a child could have gotten me in jail today. Something 'silly' or 'funny' becomes dangerous/offensive/harassment; creativity, ingenuity and imagination are turned into dullness, self-hatred and nihilism.
Ironically, you are engaging in the same sort of fear mongering and paranoia that these schools and police are engaging in. You are taking a rare event (idiotic profiling or terrorism) and concluding they are very common.
These sorts of overreactions are very uncommon. That isn't to say these sorts of zero tolerance, jail what you don't understand, actions shouldn't be strongly condemned.
But there are probably hundreds of thousands of kids who are into tinkering and hacking who haven't ever been bothered.
> In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time
How much of that is actual bad behavior. The school to prison pipeline is a worthy discussion.
But this sort insane, zero tolerance of total normal behavior is much more limited.
I agree we shouldn't be using the criminal system of kids who bring pot to school or who get into fights. But it's a different issue than a kid getting arrested for being a hacker.
it's a different issue than a kid getting arrested for being a hacker.
How so? Actually in some states the kids who bring pot to school are more worthy for being in the criminal system than the kid being arrested for being a hacker, seeing as the former qualifies as actual criminal activity (again, in some states).
That is to say, I agree with not using the criminal system for those relatively minor excursions, but at the same time I do not see how it is a different problem.
No, this is what happens when you have stupid police and school officials that are tough on everything. There are enough outrageous cases in the last year for students of a lot of different backgrounds.
I posted this once regarding a related incident, but it's appropriate here too.
One day in college, a friend and I decided to pack a plastic bottle with dry ice and hot water. In our hung over state, we thought this would be fun to watch. I was in my apartment. It took all of five seconds to realize that I couldn't rip apart the bottle. So, if the force of this explosion was sufficient to do so, it was probably really fucking dangerous. I figured it was too late to take the cap off -- the bottle was already making weird sounds. So, I threw it in the bathroom tub, and shut the door. Two minutes went by, and I felt momentarily foolish. Almost as I thought "nothing is going to happen," it exploded. The force knocked my friend to the ground. Granted she was tiny, and it was partly from fear, but I felt the shock wave rattle my bones.
I lived in the more expensive apartment building on campus. No one even came to say, "what's going on." If they did, they would have seen the bent metal of the tub's faucet.
And, that was accidentally but very literally a bomb.
"You are under arrest for making a circuit board with a clock display, while bearing a name such as 'Ahmed Mohamed' and exhibiting a brown appearance."
It seems Amazons recommendation system has acquired 'irony' - it's recommending http://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pri.... If I acquire it, I will then have to hide it from my son lest he build something and show it to his high school teacher.
It's remarkable the difference that ~20 years can make. In middle school, someone's science fair project was building an actual briefcase bomb (with clay). It had a variety of sensors, and laid out (on a tri-fold poster board, of course) the guts of how each one worked.
And even pre-9/11 I'm still not sure what the legal status of that is. Since it was designed to be a "bomb," even if it is inert, several laws do cover that.
Essentially as soon as you describe a pile of distinct legal parts as a "bomb" you've now got a class of controlled weapon even if it has no explosive components.
> Essentially as soon as you describe a pile of distinct legal parts as a "bomb" you've now got a class of controlled weapon even if it has no explosive components.
Source? If I describe a chicken finger as a gun, is that also a controlled weapon?
This seems like a great opportunity for us to show our support for kids who build things. Would anyone be interested in a GoFundMe to get Ahmed some Arduino gear or send him to an electronics camp? (I would just create one but I'm not sure what people would most readily donate toward -- gear or scholarship funds.)
Thanks for checking that. I wish the mods would replace the link, since rewarding original reporting makes more of it, and rewarding aggregation makes more of that.
I just been reading about this morning and all I can say is what the hell is going on in Dallas? I mean when I was a kid I brought to school a model rocket with some solid rocket engines and all that happened to me was the rocket and engines were held by the principal until my parents could pick them up. But a kid making a clock gets arrested? Seriously, wtf is going over there in Dallas?
Being handcuffed is the worst thing I have ever felt. It is inhumane and should not be practiced in a civilized society. The fact that a 14 year old child with that look on his face felt it makes my blood boil.
I don't understand where the race angle is coming from. How is this definitely a case of "making while brown"? What's the evidence, besides the kid's brown skin?
I would "stand with Ahmed", but if that means being attached to race baiting and Islamophobia accusations, I won't.
> Update at 11:20 a.m. Wednesday: At a press conference this morning, Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing "a hoax bomb" to school -- and not a clock, as Mohamed said he repeatedly told his teachers.
> But, Boyd said, "we are confident it's not an explosive device" intended to cause "alarm." Rather, he said, officers determined it was "a hoax bomb" and a "naive accident."
> As a result, he said, no charges will be filed against Ahmed, and "the case is considered closed." He also said "the reaction would have been the same regardless" of the student's skin color.
When I was in high school (in Slovenia), I have actually brought a home-made "bomb" to school. It had an LCD and a keypad, you would arm it and it would count down while beeping with increasing frequency, unless you entered the correct deactivation code.
Nobody mistook it for a real bomb and nobody had any trouble with it, except for when it was set up in the middle of class to annoy the teacher :)
A later improvement was the addition of "detorator circuit" based on the flash electronics for a disposable camera, and you could hook up something like a resistor to it which would then be fried by who knows how many volts...
I don't want to suggest that what the school and police did to this guy is anything but terrible, but I suspect that he'll actually be fine in the long run. If I were an admissions officer at MIT, I'd jump at the chance to admit someone with an essay "I was arrested for building a clock".
I think the bigger concern is all the people who get in trouble with the powers that be, and don't have media savvy parents with time or knowledge or connections to get something in the local paper and/or get in touch with civil rights organizations.
It really saddens me that this kid (or other kids in similar circumstances) could find the experience so traumatising that they lose the motivation/interest to pursue these creative activities.
Frankly, if someone showed up with a clock and a circuit board with wires leading to a box on the board, what would people think? Keep in mind, there have been multiple mass shootings at schools already this year. They have to investigate it.
What if someone showed up to the mall with a gun in an open-carry setting? People panic.[2] The setting matters. Especially if the setting in question, a school, has been a victim of mass violence numerous times. This is not a HP lab. They were right to take a look at the device with police. However, this is where things went terribly wrong:
> When Ahmed was called out of class, he said he was brought into a room with four police officers, one of whom said, "Yup. That's who I thought it was." [1]
Frankly, the school and police should have been more professional. They weren't. What is more disturbing, is the police have inadvertently admitted they are profiling people in this community. There is far more details in the CNN article:
Frankly, if someone showed up with a clock and a circuit board with wires leading to a box on the board, what would people think?
I don't think we should assume that everything we don't understand is a weapon. I don't understand a lot of things, the vast majority of which are not bombs.
If it was really mounted in that case in your picture, it's indeed a little funny looking. I mean, all of this politically correct rage is misplaced if the fucking thing actually did look like a bomb. You gotta know that's not something to take into a school...
And who "invents" a clock anyway? It's sort of already-done. I mean, 50 years ago kids were putting together AM radios with electronic kits. At least that's sort-of interesting. It picks up signals from a 1000 miles away--cool! I mean, a clock? Why not invent an inclined plane next?
> And who "invents" a clock anyway? It's sort of already-done.
Clocks use a variety of circuit blocks - you need something to keep time; you need something to display that time; you can add other features.
With just "keep time" and "display time" you still have a variety of different methods. You can count mains frequency; you can use crystals and dividers. Displays can be 7 segment LEDs or LCDs or binary or analogue motors. Each require different approaches.
Even if it's just a shop-bought off the shelf kit the student learns a bit of component identification and handling and some soldering skills.
I don't think it was even that. From the pics, it looks like he liberated a commercial clock from its housing and put it in a different case. Unless it had battery backup, he may have soldered in a 9V battery connector, but since it still has a power cord I kind of doubt it.
Their twitter page promoted their first "maker space" which I have trouble squaring with this story. Is the message the school wants to send: creation, making, and learning is very very dangerous and only allowed under strict supervision?
Something doesn't seem quite right about this story. He made a clock and then chose to store it in a metal briefcase with the numbers on the outside. In other words, he built something that looks exactly like a bomb from a movie: briefcase with red numbers on it. Maybe this appearance was entirely accidental; but I would bet that he originally intended it to look like a bomb, probably for humour.
And it started beeping in class- depending on the kid's history/attitude sending them to an administrator is not an over-reaction. The zero-tolerance b.s. that happens next is the problem, but even there it's hard to blame administration- I'm sure there's zero tolerance for anything that looks like a weapon, and unfortunately a beeping case full of electronics qualifies.
This isn't surprising to hear coming from Texas, the state where legislation has titles like "The Save Orphans of Firemen Act" but actually when you read it, you find out they just want to bulldoze some poor peoples' homes on the east side of town to build a dump. And the bill includes some gerrymandering in the Ferengi print. Texas is like that.
Regardless of what someone looks like or what their name is, if you see them at a school with a device like this and it's beeping, I think it's reasonable to call the police. Allow them to come and have someone with expertise ensure that it isn't a bomb and determine the student's intention. Hopefully the police that arrive do their job well - with diligence, compassion, professionalism, and without animosity or bias.
Police were called, he was detained and questioned, and then released without charges [2]. It's a tragedy that we see bombings and shootings in schools - but we do see them, and far too often. These are the times we live in. So how should this have been handled?
Hopefully Ahmed doesn't lose any passion for science or electronics because of this afternoon, but I think if people handle the situation with rational thought rather than instigation, then he will have a much better chance at that.
Regardless of what someone looks like or what their name is, if they did not do anything wrong and is 14 years old, I think it's reasonable to expect them not being handcuffed and parade out of school in front of their peers. It's hard to take in good faith that the police have done their job well - with diligence, compassion, professionalism, and without animosity or bias.
Police were called, kid were arrested, detained massively erroneously, interrogated without the present of an attorney [0], and potentially having his life turned upside down, or side way (for better or worse). It's a tragedy that we see people without understanding of Bayesian statistics (or frequentist, for that matter) - but we do see them, and far too often. These are the times we live in. So how should this have been handled?
Hopefully some will learn that reasonable and probable cause needs to have some basis in certain priori, and that opportunity cost and the boy who cries wolf are really and very harmful issue. I think if people handle the situation with rational thought rather than instigation, and understand that P(massacre | kids = 14 years old in the US) is some number that probably is smaller than IEEE floating point error, then everyone will be better off for that.
The police detained him until they could investigate the device and question him about his intentions, then released him. Sounds like a rough afternoon, but hardly a ruined life. He's been released and he's exonerated.
> Hopefully some will learn that reasonable and probable cause needs to have some basis in certain priori, and that opportunity cost and the boy who cries wolf are really and very harmful issue.
I put the security of a school full of other kids above the 'opportunity cost' of being questioned by police. I'm guessing many other people would as well - especially the parents of the other kids at the school.
> understand that P(massacre | kids = 14 years old in the US) is some number that probably is smaller than IEEE floating point error, then everyone will be better off for that.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because it doesn't happen in the US often, doesn't mean it won't. 14 years old are involved in violence all over the world, especially in bombing incidents.
If you truly assume that the world is a dangerous place that we really need to be that careful, then it's the opportunity cost of the police force of NOT preventing the actual problems (there has to be some bad things being done/ will be done that is not prevented, right? That's the basis of your argument).
And if they truly believed it was a dangerous bomb, was the school evacuated?
> Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because it doesn't happen in the US often, doesn't mean it won't. 14 years old are involved in violence all over the world, especially in bombing incidents.
This is not even wrong, and it's terrifying if politicians would be thinking the same way as you does here. There is no guarantee EVER that anything will, or will not happen. But due to the limited resources and capability that we human have, we have to act and behave rationally based on the probability that something will happen. A scenario that comes from an unfounded basis and human imagination can not be treated with the same weight as a scenario that has some more reasonable chance to happen (based on past performance or what not). And note that P(something) indicate the probability that something can happen (or your belief of something to happen, in Bayesian interpretation), it has nothing to do with past performance/ events. The past changes your belief of P, but probability is predicting the future.
People in certain area of the world are involved in violence all year round, having bombed dropped on their roof, their hometown decimated. Are you preparing for that scenario to happen to you in the US in the present? Why or why not?
> Regardless of what someone looks like or what their name is, if you see them at a school with a device like this and it's beeping, I think it's reasonable to call the police.
I don't. All sorts of electronic devices beep. A bomb requires some kind of explosive and that suitcase looks empty apart from some electronics. Giving people a pass on assuming random electronics they don't understand is a bomb does not make us safer.
> It's a tragedy that we see bombings and shootings in schools - but we do see them, and far too often.
School shootings are far more common in the US than I'd like, but still fairly uncommon. School bombings on the other hand are incredibly rare. I can find only two in my lifetime. One in 2009 had no casualties. The other was the Columbine shooting which was quite deadly, but as best I can tell the deaths were all the result of gunfire rather than the bombs.
> if you see them at a school with a device like this and it's beeping, I think it's reasonable to call the police.
Or...you know, ask them about it. A bomber wouldn't carry a Hollywood-looking bomb in a Hollywood-looking secret agent suitcase. They'd conceal it in their backpack, which is just like the other thousands of backpacks in the school.
Calling the police is not an appropriate first response to this.
That puts the whole thing in a different shade of light. Seriously. I wrote the kid on Anil's support page, but this makes me feel like there was more going on here than is being reported. I know, surprise, surprise, right?
When I was ten, 1971, I asked my father for a chemistry set for Christmas. My parents were divorced so when vacation was over, I had to return to living with my mother. This involved a short plane ride from SoCal to NorCal on PSA. I was traveling by myself.
I recall putting my bags on a table so they the airlines people could look at what I was taking on the plane. When the FLIGHT ATTENDANT looked at my chemistry set, she turned to another official and said: "He could make a bomb out of these chemicals", My first reaction was to laugh.
I waited a minute while the adults thought it over and said: "I'm 10, I don't know how to make a bomb or anything. I jusy got this for christmas!"
They taped it up and made me check it, so I could not carry it on to the plane. To this day I marvel at the idea that a child would be suspected of making a chemical bomb.
> In short, Ahmed was arrested for making while brown.
This sort of demagoguery masquerading as journalism has got to stop. Upvoting exploitative personal political propaganda like this contributes to an atmosphere of narrow-mindedness on HN that plays to the bigotry of its readers, with the majority of comments here responding in like.
I'm certainly not defending it, but in reality this sort of (over) reaction, is perfectly explainable when you consider the risk of government employees responsible for the lives of children NOT reacting and being wrong.
Yes, those involved need some education, but no more so than the author regarding journalistic ethics, or the commenters here stirring up a witch-hunt. You can see all the anti-Texan/Conservative/School/Government-ists overreacting here right on cue.
You're right that the reaction is explainable by pervasive CYA and the risk of not reacting and being wrong.
However, you're missing that pervasive and institutional racism is a big part of that risk.
Imagine a kid brings an actual bomb to school, the authorities don't react, and he detonates it. Then what?
The kid's race is going to play a huge role in how that decision is analyzed afterwards. If the kid was white then the discussion is likely to be of the form, "We need better mental health treatment to catch this stuff early!" If the kid was the wrong shade of brown then it's going to be, "He was obviously a terrorist and the administration should be thrown in a hole for not taking appropriate measures."
I'm not ignoring institutional racism, merely not assuming it, which is consistent with the American justice system tenet of never presuming guilt, even when you really want to and everyone around says you should.
You're making a lot of wild assertions that really are tangential and not intellectually consistent with my original point that there are no facts specific to this case to support the author's narrative, merely the assumptions and presumptions you espouse.
I love it when "guilty until proven innocent" gets brought up in internet conversations, as if it were somehow the right way to have a conversation.
This isn't a court of law. Skepticism is, of course, always warranted, but equating it with high principles of justice is ridiculous. We're not putting someone in prison here.
And institutional racism against certain categories of brown people is far beyond a mere assumption at this point. Just ask one of the many, many such people who get "randomly" selected for additional security screening every time they take a plane, for one random example.
You say that we shouldn't assume racism here because the incident is adequately explained by CYA. I say that CYA is not an adequate explanation without also looking at race, because CYA would not have happened like this if the kid had been white and named John Smith.
You're misunderstanding, mischaracterizing, and conflating your own arguments.
It's a rhetorical appeal to authority, so implicitly, in addition to anyone who shares my respect for and identifies with the values of the American legal heritage, I agree with it. Therefore, even though it has no direct application, as you unnecessarily point out, it is a rhetorical convenience for delineating our very different views of right and wrong.
You misunderstand / mischaracterize me in that despite the existence of institutional racism, I think it is morally wrong and intellectually dishonest to presume or even assert that the specific police are racist, without personally specific supporting evidence.
And institutional racism against certain categories of brown people is far beyond a mere assumption at this point.
Ha, ah yes, the old, "I'm not going to justify my stance, because anyone who disagrees with me is self-evidently delusional." It must be nice to use leverage your inclusion in the ideologically "privileged" majority as an excuse to ignore the merits of my argument. Some would refer to this as a microagression.
I'm not interested in engaging the rest of your arguments. It's not related to my original point, there's too much material to cover, and we clearly have wildly divergent views of right, wrong and what constitutes appropriate treatment of the individual police officers in this situation.
I will say, to avoid being mischaracterized, that we are in agreement that the student was mistreated. We merely draw different conclusions as to why. Mine upon the specific facts; yours upon generic presumptions, assumptions, assertions and other views that are not specific to this situation. As a personal admission, I don't see any avenue for myself for effective communication with someone that communicates as you have chosen here.
Oh yes, the good old "my argument is based entirely on facts, while yours is based entirely on nonsense, so they are not comparable."
Except I don't see a single fact in your original comment.
Sorry, but we're both in the same boat here. We're both making political comments while bringing in our own biases based on a lot of assumptions about how things went down. The difference is, I admit it.
"my argument is based [...] on facts, [...] yours ... on nonsense, [they're] not comparable."
I said your stance was based on presumptions, mine on facts, which are by definition incomparable since one is the basis for a conclusion, the other is a search of evidence to fit a pre-concieved conclusion and is typically based on prior context or experience.
Except I don't see a single fact in your original comment.
Then you missed it. The TechCrunch author's controversializing use of race is not supported by any specific facts and is merely a presumption based on circumstantial evidence.
Now, we're in agreement that you believe presumptions are sufficient to reach different conclusions, and I do not.
while bringing in our own biases based on a lot of assumptions
You're confused and not following along. Not only do I make no assumptions on this issue; that assumptions should never be made is my whole point.
The difference is, I admit it.
Your position is that we both make assumptions. My position is that assumptions should not be made and that your stance is justly objectionable. Do you see that admitting the above would not only be a self-contradiction, but, in fact, it would be a reversal?
This is the logical result of "if you see something, say something."
And, I can assure you that almost any science fair project found in a bathroom or under a car would look suspicious. So would a backpack or cardboard box.
"Because it consisted of a board with a digital display and a tiger hologram on the front, the teacher recommended he hide it from the rest of the staff."
Anyone know why the teacher had him hide it? Are they restricted from having electronic devices and toys at school? Is it because the teacher thought it looked suspicious?
Either way it's unfortunate that the teacher didn't just ask to hold on to it until after school was out. If one reasonable adult had stood up for him before another adult freaked then it may not have been an issue.
Condition 1. As long as teachers are drawn from most the lowest deciles of the graduating class, this will continue.
Condition 2. As long as we fail to value the education of children, Condition 1 will continue
Condition 3. As long as the majority of parent perceive that the life outcome of their children are less important than the parent's own desires for money, assets, sexual intercourse and self validation, Condition 2 will continue
Condition 4. As long we are humans, Condition 3 will continue.
Iterate ad infinitum
( or recurse if you love Lambda )
This doesn't surprise me. People are paranoid about bombs and terrorism, and most average people have never seen an exposed circuit board. To them anything with a circuit board and wires looks like the bombs they've seen on TV. I've had an arduino hooked up to an ipod for an art installation confiscated by police. Of course part of the problem was lack of communication by the administrators who had given approval for the project.
This sort of thing is very sad, and a symptom of a larger problem. School district policy is a largely political process with a variety of actors with their agendas involved. Making effective change involves people with children in those schools coming together and making their opinions known. We have had a couple of successes in the bay area using NextDoor as a communication portal for this sort of activism.
Anyone have any actual technical details on what Mohamed built? Judging from the pics I've seen, it's clearly a commercial PCB. I'm wondering if maybe he worked out a power supply or display driver himself or if he simply re-homed a commercial clock into a cooler case... I don't expect that anyone in the 'news' actually cares enough to go into detail.
When tasked with the protection of human capital, it's not a big surprise that the administration takes the most extreme response when confronted with uncertainty. That being said, the Engineering professor could have prevented the whole situation if he had just kept it in his class for the rest of the day instead of advising the student to "hide it".
Making while brown, really? That's the best explosive phrase they could come up with?
Maybe it was stereotyping of one kind of another or maybe not. When Asians or whites are arrested under questionable judgement is it also appropriate to say making while while or Asian?
Dammit, there is an injustice here, but going inflammatory is not helpful. Who does the editing for tv? Are the awol?
What's incredibly sad to me is all the kids whose parents wouldn't let them leave the house with a homemade clock.
"What are you doing? If you take that to school they'll think it's a bomb!"
Even Ahmed's engineering teacher advised him not to show his clock to any other teachers. Fear and suspicion are the default now. That's heartbreaking.
The war on terror is over. Terror has won. The people of America are terrified. Osama bin laden has successfully dragged U.S. into conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq(there would be no war if not for 9/11), ISIS(who appeared from power vacuum left by U.S.) and Syria. U.S. has spent trillions fighting wars and maintaining bureaucracies' expansions that feed on the terror of the American people, and in return through security theatre further encourage this terror. U.S. is in a positive terror feedback loop. It is a kind of hell the U.S. nation state will never escape.
On the plus side, where the end is coming into sight, so is a new beginning.
Perhaps the correct response would be to ban circuit boards and items containing circuit boards from school grounds.
This would be quite educational, as everyone learned the hard way that cars, clocks, cell phones, loudspeakers, and so forth are packed with "threatening" fake bombs.
This line really bothers me. Probably because I simply don't think this way. I don't see color in people.
It is because of this, perhaps wrongly, that I can't accept the idea that this kid was arrested because he is brown. I think a white kid would have been arrested just the same.
Why?
Because the problem, as I see it, is our schools, in some areas, are bastions of ignorance. And this goes beyond K12 into colleges and university.
The problem in this case is an "Engineering" teacher who probably isn't anything close to an engineer. In other words, incapable of evaluating what the kid actually built. For this teacher what was in this little box might as well have been alien technology.
Why do I say this? Because it would have taken any engineer all 30 seconds --if that-- to understand what this kid built.
This could not have been the first time this kid brought some of his work to school. It sounds like he is really into making stuff. His "Engineering" teacher should have known this and should have known his profile.
My oldest kid had a "robotics" class in middle school. In quotes because the teacher would come into the room, sit down and browse the 'net on her iPad while the kids did whatever they wanted. She got to earn extra cash by pretending to teach this class. The union protected her from any potential consequence of her ineptitude. The only reason the other kids learned anything is because my son actually taught them (we have an FLL table in our living room).
Now in college, he's come across the same sort of thing. A calculus 1 "professor" who quite literally copies from the book onto the blackboard and will not answer any questions during class. Students are asked to write the questions down and they might be answered during the next class. She clearly knows nothing. And, to be politically incorrect, is likely to have gotten her job due to "equal opportunity" rules. If I didn't devote a serious amount of time to help my kid Calculus he would have come out of that semester way behind in his understanding. I feel sorry for the other kids if they didn't have a parent with the requisite knowledge and the time to do the teacher's job at home.
Yet in another case, a professor in an arts class devoted half of nearly every class meeting to a monologue about her ongoing attempts to become an actress, professional dancer, whatever. No tests. No teaching. Just ranting about various aspects of her personal life every class. At the end everyone got an A. Sad. Truly sad.
There are many problems with our schools. I feel a huge part of it has to do with ignorance, incompetence and union contracts that prevent us from a "survival of the fittest" approach to evolving good schools with truly intelligent, well-informed, balanced, knowledgeable teachers.
Then there's the deeper political element. Teaching, K12 through University, is largely populated with a wide spectrum of people of Liberal ideology. There was a study [2] that concluded some majors have a ratio of 44:1 in favor of left to extreme-left teachers. And, with that, comes the use of their position to indoctrinate kids --consciously or not.
If you don't think this is a problem, please take a moment to go through the mental exercise of inverting that ratio. How about 44:1 extreme right teachers? Or, today's favorite punching bag, 44:1 Islamic extremist teachers?
Right. The extremes are not good for anybody. Before you jump-up in joy if you like the idea of academia being permeated by left-leaning teachers you need to take a rocket up to low earth orbit and consider what that looks like from many points of view and what the consequences of a mono-ideology might have on society. As an Atheist and moderate Libertarian I feel I am firmly rooted somewhere around the center of both ideologies in many ways. I am with most Liberal social ideas while wanting to see less government intervention and a Conservative fiscal approach to things. Having a 44:1 ratio of teachers pushing one ideology on the kids is a bad thing, no matter where you are standing.
And so, there's also a high likelihood that the teachers who are ignorant, acted like morons and had this kid arrested are Liberal and highly intolerant [1]. Nobody wants to talk about how, for some strange reason, the Left has become the most intolerant group over the last several decades. Principles are great to put down on paper, but, if you don't follow them, what do they mean?
This kid was arrested due to everyone around him being ignorant morons.
> This line really bothers me. Probably because I simply don't think this way. I don't see color in people.
It is because of this, perhaps wrongly, that I can't accept the idea that this kid was arrested because he is brown.
If you really "don't see color", then that's commendable. If you don't think it's possible that other people see color -- well, that's just willful ignorance.
The rest of your comment is irrelevant speculation. You have no idea about the political backgrounds of the teachers of this school. And if I had to speculate, I wouldn't think it's likely that you'd find a lot of hard-line liberal teachers in a suburban Texas high school, in a town whose mayor is notoriously anti-Islam. [1] In any case, it wasn't the teachers who put this kid in handcuffs and interrogated him, it was the cops.
I'm not going to watch a couple of hour-long videos of talking heads, but I'm well aware that people like Sam Harris believe liberals are "intolerant" of anti-Islam sentiment. I'm struggling to see how it's relevant to this issue.
> If you don't think it's possible that other people see color -- well, that's just willful ignorance.
I didn't say that anywhere. Yes, of course, bigots do exist.
Perhaps the greater point is that we shouldn't jump at any conclusions, including one that proposes this kid was singled-out because of the color of his skin or his religion. Nobody knows, right?
I am proposing it was ignorance on the part of the teachers, particularly the Engineering teacher.
Had I been in that position I would have had the kid do a full presentation in front of the class on how he built the clock and how it worked and perhaps see about having him teach the other kids how to build their own in school or as a home project.
Had other teachers expressed concern I would have said something like "Calm down, he is a great kid who'd been tinkering with technology for years. We need to encourage him, not smash him down. He just build a fantastic clock. How about everyone learns from him.".
Then again, that's me. A non-engineer engineering teacher might think he is looking at Martian technology that could end life on the planet.
This kid should not have suffered one bit due to the ignorance of the adults that surrounded him at school.
Beyond that, I think about what he said in the video: They took him into a room with five cops who interrogated him. I, as a parent, would be angry beyond description for that alone.
The case seems a little reminiscent of what happened to Aaron Swartz, large bureaucracy is unable to understand what someone is doing and so it attacks them.
Fortunately it appears that the outcome will not be tragic.
I feel so sorry for the kid :(
I used to make my own beeping LED flashers with BC109C transistors and AA batteries when I was his age, and brought them to school to show my friends how cool electronics is.
And now, every time that kid thinks about pushing the limits of his own personal education, he will reflect on this event and think twice. Will his effort be worth the outcome. Sad day. Very sad day.
President Obama just tweeted: "Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great."
The press release from the school tells you everything about how they view this situation. They took a bad course of action, and now they're going into overdrive to justify why everything the adults did is ok. They'll probably add even more restrictions on what students can bring to school to make sure they don't look like fools again.
Is there any study to ascertain how these kind of incidents affect children psychologically, the effects of which manifest only years later? (Let's assume that this boy is a gifted engineer, and this incident leaves deep psychological scars not expressed in the next few years, but eventually leads him to take up activities later in life which are harmful for American citizens)
Honestly, I had a very similar thing happen to me at an even younger age. Almost got expelled for hacking when I was just making stupid shit with batch programming. Similarly, I made a crappy little audio amp a couple years later at the same school, and again, almost got expelled for "making a weapon and bringing it to school" (they thought it was a stungun)
All it did was make me anti-establishment at a slightly younger age. The kid in this story knows that what he's going through is bullshit, and he's likely to have something pretty good come out of this due to all the media attention. If anything, I'd suspect it would drive him to create more, because if there's something kids like to do it's sticking it to the man.
Nothing quite so extreme for me but I remember being kicked out of class and sent to see our sadistic assistant principal for "trying to cause a panic" in my computer class.
This was around 1993 or 1994 and I was in 11th grade. I was in some fairly "bonehead" computer class and we often worked on simple projects and saved them to floppy disks to take home or work on later.
At the time, the family computer was still an aging Commodore 128 but I was working mostly in DOS at school so I'd bring home my disks and work on projects on my dad's work laptop. Dad's work laptop included a primitive virus scanner so of course I scanned the disk I'd been using on the school network. The scanner finds some minor virus and cleans it up (in retrospect, I guess it could've easily just been a false positive but who knows).
After taking the disk back to school and working on projects again, I scanned it at home the following evening. Virus once again detected. So the next day in class I mention to the teacher that there's probably some innocuous virus on the classroom network and offered to help get rid of it. I was interested in that stuff even if I was still mostly a novice.
But instead of giving me a new project, the teacher flipped out. She accused me of trying to start a panic and disrupting class and sent me to see the ass. principal. Now, this dude hated kids (especially the ones who clearly had no respect for authoritah). I had to sit in his office without speaking while he held a (no joke) half hour conversation on the phone with his friend about some fishing trip they had planned for the weekend. Afterward he reamed me out and basically told me I was full of shit because the teacher wouldn't lie about such things.
In the end, it was my first lesson in "people who don't get computers or trust them will often avoid dealing with issues that make them uncomfortable and possibly view you with hostility for suggesting otherwise."
Yup, similar experience here. I'm now a die hard believer that social structures, governments, and religions are there to make our life's as miserable as possible. To me that experience was comparable to that kid in Whiplash.
Far more likely that the experience will be a distraction to his learning and creativity, and will beg uncomfortable questions, the answers to which will affect his self-esteem.
What really strikes about this story is the fact that Ahmad was the party who came forward to the teacher and notified him of his invention and even demoed it but that wasn't enough for the school staff to deter suspicions since and this elementary school logic level if he were intent on doing harm, he would have concealed completely the fact that he built such a device and kept the info to himself without sharing with anybody till the operation is carried out.
But apparently everything is indeed BIGGER in Texas and this applies to stupidity, ignorance and prejudice as well.
So how do we get his idiot school admin fired? That's the only way to fix this now. He's essentially marked the kid for life now with an arrest record because of his own stupidity. If our society doesn't punish these people (and it doesn't) then this would be a good use for Twitter shaming. He deserves to lose his job.
Honestly, when I was 14 I would have thought it was cool as hell to have a realistic looking suitcase bomb if I had the skills to make one.
I am kind of leaning towards this being a publicity stunt, as a digital clock project really wouldn't require much circuitry, wiring or case space(with the result looking nothing like a bomb ). That being said I find it absurd for the child to be detained over any of it.
In the little video, it looks like a lot of it was just cannibalized parts. I'd be interested in the actual thought process that built the monstrosity (and I say that as a person who just loves that sort of gizmo work). When I was his age, I didn't know anything about proper electronics, and so I only took stuff apart and tried to figure out how to get it combined. I remember one of the big problems I had was figuring out enclosures, and frankly a $5 box from Target really would be the perfect thing; the other stuff likewise followed similarly.
Think of it as the Git-R-Done philosophy, like installing Postgres for a single two column table. It ain't elegant, but I wouldn't make a kid feel bad for trying.
1. In 2015 it's highly unlikely that you could build a home-made clock that would be of the size and shape resembling a bomb - that is, unless it was made to look like a bomb.
2. Ahmed, his father, and anyone else with a phone camera (that is on Ahmed's side) would have posted a picture of the clock, or given a full description of it (size, shape, etc), in defense of Ahmed - that is, if it made sense, otherwise they would not. And I have not been able to find an image, nor a good description.
3. The initial teacher told him not to show it to anyone. You can break this down into that teacher having one of two opinions: A) It really did look like a bomb or B) its all about racism / hate / being anti-Muslim / anti-brown in that school (check the school's panel http://www.irvingisd.net/domain/2031 - that school is half brown and black).
#3 could be that the engineering teacher knows some of the other teachers and administrators are a bunch of panicky idiots and will freak out when "the brown arab kid" brings in something they don't immediately recognize.
You're assuming that it actually looked like a bomb.
It clearly did not. (There are pictures linked elsewhere in this comment thread, so you can see.) What happened is that a bunch of complete idiots thought it looked like a bomb, only because they have no idea what a bomb looks like, and they are additionally ignorant of their own ignorance.
To have a bomb you need explosives. Did this "looks like a bomb" have anything that looked like explosives? No. Therefore it did not actually look like a bomb.
I assume that you meant to google image search IED. Doing so, I see one image with an exposed PCB. I see several images with cell phones. One shows a Coke can. Are we to believe that an exposed Coke can also "looks like a bomb"? Or should we maybe believe that showing up in a Google Image search for a particular term is not sufficient to "look like" something?
The claim is that the device looked like a bomb. That he's being charged with "creating a hoax bomb" makes no difference to this. Either a hoax bomb still looks like a bomb, or we're giving control over to idiots to declare that a hoax bomb is anything that looks like their crazy and inaccurate ideas of what a bomb looks like.
Certainly IEDs can have exposed PCBs. So do hard drives. It's irrelevant.
What do explosives look like? I don't know. But I know that they look like something, and they probably don't look like electronics. So when you have a device that is a bunch of electronics and nothing else, I can pretty safely say that it does not look like a bomb, because there are no explosives.
Sad that you're being downvoted (and probably flagged) for expressing a reasonable opinion.
Hacker News has been a left-wing echo chamber ever since the crazies started flowing in during that period when every story on the front page was NSA related.
Now it's nearly impossible to have a reasoned discussion on any non-technical issue without SJWs using the voting system here to silence dissent.
> Maybe he's being downvoted because the so-called facts he's basing his suspicion on can be easily disproven
Which of the 3 points have been dis-proven?
Also take into concideration that -
1. The kid had a metal box containing PCBs and probably large components, all tide together around with a wire, and it was making beeping noises in class.
2. The school body and school district is almost 90% non-white, with the majority being "brown".
re. 1: His claim that it is "highly unlikely" that a home-made clock would look like a bomb needs some citation. Unless your definition of "looks like a bomb" is "anything with PCBs and wires, stuck in some kind of box", at which point I would argue that any home-made clock will look like a bomb.
re. 2: He's asking the father to provide an image of something that was confiscated by the police or school administration. Furthermore, the first video with the boy contained a fairly detailed description of the clock, and the second video even contains an image of the box (or at least a similar box).
re. 3: Well, he provided an alternative explanation for that himself.
You're getting downvoted, rightly, but I wanted to explain why that is.
> Is that racist ?
Yes
> Do you people really want to live in a world where gays,transgenders,gypsies,blacks,hispanics,yellows,purples are favoured and put on pedestal
You've got a pretty distorted view of all this. No-one (sane) is advocating for putting any group on a pedestal, we're just asking people to treat others as if they were human beings, which they are. It's really not that hard to grasp.
For example, in this case we are discussing no-one is asking for the kid to get special treatment because of his race, instead they are pointing out that he should not be actively discriminated against because of his race.
Thanks to the HN users who tirelessly flag comments for the good of this community. Without you, we couldn't moderate this site. Because of you, we can at least prevent the bottom from falling out.
This kid didn't show up with a homemade alarm clock at a Confederate Flag rally.
He showed up at a school
You know, those places where you go to learn? Where you have these people called "teachers" who are supposed to have a college degree and promote learning?
Context matters. If you can't trust educated teachers in a school to know the difference between an alarm clock and a bomb, who else can you trust?
So in your ideal world brown/Muslim children should not be encouraged to tinker with electronics. Or maybe they should just stay away from any form of engineering whatsoever. Does that sound about right cowboy?
Every student, teacher, and staff is bringing or already has one of those in the school every day in computers, laptops/macbooks, smartphones, security cameras/alarms, etc.
Because he's profiling, it's a survival instinct. He sees on the news daily about Muslims using bombs and blowing things up and he's associating it with this kid. He believes statistically that Ahmed is more likely to be carrying a bomb than Alice.
Is this true? I don't know, maybe it is? It's the same reason I am cautious when I walk alone downtown at night and a stranger approaches me. I act differently because I know statistically that they're more likely to be dangerous compared to at 2:00 PM... well, again... I assume so.
The hard part is trying to ignore statistics and the media on things like skin color and religion. It doesn't matter if x color or y religion is more dangerous, you need to ignore it. Thinking differently or acting differently because of these statistics is frowned upon.
In this case, it's silly. Of course it's not a bomb, of course the kid isn't dangerous.
> The hard part is trying to ignore statistics and the media on things like skin color and religion.
If people paid attention to statistics, this wouldn't be an issue: Terror is so exceedingly unlikely to kill you that it's a rounding errro. In the US you're more likely to get killed by lightning.
Part of the problem is that the risk has been blown out of all proportion.
> He sees on the news daily about Muslims using bombs and blowing things up
Did this happen with the Irish in the US during the Troubles?
Same reasons Italians and Germans weren't interned to the same extent the Japanese were during the 2nd World War: They can't be told apart from "proper" folk as easily. You can pick out most Arabs, but it's much harder to pick out most Irish.
Still a travesty. We need to move beyond hatred, especially of people we've never met.
Many, probably most, of us can imagine ourselves in this kid's shoes.
Personally, I was punished repeatedly in high school for things I didn't do, simply because the administration was extremely paranoid about my computer knowledge. The principal once threatened me with "blacklisting" (seriously) because they got infected with a virus and didn't know what was going on.
A lot of people in the tech community have similar stories. We tend to stick out in the wrong way while in high school.
What's really worrying is that when I was his age, it was just the school I had to worry about. I was sometimes harassed and threatened (and to be fair, encouraged in a lot of things) by the administration while at school, but that's where it ended. Now they're getting the whole system involved.
Because it's a person making something, authority denying him that for stupid reasons, etc. It has all the elements of something that appeals to hackers (in the "maker" sense).
But seriously, if you have to ask you will never know. This is more of a "you get it or not" thing, related to how HN's targeted demographic feels on such issues.
I'm not a banker or a lawyer, I get the story bro, I just don't recall ever seeing a story reach 1&2 in both places at the same time. I would maybe expect the discovery of extra terrestrial life to get that kind of fascination.
Because every hacker on hacker news has done stupid shit with science and technology. And the majority of us got away with it.
When a kid is brutally harassed over double nothing, we can both link with him AND cry for the experimental culture that is dying the death of a thousand cuts.
Many of us were the nerdy kid in school at his age, and we got bullied by people because of it. That fact that he's being bullied by his school administration and the police is just disgusting.
One-off events in the world don't really interest me. I believe that on any given day in the US, some public school administrator does something stupid where a student is involved. And also the majority of public school administrators are very competent and handle similar situations without blowing things out of proportion.
There's no evidence of a trend. This isn't a sign of a shift in culture or of the impending [DOOMSDAY SCENARIO].
Wow, this thread makes me ashamed to be nerd. It's all bashing the intelligence of administrators/educators while hypocritically trying to make the point that we shouldn't scorn groups of people. "Hey, kid, if a person can't tell a clock circuit from a bomb, it invalidates all their motives and education."
I have kids at school and I'm actually for the responses from the teachers, yes it's overacting and could be dealt with _much_ better, but being overly alert on this is better than ignorant.
and it's better to show it at his house instead of at school for things like this I feel.
"but being overly alert on this is better than ignorant."
Please cite any evidence that this is true in practice.
Seriously.
The long-term cost to treating kids like this is probably vastly higher than any possible damage caused by the threats.
(IE i would even expect it causes more kids to die younger over time)
Humans are very good at significantly overestimating the risks they can easily reason about, and significantly underestimate the ones they can't.
1. His own engineering teacher "suggested that he not show the invention to other teachers." He should have listened, but...
2. During his English class the case made beeping noises. Not smart bringing it to English.
3. When questioned, he didn't explain what it was all about, and was described as playing "passive aggressive".
4. He calls it an "invention", but a digital clock in a case is not an invention. He's 14 years old, not 8. There's nothing inventive about it.
5. Admitted in the video he chose a "simple cable" to lock the case so it "wouldn't look threatening". So let's be clear, he did think about the possibility of it looking threatening, and his own teacher warned him about it.
Are the pieces coming together for you?
if he's smart, which apparently he is, then he should move on from clocks in cases to something that approaches an actual invention.
"Ahmed, for his part, wanted to bring the clock to show an engineering teacher. Because it consisted of a board with a digital display and a tiger hologram on the front, the teacher recommended he hide it from the rest of the staff."
This statement implies there was a conversation with the teacher before bringing it in and that the teacher told him to bring it, but to not bring it out in other classes/in front of other teachers.
Your other points are not even worth replying to and border on trolling. You're upset that he didn't invent something new at 14? Building a homemade clock is too simple for his age and only 8 year olds should do it? This is one of the most insane posts I've ever seen on HN.
It's no surprise that our school systems are such shit when people actually feel there are two sides to a kid wanting to show his teacher something interesting and academic that he made.
So... kid with an Arabic name, whose father is a belligerent Islamist known to the townspeople to rail against imagined anti-Muslim racists in the town square, shows up at school with a homemade electronic device with a timer on the front of it. He takes someone's bad advice to conceal it under his clothing, and walks into a classroom where it starts beeping.
I think reasonable people can understand why the police might have been called.
It was of course unreasonable for the police to have actually arrested the boy, once they found out what they were dealing with. Reading between the lines though, maybe the article's use of "arrested" just means they took the kid home to his parents.
The father is an anti-Islamist. Anti. It means opposite. The guy is sufficiently anti-Islamist to go run for president of Sudan. That takes some dedication.
Muslim != Islamist, just as Christian != Westboro Baptist.
The article said the father is outspoken against (presumably imaginary) anti-Islamic policies.
You may not know this, but Sudan is ruled by its Muslim, Arab north and is often quite happy to enslave or murder the black Christians in its south. Hardly a model of an anti-Islamist republic.
I'm not sure what kind of policies he's outspoken against, but if someone is against policies that they perceive to be hostile to Muslims, how does that make them Islamists who want to establish Islamic rule?
He is a Sufi (mystic, esoteric) and more than a bit eccentric. I saw his brand of Islam described as "New Testament" elsewhere. He has tried to argue (contrary to most Islamic scholarship) that the earlier peaceful Meccan sections actually abrogate the later warlike Medinan sections of the Quran. I don't think he's any sort of Islamist at all.
"He says he has serious issues with the hardline, traditional readings of the text, and he's writing a book about his reading of the Koran -- with working titles like Jesus Among Us With the Quran, or The New Understanding of the Quran."
Notice in the video he says "he used a simple cable to lock it so it wouldn't look like a threat".
People are forgetting that there's nothing impressive about a "clock in a case". He called it an "invention". Sorry kid, you're 14, not 8. Nothing inventive about sticking a digital clock in a case.
His own engineering teacher suggested he not show it to other teachers. So what does he do? Takes it to English class where it makes beeping noises. Real smart kid, real smart.
It's a clock in a case. NASA are not interested.
Then, when first questioned he was apparently "passive aggressive", not explaining why he made it or why he brought it to school. Gee kid, you're really making all the smart moves.
Ask yourself, why would his own teacher suggest he not show it to other teachers? Here's why... his "invention" looked dodgy as all hell.
Hashtag "I'm not standing with this kid, not this time".
I can't see anywhere in that diatribe where he was asking to be arrested. The outrage is at the reaction here, not the kids level of martyrdom. We still aren't supposed to arrest 14 year old jerks with PCBs.
I'm sure it's always diatribe when you don't agree.
"Asking for trouble" is what I mean. The default processes in the USA are not what I'm talking about, but everyone here is defending his "right to be creative". Nobody is saying "hang on, he put a clock in a case, brought it to school, not part of any school project, advised not to show it around, showed it around anyway and was passive aggro when asked about it".
It wasn't just "something", it was a case with a timer inside and wires and circuits.
His "invention" was not anything useful. The only useful function I can think of for such a device, is actually a hoax bomb for drama class. What good is a clock inside a case?
I'm getting down-voted to all hell, but that's what one gets for backing one's argument in a den of trigger-happy bigot-hunters.
He showed it to his engineering teacher. If he'd left it there, everything would have been okay. But he took it to English class.
His mother blamed racial profiling, but does that mean his ethnicity or his religion or both? Does he practice Islam? 14 year old kids studying Islam on the side, then bringing cases packed with electronics to school, then being coy when asked about it? It adds up to trouble in anyone's language.
How is a timer with wires and circuits "not just something"? Are you implying that the fear of this device was somehow justified?
The kid is 14 years old. So what if his invention isn't useful? He was enthusiastic about it and he probably learned something from it. Maybe some of his classmates could have learned that electronics aren't magical mysterious black boxes.
He took the object of his enthusiasm to English class. Yes, if he had left it at showing it to the engineering teacher this whole thing wouldn't have happened, but that doesn't mean he was wrong to show it to his English class.
What exactly about his behavior do you see as "asking for trouble"? Because I don't see anything that even remotely qualifies.
I have spent a lot of time making non-useful things, including every project I've ever made with an Arduino.
And what's with the "practicing Islam" thing? I was in this group where I memorized the Sermon on the Mount in junior high, in addition to going to church and doing choir. We got cookies every week. Seriously, no one thought I was getting radicalized when I "practiced" the religion of a radical Middle Easterner three times a week. Joke's on them: I got so radicalized I refused to join the church because of the hypocrisy I perceived (as a self-righteous mildly aspie junior highschooler).
And we made actual explosives at school in my day.... good times.
> bringing cases packed with electronics [...] adds up to trouble
Yeah, seriously. Gotta watch those non-ROHS solder compounds hobbyists like to use. Also, through-hole pins can be sharp and scratchy.
This is part of the ridiculous ignorance that has a lot of us upset. At what point did a printed circuit board outside an enclosure become a "weapon"? Are the decision makers in our society (and exodust here) really so divorced from the techical world that they're informing their opinions based on the blinking gadgets in cartoons?
It wasn't just a circuit board. The whole issue is around it looking like a 'hoax suitcase bomb'. Check google images for the endless list of suitcase bombs. I don't think at any point anyone actually thought it was a threat. The school over-reacted, but they though he deliberately was making something look like a suitcase bomb.
Of course, he's not going to admit that is he. Just an innocent 14yo, who would never make something that looked like a suitbase bomb. Reminder: he's 14. When you're 14, fake suitcase bombs are cool.
Obama says "it's a cool clock". But it runs off mains power, it's enclosed in a small suitcase (hobbyists don't use such enclosures). If you ask me, the kid was going for something that looked "secretive" or "spy games" at the very least.
This "suitcase" is about 17cm wide. You can measure it from your picture using the conveniently-located power plug, whose prongs will be 12.7mm apart. If this kid wanted to make something that looked like a suitcase, surely he would use something big enough to actually hold at least one suit?
Yep, that's the US today. And of course Obama doesn't waste a second to exacerbate the situation by vilifying the school/policeman/whatever. It's amazing how in 5 minutes everyone knows all the facts and concludes these school officials are racist xenophobic knuckle-draggers.
Where did Obama do that? The only comment from him I've seen was his tweet that just said, "Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great."
As a leader who is supposed to be about bringing people together and not being divisive, he had an opportunity here. Fine to complement the kid. But he could also have thrown in a "in this time we know school administrators have to be vigilant, they have a tough job, we're all in this together, whatever". Something like that. But his tweet indirectly says this kid is great and the school admins are the bad guys. I just wish for once he could do something to calm a situation instead of throwing gasoline on a fire.
Yep. This is like two parents. One is scolding a child for doing something wrong. The other parent goes to the child and says, "come on, lets go to Chuck E Cheese". It's undermining the authority figure. How much do you think this kid will respect the administration/teachers at this schools after his visit to the White House where Obama reinforced how they were all horribly wrong?
All I'm really saying is he could have easily cooled the situation.
If it's like two parents, then one of them is abusive, and the other one is trying to gently steer the kid away from the abuser.
Sometimes authority figures need to be undermined. Doing so is not "vilifying" them, even if the abuser might see it that way.
Why does the situation need to be "cooled," exactly? There aren't any riots over this. The only person who was harmed in any way was the 14-year-old kid who was arrested and interrogated at length without a lawyer and without his parents. Why are you more concerned about the feelings of the people who did this than about him?
It sounds to me like Exodust is just trying to validate preconceived notions and is unwilling to consider evidence contrary to those. Honestly, when I read the headline I was skeptical as I feel like I have been burned in the past many times by immediately siding with the 'victim.' However, this seems like a pretty clear case where one should be outraged about what happened to the student, even if one takes presumptions in favor of the school.
I don't feel strongly about this other than not having the story occupy more than one spot on the front page, so if people have strong objections otherwise, we can adjust.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10230696
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10230555