That's a fantastic way to encourage kids to go into science and technology fields: make them think it's criminal activity and then send them to counseling. I love the irony that this happened at a science and technology magnet school where one might, by some off-chance, presume the teachers are better informed. Way to go, educational system overlords.
Imagine if Jobs and Wozniak had lived today during this sort of thing. They'd be sitting in Gitmo.
To be fair, it was the vice principal, not a teacher, who was concerned that "it might be harmful" and notified the police. Certainly, school administrators get promoted based not on their teaching or academic credentials, but on degree to which they adopt the "erring on the side of caution" mentality. What's terrifying is that it takes just one call of an ill-informed, over-reacting person to set this kind of disproportionate response into motion.
Personally, I think this story has broader implications than simply that American students are discouraged from pursuing interests in science and technology. I think it illustrates two socially destructive trends:
1. To perceive anything science or technology related that has not been marked with the corporate stamp of approval as a potential threat. Any device with exposed wires that are not hidden behind a slick case with a logo must be a bomb. Anyone that's using command-line instead of a slick GUI must be a hacker, etc.
2. To consider perception of safety above all; that is an over-reaction on a massive scale is not considered anything short of normal. It's normal to send a bomb squad to a kid's house on a mere suspicion of a school official. It's normal to close down a major airport because of a battery explosion. And so on, and so on.
> that is an over-reaction on a massive scale is not considered anything short of normal.
I think it is more subtle than that. If it was about safety, they would cancel cheerleading and football. I know I have been repeating myself in 2 other comments on the same thread, I feel strongly about this, see here http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5538a1.htm for some CDC stats on 2005-2006 ).
What seems to happen is that schools are interested not in safety but in avoiding litigation. So they are only concerned with the perception of safety. It all revolves around "Would we get sued?" or "Legally, did we cover our asses?"
Schools should just merge with TSA, they both seems to share their delusions about safety.
I think the key word here is perception: both perception of safety and perception of threat are at play. Sports are not perceived as dangerous, technology -- unless contained as I described above -- is. I'm not sure about degree to which the threat of litigation plays here. Certainly one would think that millions of dollars lost in airport shutdowns would have some weight, but it does not appear so.
Not by AOSSM: "With more and more kids participating in sports, injuries are on the rise – an estimated two million occurring each year, resulting in 500,000 doctor visits and 30,000 hospitalizations" [http://www.sportsmed.org/tabs/newsroom/AOSSMPressReleaseDeta...]
"Almost one-third of all injuries incurred in childhood are sports-related injuries." [http://www.chp.edu/CHP/P01650]
I'm not going to comment on that - I just wondered what the actual injury rate is and found this.
In the TSA grunt's defense, the training course probably involved something like "look for the hard drive, it's blue with a circle thing", "look for the battery, it's green", etc. Replacing a hard drive with C4 could yield a pretty sizable explosion...
I think it's less of a reaction to technology than it is to the post-9/11 terrorist scare.
Ever since then America's developed severe allergies to everything bombs and explosives or dangerous.
What's worse is an incompetent TSA that's trying too hard all in the wrong places. The only reason the recent terrorist attempt failed was because the guy just happened to be as incompetent as the TSA. Or maybe the plane would have landed on my house and killed me (and would have disrupted my stream of consciousness; I live in the Detroit area) and so in my universe he failed.
But to be completely fair, China's TSA seems to be just as incompetent, probably more so since they really don't have as many terrorist attacks to test their strategies. I had a really small bottle of children's Moltrin confiscated, but it got through USA TSA. I wouldn't be surprised the next time I get on a flight with two sticks to be stopped and questioned. God forbid I start a fire by rubbing the sticks and burn everyone to death while they are sleeping.
In my mind I want the child to go to counselling but it goes like this:
Kids gets dropped of at a massive imposing building, he walks endless corridors looking for room 101, with fear in his heart he opens the door and enters a dark room. When he shuts the door, the lights click on and Woz is there and tells the kid... "don't worry, the world is full of idiots, let's make something cool"
That's what the kid really needs and more importantly deserves!
When I was in school we had friggin' ROCKETS! That's right, we had an after school ROCKET club headed up by one of the science teachers. He'd show us how to build the different Estes models and then supervise us as we launched them, and in class would blow shit up and set things on fire and we all loved him for it. That was 1992. It's sad to know that such would never be tolerated today.
I was expelled from a "science and technology" magnet school for finding some holes in their network. The IT admin's password was "north" so I could basically do anything.
Based on the way they did logins (Novell on Win2k workstations) any time a user logged in on a machine, I could get their password. It was a matter of booting a live linux distro, mounting a usb stick, copying a few files from the windows drive over to the usb stick, and then brute forcing once I got home.
I screwed around a little bit, rebooting various Netware servers from the web admin for fun. Unfortunately the "shut down" button does a graceful shutdown and sends a message to every single machine on the network... so it wasn't very stealth. All in all, I never did a single malicious thing. I explored their network, restarted some servers, and logged in as a teacher occasionally to screencap the "Logout blah teacher name" to show off to my buddies. Never once did I look at anyones personal documents or change any grades. I was a pussy, just an explorer.
Long story short, being a cocky 16 year old kid with a ton of user passwords, I blogged about it and got nailed. The way they handled it wash horrible, literally dragging me and my buddies out of class by the arm and cursing at us for embarrassing the school. This all happened the day after returning from a thanksgiving break, but the interesting thing is one of the teachers there was dragged into the "investigation" (every single post/page on my blog was printed into little booklets for the majority of the staff to read and analyze) and personally called me the day before the break, to let me know that I better watch my ass.
I'm a good guy, I give money back to people who drop it on the sidewalk, give up my seat on the bus to women, kids, and the elderly, etc... but they didn't realize it. The staff there is so elite because their public magnet school only gets the "smart" kids in the district. They kicked me out as soon as they had the chance. Their infrastructure is probably still vulnerable and their IT staff are just as clueless. I'd have happily done anything that I could to prevent other jacknobs in the school from doing what I did, if they had just asked for my help or even just noticed there was a problem and made changes. Instead... I'm some crazy hacker kid who doesn't belong amongst the elite kids.
I remember booting a live cd once before I even had a reputation at the school, and it was as though I was beating off in church. People were so incredibly offended by the terminal and lack of gui, like I was some kind of hacker just waiting to destroy everything.
Looking back.. I wish I hadn't been such a wimpy 10th grader. I should have screwed around way more in high school. For some reason the second I was expelled and sent to the "normal" high school I grew some balls and started acting like a regular teenager.
Oh yeah the dump I speak of is called Clark Magnet and it's in La Crescenta, California.
When I was in British middle school I got into trouble for bringing a small tape recorder to school. A teacher saw it, it was confiscated and I was in deep trouble. When I tried to explain to the deputy head that it was a tape recorder and not a radio (which was specifically forbidden by school rules) I was told to "shut up" and that I didn't have the "right to speak" because I had broken a rule.
In the end my parents went to the headmaster and gave him an earful.
The good news is that the school's behaviour had a lasting impression on me: people in authority act like assholes because they are in authority.
When I have kids I plan to teach them at a very early age to stand their ground when dealing with situations like this. The first step to protecting yourself from this kind of aggression is knowing it for what it is and not fearing it.
I do. I owe my parents an enormous amount. Hence the special thanks to them in my book. They made a tremendous impact in my life by allowing me to be me.
According to evolutionary psychology, you would have been yourself no matter what. For example, Steven Pinker sustains in The Blank Slate that the influence of parenting on personality, IQ and other more specific traits is pretty much negligible (as long as you have "reasonable" parents). Variance in those traits is 40-50% heritable, 50% due to factors outside the control of parenting (accidents, diseases, peer groups, randomness during development) and 0-10% due to parenting.
This sounds very counterintuitive to many people because it's not the way we would like it to be. Many studies of adopted siblings, twins separated at birth, and natural siblings who grew up in different families support this hypothesis.
You could argue, then, that your parents are responsible for choosing where you grew up and your peer group, and who your other parent is. They're still 100% responsible for how you turned out, it's just the critical decisions happened before you were born.
Not exactly. Your brain is shaped partly by randomness in the womb or in the environment that is not directly under their control. This doesn't include decisions such as whether your mother drinks or smokes but more chaotic variables that cannot be controlled. Also, your parents can do their best to choose what they consider a good environment (e.g. a city or a school) but your innate personality is a stronger indicator of the groups that you will tend to associate with in that context. This is why siblings who grow up in the same environment chosen by their parents can have extremely different personalities and peer groups.
Parents can give you opportunities. At about 12 they found me a computer science tutor, and that pretty much sealed by future career (for better). This was _NOT_ random. It was only one of a very long string of stuff they tried very deliberately in order to find my "thing".
As a kid I did briefly a whole lot of stuff, from swimming to skating dance to karate. Most of it didn't catch at all - I still have two left feet - but the stuff that did made a real difference. And almost all of it was at my parent's initiative.
This model seems mistaken. Certainly in the negative direction, parents can "bring down" a kid far beyond the 10% that they supposedly have influence over.
I realize it's just a model and not intended to be entirely accurate. Just seems like a very small piece of the story.
Every time I hear that kind of a story, I wonder if I should come back from UK to my home country when I need to send my kids to school; just so they can go to a normal place. Sure - it may be a less known school. But at least you get treated in a normal way and the rules are not that different between the school and any public place (i.e. you'd have to have a knife in your hand to get stopped). I can't imagine any teacher there asking me about any electronic equipment to be honest... (apart from genuine interest, or in a "do you really want to bring that to school - for your own safety" way)
"The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said."
What possible sane school policies could exist at the "Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School" that the student could have violated? Don't do anything with what we're teaching you outside of school?
I suppose there might be a rule of "don't bring in anything unless you get it screened first", but ... geez. Given the level of screening they considered necessary for this device, that doesn't sound likely.
I'm really glad I went to school in the 1970s; heck, for my 2nd year in JROTC teaching unit (my senior year in high school), where we went beyond writting a lesson plan to actually teaching a lesson (in anything we wanted, didn't have to military related), I used a page from the Ranger Handbook to show how to build an improvised booby-trap, with a bottle rocket as the thing which went "boom" (mounted in a 2x4 block of wood; much better than a firecracker, makes a lot of noise building up to the boom without as high a single impulse).
The instructor was concerned for a moment until he remembered who was giving the lesson ^_^. If someone tried that today they'd probably end up in jail (then again, I suspect my home school district isn't this insane).
I was thinking the same thing (though more 80s than 70s for me). I was very interested in chemistry from 7th grade and up, and did a lot of home experiments including some more or less flammable stuff. This was at least in part encouraged by both my chemistry teacher and my parents and grandparents. Had this been today and in the US and the police had gone through my garage, it seems likely I would be in jail.
This stuff is extremely troubling to me. This hysterical overreaction will, as many have already pointed out, serve to completely discourage kids from nurturing their interest in science, and it makes me really, really hesitant about the prospect of raising kids in the US.
> What possible sane school policies could exist at the "Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School" that the student could have violated? Don't do anything with what we're teaching you outside of school?
> I suppose there might be a rule of "don't bring in anything unless you get it screened first", but ... geez. Given the level of screening they considered necessary for this device, that doesn't sound likely.
It seems pretty shocking to me that the boy's home was searched. Was there any reasonable suspicion of anything?
To be honest, it's a pity we don't know the name of the student so we can start sending him presents consisting of subscriptions to Make, electronics books, chemistry sets etc.
We could send the subscriptions to his school! Imagine how traumatized he must be, now. He'll need counseling just to deal with the stress--not to overcome his 'problem' making electronics.
Hopefully the counseling will include skills for coping with ignorant authoritarian bureaucracies - essential for tech innovators outside of tech-savvy settings.
That is quite likely why they recommended counseling. The official reaction here sounds exactly like the one depicted in E.T.! Any 11 year old would be traumatized. The linked article doesn't say what the counseling is for.
Indeed, but perhaps based on the threat, implicit or explicit, that their son would be expelled if they didn't consent.
ADDED: Presentation also counts, e.g. if the police show up without the son, and say (as a worse case) the son brought a bomb to school, can we check for any other dangerous materials in his room?
My kid is in 6th grade, which is middle school in these parts. He did his science project over the Christmas break, which involved a Daniels battery (zinc, copper, copper sulfate, zinc sulfate).
Although his science teacher had agreed to take the solutions for disposal before the break, I was still cautious when I brought them in first day after break. I left everything in the car, went to the office, asked them to call the teacher to get his permission, and then brought the chemicals in, all the while trying to look like a straight citizen as I walked by the sheriff parked out front as usual. I had exactly the OP's scenario in mind. No sense pushing things when the world is nuts.
Yet we have no qualms about our kids playing sports where they easily can break their necks and knees. If you go to any school in US, you'll see students with casts and bandaged knees and elbows. Most of those are sports injuries. See how many children have "science" related injuries -- you'll probably see none. So it is not that we want to protect our children, because then we'd have to cancel football, but instead we end up teaching and perpetuating certain attitudes and values that ultimately will put our country at a disadvantage.
I was very concerned recently to read of your school being forced to evacuate after finding a suspicious device in the backpack of one of your students, as reported here:
I realize that the press often distorts facts in order to better fit their own narrative, but the idea that a child at a technical magnet school is being embarrassed at a school-wide level for doing experimental technical work in his own time is extremely worrying. The suggestion that he is being sent for "counselling" is even harder to believe.
As I'm certain you're aware, America has an ongoing problem with adequate science education, a problem schools like yours are meant to correct. This kind of hysterical overreaction is only going to discourage children from building their own devices, and from creative play in general. It is part of a deeply worrying anti-science trend in this country, and I hope you agree that the real changes needed here are at the administrative level, to prevent these kinds of misunderstandings from getting so out of hand in future.
Great, the school and police _traumatize_ a child for doing exactly what we should want them to do: be inquisitive, curious, and creative.
The _parents_ need counseling!?
These news stories are not shocking anymore (sadly) due to how frequently these absurd reactions are. What is very angering is how the reporter/news outlet never indicate how disproportional and inappropriate the 'official' response is. There's never a cautionary lesson on over-reaction; rather, they always praise "erring on the side of caution" (i.e. erring on the side of irrationality). Yes, fear will keep us safe, eh?
Who said anything about keeping us safe? Fear puts butts in seats, which is the entirety of the media's interest in the matter. Now stay tuned for the shocking truth about child abductions in broad daylight - a report no parent can afford to miss!
"He was very shaken by the whole situation, as were his parents," Luque said.
Well that will teach him to be interested in electronics. It's a good thing that there's an overabundance of kids going into science and engineering, otherwise this sort of thing could become a problem.
This reminds me of Star Simpson, the (former) MIT student who showed up to Boston's Logan airport in 2007 wearing a sweatshirt with a light-up LED circuit on it. She wasn't even flying, just waiting at baggage claim for a friend, when one of the airport employees concluded that a 19-year-old girl with an unusual sweatshirt might be a suicide bomber. 40 (that's right: 40) police showed up, and she was charged with possessing a "hoax device" (http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/09/19/star-simpson-once-mi.htm...). I'm still pissed at MIT for throwing her under a bus; instead of saying "This is ridiculous, clearly the airport staff and police overreacted", they bent over and supported the authorities 100%.
I still think that the girl was stupid for bringing it to an airport of all places. She had putty in her hand, that could be mistaken for plastic explosives. Terrorists have been known to detonate explosives with hand triggers when confronted. A 19yo MIT student should know better
IMHO An 11yo school student would be more deserving of the benefit of the doubt on his project, than the girl at MIT
Im really confused. Are you telling me that in America, teachers are so ignorant of their students, that their first assumption would be that the device is dangerous? Didn't they bother to actually ASK him what it did? I imagine an 11 year-old wouldn't intentionally himself up with his classmates.
I go to a public school (and one of the best ones in the country (the US)). Even here, that statement is so close to true in some cases I don't know whether to laugh or cry... It's even worse IMHO with middle schools, because that's the time period when a lot of kids internally decide 'oh I'm going to be solely a sports person' vs 'wow! math and electronics and physics are so cool.'
What gets me is that in our school, in one of the best schools in the country, there's so much idiocy - I can't even imagine the levels of stupidity and prison-like institution present elsewhere. (Funny anecdote: at one point last year, the school staff started putting up bars, expandable bars, in the hallways to prevent people from leaving the cafeteria during lunch. There was quite literally no way to get out and go anywhere, without bumping up against an angry security guard.)
That reminds me of the guy that was seen using a commandline window on his laptop and got immediately suspected of breaking into the network. ("normal people only use GUIs")
And the guy (maybe the same guy?) who actually had a warrant served to search his dorm room and seize his computers, based in part on the fact that he had been seen using a command line.
The warrant was later quashed, don't know how or if the case concluded.
Heh. I just used a terminal on my laptop while trying to figure out why the airplane I was just on didn't want to let me have internet access. Guess it's a good thing I look normal....?
It's hard to believe nowadays that a President said something as radical as what Roosevelt said in his inaugural address:
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
You can be too careful, and schools need to realize it. Incidentally, so does liability law.
Isn't going to happen.
Schools will object because of insurance/liability concerns.
Teacher's unions will complain
Dads won't be allowed unless they have a police background check.
Remember we must protect the dear little children.
The dads are probably all child molesters anyway. What possible reason could a grown man have to spend time with a child other than to sexually abuse them?
In fact, we should probably take their own children away from them.
Our school system is incurably insane. Its actions are irrational, only tangentially related to its explicit goals. Reform is likely impossible, like trying to turn a cancerous tumor into a working organ.
I am quite concerned by this because it suggests to me that these schools would have to start modifying the curriculum. What about exothermic reactions using iron or aluminum filings? Basic cellulose reactions? In high school we made thermite and the teacher made nitroglycerin. I guess all that is over now? How can you move to University without this basic knowledge? (on a principle / elemental level)
> What about exothermic reactions using iron or aluminum filings?
Well now, we wouldn't want our precious little snowflakes to blow their fingers off. But we'll sign them up for cheerleading and football, where they can break their knees, heads and spines.
So we are basically banking on them all being professional athletes and dancers. But then, of course, we wonder how come we are so behind all the other countries in science and math.
I made nitrocellulose in high school chem in 2005; the teacher gave me the instruction sheet and told me to go at it. The teacher also made thermite and welded a cast iron pan to an iron plate. So, I don't know when or where you went to school, but we did the same things you did (thermite and nitroglycerin) only 5 years ago, and this in a little farm town of about 2,000 souls.
Little farm towns are the last bastion of sanity in this respect. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, too; the prevailing philosophy there is, if anybody else can do something, then I might as well try it.
Same here. I went to high school in a little farm town. There were no metal detectors or mandatory ID badges, people openly carried pocket knives in case they had to cut something, and some of the classes would leave you unsupervised with power tools. The only problems with security came from damn fool English teachers. One of them flipped out over a plastic butter knife, and another misinterpreted an teenage gloom as a warning sign of impending terrorism and called the police.
I, on the other hand, went to a public highschool in a well-to-do Los Angeles suburb. The year before I graduated, a senior girl was expelled from school two days before her graduation because she brought a swiss army knife on the senior trip.
delighted to hear it! I was just projecting a possible future - if a person gets into trouble with a few empty water bottles now .. what will they do to the curriculum later...
Thus concludes episode 282464 in how our public school systems have been transformed into prisons/day-care centers for anyone under the age of 18 rather than institutions of education helping to mold the adults of tomorrow.
The end goal of the education system should be a self-sufficient, literate, mature, responsible adult, yet there are precious few indications that today's education system has anything even remotely close to that as a goal.
That was part of the apparent intent behind No Child Left Behind. Since some people just aren't as capable as others, the only way to keep anyone from getting "left behind" is to keep anyone from getting ahead. The "Harrison Bergeron" Act is coming up.
What we need is for a few people in positions of public trust to have the courage to say "yes, you can be too careful". A small risk of something Very Bad is better than the death of a thousand cuts.
I was just reading yesterday that DARPA is having a hard time finding computer geeks. This sort of wretching, chicken-little stupidity might be one reason why.
If any of these 'adults' had been paying attention in 9th-grade science class, they'd be able to tell what the kid's up to without calling in Sandia.
The correct version is: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, work for the government." Or have you forgotten these are all gov't employed teachers; and do you think most private teachers are this incompetent (private school teachers are an in between case, how bad they are depends partly on state requirements).
I've never liked that phrase, even though I recognise it's true most of the time in the public school system. But the idea behind it, that teaching is a last resort job for losers who can't do anything else, is very damaging to society, IMO.
Also, the first thought that comes to my head (after all the bad teachers I've had anyways... ) is that Feynman loved to teach. And I'm pretty sure he could "do".
My understanding is that the phrase refers to the fact that athletes and others go into coaching/teaching when they can no longer do the sport (etc) because they are too old. It was not intended to suggest that teaching is a last resort job for losers who can't do anything else. It means when the body can no longer stand up to the rigors of professional dance, professional sports, or anything else that is a young person's game, age and experience mean they still have something of value to offer.
Around here we have an extension. "Those who can, do. Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, administrate. Those who can't administrate, teach gym. "
It's a phrase true mostly in the public school system. Doesn't hold so much for universities or other educational institutions.
The cool thing is that if you look at their Website now, there is no vice-principal listed. Just somebody with a position of "N/A". I'm thinking that person got a whole lot of email...
Okay. Why then, do the education folks complain so much about how USA students test lower in math an science than other countires? Clearly, math and science are dangerous.
Does behavior like that of the administrator in the story cause our math and science scores to be lower, or do the lower math and science scores cause the behavior of the administrator? It’s hard to tease apart the causality here. It may very well be that the administrator wouldn’t have called the police if American students tested higher in math and science. That is, our lower math and science scores make us less knowledgeable in these areas and thus more prone to fear when it comes to an ominous looking device with wires.
In all likelihood it’s probably both, with feedback going both ways.
And I recently finished reading A Confederacy of Dunces. . . .
If you don't understand it, segregate it and isolate it ! What sort of sick kick do people get out of cowering geniuses into corners? Here we are, improving and saving the world for everybody, all day long.
I wish there was a way to let the kid know that he's a little bit of a hero.
Do what you're told while at work or school, nothing more. On your own time. Watch tv. Make sure to only watch what we tell you. That will be all, thanks.
"Luque said the project was intended to be a type of motion-detector device." That's all I see about it from the article. But yeah, I am curious why an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle is needed for that. As a reflector of some kind? To make it look cooler?
More likely than not, the electronics inside were meant to detect the motion of the water. I'd be willing to bet there was something floating in the water that detected the motion of the water. Perhaps more of a vibration / proximity detector than motion detector, but that's what 'half empty bottle of gatorade and some electronics' says to me.
Wish I could join you at laughing at the stupid yanks, but my own country is headed down this path just as fast as it can, along with pretty much every other liberal western democracy.
Imagine if Jobs and Wozniak had lived today during this sort of thing. They'd be sitting in Gitmo.