Slashdot Mirror
Principal Cancels Classes, Sues Over MySpace Prank
Earnest writes "A prank MySpace page has led to a barrage of lawsuits and the misuse of school resources as the principal targeted by the pranksters attempted to find the perpetrators. In 2005, students at Hickory High School in Pennsylvania created a fake MySpace profile of principal Eric Trosch. As a result, the school's IT staff spent about 25 percent of his work time dealing with the issue and finding the culprits. That's not all. 'Trosch kept at it, even taking measures that led to the "cancellation of computer programming classes as well as usage of computers for research for class projects." Now the basic educational mission of the school was being compromised in order to keep students from visiting these profiles during school hours (students were still free to look at the profiles from home, of course).'"
Remember the good ol' days when people would just burn effigies of those they didn't like?
I don't think that the principal should have so much power over the IT staff. IT should do his job: keeping the IT services running. He shouldnät waste his time doing private stuff for the principal.
The principal seems to be such a nice guy! *rolls eyes*
He was probably just pissed because someone managed to create a page about him on myspace, while he had been desperately trying to do the same but couldn't fit his ego onto the page...
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
Ok, I can see why he wouldn't want students looking at it during school time, but I think the real reason he went after them was his own ego. Students do waste time at school, and adults waste time at work, but do you really think he would have pulled out all the stops if this page wasn't aimed at him?
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
How insecure does this guy have to be to sue students? Can't he just try to suspend them for a few days or make them clean the school toilets with tooth brushes? I bet he sucks his thumb at night too.
I don't see the relevance of it being a MySpace profile. When I was at school (12 years ago) MySpace didn't exist and yet the head teacher still had cause to gather all the pupils together once or twice to try to ascertain the culprits behind a fake, and horribly libelous, newsletter detailing the fictious activities of some of the teaching staff. It was produced by some malicious students and distributed around the classrooms. Exactly the same thing, just in a less connected world.
This issue is about the discipline of students, dealing with a prank in an appropriate manner, and ultimately finding the reason why some people find it funny to be disrespectful to someone (hopefully) dedicated to improving their future. If MySpace, or even the internet itself, vanished overnight it'd still happen as much as it does now.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
just block myspace. tada! problem solved
Why does every little problem now have to be solved by the court? Common sense, compromise (or in the case of kids, discipline by parents and teachers) used to solve petty things like this.
"cancellation of computer programming classes as well as usage of computers for research for class projects."
Nice to see that this guy holds the student's education as a high priority. Who needs to be able to search the web for research purposes or to lean how to code?
...would have blocked *.myspace.com at the firewall level, if their nazi content filter didn't already do it for them.
I read the link, and something catched my eye :
".. is suing the students involved in the 2005 caper, arguing that his reputation was damaged and his earning potential was affected."
Funny that a person who now sues for it did not hesitate to deny whole classes access to computers they needed for their education (thereby lessening their "earning potential") and putting the culprit into an "alternative program" for no reason but for a punishment (where such a program is surely lessening the persons "earning potential")
What a pussy... Can't take some dirty jokes from a bunch of teenagers.
Ii wonder if he is going to sue himself next, as he was the one that created the circumstances for this damage. It was not the students actions (some childish prank that was rather unremarkable) but his own ego that led to the damage to his 'earning potential'. Maybe he didn't understand the meaning of the word earn: his egotrip earned him ridicule, which is a just reward for him
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
The freedom of speech does not legitimize defamation. Of course the students must face the consequences. MySpace is not some special zone where laws do not apply.
Quick! Tell the principle to sign up for ReputationDefender.com!
He should be thankful he wasn't expelled. I don't know if the relevant jusrisdiction has criminal libel - if not that's another thing the little jackass should be grateful for. Finally, what if some vigilante had acted on this false information?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
This sounds more like some low production 80s high school comedy (in an alternate universe where myspace exists) than real life. How come this sort of absurd stuff only seems to happen in the States (incidents that I know of anyway). Any sane person wouldn't give two shits about this and get on with his/her life.
IT staff at schools are notoriously bad. I worked a while as a "computer" teacher (and as such had no control over the IT infrastructure) Their "fancy" squid filter did keyword filtering in the URLs + blocking of certain domain names. So, stuff with "game", "sex", whatever was blocked as was stuff like myspace.
The workaround? Simple: use the IP address directly: immediate pass. No, I didn't tell the IT staff that they should fix it. I did tell my students how to get around it, hoping that the IT staff would notice it in the logs and fix the damned thing. In the 1.5 years I was there, nobody fixed that flaw.
Do not expect good IT staff at schools...
Bess has pretty much every CGI proxy blocked. Pretty much only port 80 outbound is allowed through at my school. So you've got the have some way connect to your proxy, and change IE settings which can't be changed. You could run firefox from a USB key so that you can configure it to connect to a proxy server over an ssh tunnel, but then the nazis who run the computer lab would catch you using "unauthorized software". It's all about the competence of the people who run the school and it's network.
Seems like layman's speak for using a proxy, yes.
I won't deny that the firewall at my work has plenty of ways around it. That's not the point - above the filtering that our ISP does (which goes well beyond CIPA minimums - sometimes to levels where it actively hinders learning, due to overfiltering - and yes, we've tried to get them to unblock the relevant categories - and no, we can't switch ISPs,) we block specific sites that we don't want students to access manually.
If students do get around the firewalls, that specific student gets their account disabled. (Same goes for sharing accounts.)
I work in a UK school doing IT support so I have a front line view of what happens.
At a county level we have a fitler that works on basic URL blocking. It's called 'SmartFilter' and it's definately not very 'Smart'. Pupils can easily evade this filter by using CGI:Proxy, PHPProxy, Google Translate or Google Cache for example. Basically as long as the url doesn't match something in it's blacklist, it gets through.
Therefore, at a school level I have implmented a Linux/Squid based proxy with a content filter called DansGuardian. It's a lot more intelligent about filtering and works along the same lines as antispam filters. As well as domain/url blocking it allows grey listing based on the content of the web pages being pulled through it. You assign words or phrases a numerical value and if the page hits a certain score then it's blocked. As the filter is no longer simply relying on the domains/urls this solves the proxy problem.
Yes, some stuff will always get through, I think the above solution is about as good as it gets currently.
appen in states"
you would be surprised at the sort of shit happening in turkey.
Read radical news here
IT being one of the most obvious instances of that old mantra, "Those who can do. Those who can't teach."
Which is very funny, because I left teaching as fast as I could... I'm back in IT now.
If you add so many absurd things to a profile, it should be obvious to anybody that it was a parody. I'll grant you it was not very tastefull from what I read about it, but a civilized democracy does allow these things (doubt if that includes the US). He could have taken it as a sign that he needs to brush up his image with the students instead of riding his 12foot dick to school everyday. (s/foot/cm/g).
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
I've visited some Elementary and High Schools in my area. I personally know some of the people who work in the IT department of these schools. Most of them have their A+ and N+ certs and that's about it. The majority of the ones I've seen or had to deal with are in over their heads.
This principal provided the inept IT staff with the perfect reason for not getting to Mrs. Smith's computer problem in her classroom.
If this principal is having the IT department work on such tasks during school hours, I'm sure he didn't get his raises based on a plethora of other reasons.
And the IT Staffers.... well, one could argue they were "following orders"... but even so, people should know not to follow orders when those orders conflict with their primary job duties as described by their contracts.
*sigh*
--- http://www.keything.com
Weird shit happens all over the world. But i specifically mean teachers going loco and suing their students when childish pranks like this are pulled. I mean, seriously. We were all kids once. Everyone has pulled prank in their time. Get a life.
principal targeted by the pranksters attempted to find the perpetrators
It would be wiser to monitor the school network to identify the people who where capable to modify the specific webpage. You could make the phrank die out silently, or convert the page to a more friendly nature.
The principal, he has diserved this. Being so immature.
Did you read TFA? There are 3 suits, two earlier ones by the parents against him (one they lost, the second one is pending) and now he's suing the kids back. America: where there's one lawsuit, there are probably two more if you look closely :)
See http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/US SC_CR_0485_0046_ZS.html Hustler Magazine (Larry Flint) vs Falwell
Hustler ran an add for beer "endorsed" by Falwell with a description of his first time being with his own mother in an outhouse. He was sued by Falwell in the supreme court and won because political satire falls within the first amendment. If we don't support freedom of speech and publication at what point do we draw the line with what is too far to say? Will Leno start getting sued because of what he says in his monologue?
That something like this develops into a lawsuit is just plain sad. The worst thing is that crap like this ties up the court system unneededly. it's just plain pathetic if you think about it.
Can someone tell me if this is really news from 2005... or has something important actually happened?
:(){
if he'd simply asked Myspace to remove the offending pages. http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.f aq&Category=9&Question=39
If he'd done that instead of making such a big deal of the matter, he wouldn't have brought so much attention to his little problem.
There are all kinds of bad things posted about me on the web. Who cares?
People should be abllowed to post anything they want on the Internet. It is not the same as other printed media.
IMO if it isn't markedly obvious that the source is a cooperation or employed by someone, then everything on the Internet should be assumed to be hearsay and thus immune from libel. You know "freedom of speech" and all???
Seriously - what is the difference between a blog posting and sticking a flyter on a telephone pole? Would you give one more credibility than another? If so - WHY?!?!
People need to be made aware than anyone can, and will, make a face MySpace / Facebook / Whatever claiming to be you. That's Just the plain truth. If you have a problem with that then unplug your PC and go back to your telegraph. I have a metric crapload of derogatory things on me out on the web in various locations. Did I go sue every one of them? Of course not. Cause I have a backbone.
There are KIDS. It doesn't matter if the site is taken down or not cause they're making fun of the principal and teachers 24/7 behind their backs anyways, cause it's the fun thing to do. If this guy is really that sensitive to what a 12 year old thinks about him he is in the wrong job.
Hey, I'm an school IT tech. I can't be that useless if I'm posting on slashdot!
been to myspace lately? That place is a fucking wasteland of annoying webpages that push shit onto the viewer, it's a throwback to the 90's and when geocities was in it's heyday, except now it's 10x more annoying... god damn pages with mp3's, flash ads, animated background images, "this person has 15,234 friends, and here is an image of every fucking one of them.." and then comments from those "friends" that make no sense, sometimes they're spam... sometimes jackasses post a million images just to fuck with with your browser memory limit... and then there are contests about who has the most "friends" on myspace.. fuck that, nobody has friends or "buddies" on myspace.. just middle-aged men that are dumb enough to add all these teenage girls to their myspace friends list and jerk off to the private images that 15,234 friends have access to while listening to a duran duran "girls on film" mp3 that they didn't choose to play, it was fucking forced on them by myspace. I am calling on all blackhats to do their part and take that steaming pile of shit off the internet... take it down boys, you have a go.
turkish prisons are not as horrible as popular culture believes. in fact they are generally otherwise. albeit, the usual inmate-hierarchy persists. comforts are generally similar to a upper-poor class household, television, radio, beds and etc.
even many political prisoners, they are able to continue their works, writing a book, even unfortunately participating in more outlawed terrorist organization furthering, like pkk situation.
prisons where terrorist/radical political prisoners are kept, are an entirely different matter.
Read radical news here
The potential and real audience is much larger nowadays, with usage of digital copying, theoretically and practically.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
School principals and many teachers have an overbloated ego and sense of authority. It is interesting to see how they react when this sense of superiority is undermined, usually through criticism.
... oh, I forget what it was, but something to do with retention of diversity, age barrier, and adopting to new ideas. Anyhow, he took it really personally that a 26-year-old (youngest board member) was criticizing him. He went on a rant about how in all of his years as a teacher/principal none of his students ever dared disrespect and criticize him.
I know this is a little out of context, but it brought up memories about this retired school principal I used to know. We were both board members of a nudist group.
At one meeting I criticized his ability to
Well then, I didn't particularly think that discouraging criticism was a good thing for a teacher to do, so I continued to challenge him. Pretty soon he was raving mad. Let me tell you, I don't think he understood how funny it is to see a balding old raving mad nudist school principal make a fool of himself at a naked board meeting.
How do I ever get involved with these things!! By the way, can you believe that this guy had a lot of difficulty using computers? I mean, it was a huge success for him to learn how to use his email! I guess they're shelling out the school principal job to just about anyone these days.
I'm not implying that this other school principal here is also a nudist. I'm just thinking about how his students perceive him. There's obviously a reason why they don't respect him.
Those who can't do, teach.
I bet there are 100 kids at his school, whose actual myspace pages are being "bullied", and yet he wants to put all this effort into stopping a fake page about himself. Get a grip, and help the student victims of harassment!
stuff |
Our primary goal is the education of our children. Well, our PRIMARY goal is making sure we don't get made fun of by the children. Also, our primary goal is making sure we keep guns and knives away from our children. Actually, our PRIMARY goal is making sure the children aren't having 'freaky' sex. Well, our PRIMARY goal is to collect a paycheque on the taxpayers kids dime.
Ok, so our primary goals are:
Collecting a paycheque on the taxpayers dime
Making sure we don't make fun of by the children
Making sure the children aren't having 'freaky' sex
Keeping guns and knives away from our children
And our secondary goal would be the education of our children. Well....Your children. I hate children. I hate children.
It's been a long time.
We had a system going at my school when I was going through
For every flaw I found in the firewall/security, I scored $5. For every major flaw (I managed to redirect my report to a different print spooler for example) I scored $10. The IT guy there paid out of his own pocket. Since I left (and the 3 kids with me - I'm not that good at these things!) I have heard of only ONE instance where this guy had to pay up, and that was because he screwed a configuration setting.
For us, all it took was a bit of incentive (I've heard tell of this being implemented with various priveledges such as a multiplayer Quake session during a class) and the IT guy willing to take the time rather than disabling the accounts.
Of course, there are other issues here... but before all this FIRE THE HEAD! Friend of mine failed his senior year because the IT at his school screwed up and they blamed it on him, so he lost all PC access while at school. That's pretty unfair and downright stupid...
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
It's too bad the Principal, and thereby the School Board, feels it's more important to save face than to educate people's children.
... then he could be Federal Attorney instead of dealing with a bunch of unruly kids.
I do think our schools are underfunded, but a lot of money is being wasted on "staff" who simply have too many other agendas than teaching.
Most middle school "teachers" will tell you they're really only baby-sitting.
This principal obviously made a bad career move. He should have gone to Regents
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
A prank is gluing a pencil to a table, putting a transgendered doper alcoholic label on someone is slander.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Shouldn't he be the adult here. The one to take the higher ground. This almost sounds like a school yard fight between two "children". He's probably done more damage whining like a little bitch than if he just ignored it, rather than it being a localized issue hes taken it to the next step.
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
It just amazes me...some weeks ago, students were suspended for saying "vagina"...during a performance, at school, of "The Vagina Monologues" (I mean, couldn't they have just told the students to pick another piece to perform instead?). And now this. Why is it that so many principals...the people in charge of the development of students...seem so intent on acting like Principal Rooney from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Everyone pranks. It is part of growing up. Hell - some people never grow up and go on to be Emmy-award winning comedians who prank for a living - OH THE HORROR!
The fact of the matter is some people just a) have no sense of humour, b) take things way too seriously.
Kids will be kids. If you can't deal with that in a logical and sane manner then you shouldn't be principal. I am not saying that these kids should not be punished for what they did - they have to be taught that all actions have consequences. But what happened to good old detention?
When I was a kid and we were caught drawing pictures of the teacher, they didn't cancel art classes for the whole school. How is this any different?
No, kids! Don't look at my fake MySpace profile! I demand you don't! I'm really, really, serious!!
By over-reacting he has called far more attention on himself and, in turn, the school district and community at large. And not the good kind of attention.
He should have just gone with it, and had fun with it. And maybe, just maybe, use it as an easy-to-access tool to assess what the students think of his methodology? I know, criticism is a lost art.
Personally, I would have just created a fake profile of the kid that made it and photoshopped him to wear a frilly pink tutu and had a good laugh with the kid (whilst dodging his parents).
...but let me defend the principal, at least on some grounds.
These teenagers, as well as most teenagers in general, do not understand and will not consider implications of their actions before doing something stupid. They especially don't understand that when you post something on the internet, it is a form of publication; the world is able to read what you wrote. Purposefully publishing lies in printed form with the willful intent to harm someone's reputation is called slander, and is punishable by law. These kids clearly did exactly that. The principal's daughter was emotionally distraught when she discovered the pages, as well as the principal. The student's work was malicious in nature. An apology isn't going to make up for the harm that was done.
I will agree that the principal overreacted in regards to obliterating access to a computer in the school, but I can understand where his anger is coming from.
Clearly the students have crossed the line, even they admit that, but whereas in days gone by rumors and advertisements might be spread within the school, any internet presence making such claims can be classified as slander and defamation of character. The principal is, IMO, well within his rights to file suite, and in a world where no one gets hired without an employer doing a google search on them, I can completely understand why he feels it necessary to exercise those rights. These kids might think they were playing a harmless prank, but it's had real world consequences, and the sooner they learn to appreciate those consequences, the better we'll all be.
Here's a good one: Take a screen capture of a screen with lots of open windows, preferrably the ones someone usually leaves open. Make that the desktop background. Close all the real windows. Enjoy.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Maybe, just maybe, he should have ignored it to begin with.
And the reason I say that is not just for the practical reasons, but to teach his students the same thing. It's awfully hard to tell a bunch of guys to "just let it go, just let it drop" when you won't do the same thing.
The end result is a lot of lawsuits. What did the principal gain from all of this? Does he even have his dignity left at this point? All because he couldn't follow the advice that any parents tells their 8 year old. Ignore it.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
When I was in HS I knew more about computers than my computer teacher did. I should've realized than that spelled trouble.
At one point she recognized my skills and asked me to set up a computer for her... basically just plug the monitor, keyboard, mouse in and turn it on. The only problem is, she said "set up" so I assumed she wanted me to make sure it was booting and working OK in software too. She wasn't happy when she found out I had modified the boot files to get the mouse working. What is puzzling though is that she could see me the entire time and I can't imagine why she didn't come back to check on me after I had obviously plugged it all in and turned it on.
What's even more puzzling is that, according to her, I somehow managed to turn a perfectly working copy of Windows 98 into a broken copy of Windows 95 without an installation CD. Never mind that I insisted Windows 95 had been on there already and that i had turned a broken '95 into a slightly less broken '95.
My dad (who is more skilled in computers than me, and thus her) offered to help her fix it, but when he showed up at the designated time she was nowhere to be found... she had left her son who had no idea what my dad was supposed to do exactly. So dad just left.
Oh, and this teacher promised every student who got 50+WAM on the typing program a t-shirt, but she disappeared at the end of the semester instead. We were all sorta annoyed at that. She didn't even give out the honor roll certificates all teachers were required to at the awards ceremony thing...
Oooh and this story is the best. The students at the school in the web design class worked on the school website. Apparently one of them set the IE homepage to the NETWORK location of the website source (it's supposed to be set to the internet location). So when I logged on and opened IE (this was before anyone had heard of Firefox, called Phoenix then) it loaded the file from the network share. I noticed this and, curious went a level up to the directory index and checked out a couple other pages, and then fixed the IE homepage to point to the online version and went back to work.
The teacher later confronted me with charges of "hacking into the school's computer systems". Naturally I had no idea what the hell she was talking about. She then went into Windows Explorer and navigated through network shares back to the website source files. (It's worth noting not once when either of us viewed these files were we prompted for a password. The computers ran on Windows NT/2000 and every student had a roaming user account so it's not like it would've been hard.) I tried to explain that IE had opened the page automatically but she didn't buy it, and then went on into a lecture about how hacking is bad blah blah blah blah. I, being a shy introvert, couldn't really talk back to a teacher. :(
Statement from Justin Layshock's parents on why they brought suit
Original MySpace page created by Justin Layshock
To say the principal and school board are overreacting would be putting it mildly.It was slander. The principal should have immediately called the police and asked them to contact MySpace. MySpace will release information about the person who created the profile as part of a police investigation.
reminds me of two quotations from mark twain:
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
No, spoken defamation is slander. Published defamation is libel. If a reasonable person would not believe a statement, then damage to reputation can not occur and hence it is not defamatory. For example, you could argue that a reasonable person would not believe a MySpace page purporting to be from a school principal admitting to being a paedophile, and so it would not be defamatory. I can say "George Bush told me that he has sex with goats" and this is not defamatory because it is ridiculous.
To quote the great Dennis Miller, "Life is tough, get a helmet."
I agree that this was a juvenile and "typically teenager" thing to do, but this guy is out of his mind by reacting in the way that he is (and has). I mean, come on, "emotionally distraught"?? Geez, who in this world hasn't been the target of some form of ridicule/satire/mockery? Sure he's got a right to be annoyed about it, but dude, they're teenagers, and you're their principal, they're going to hate you and make fun of you, that's probably in the job description.
It always suprises me that a large percentage of people will generally state that the victimised "adult" should "turn the other cheek" and forget it as it's just a bunch of kids. I look at some of the kids in my childrens school and eevn though it's a pretty good, a lot of them are truly vicious and amazingly horrid to other kids for no reason, and usually they are like this for no reason other than they are spoilt little sh*ts who'd run home and cry to their mum if they copped the treament they dished out. Fine and good to say it's just kids being kids, but we aren't talking about putting worms in the microwave, or other similar less soul destroying pranks are we? Until you have been in a situation like this, or even had one of your own kids in this situation like I have, you can't even begin to imagine the complete and utter despair, hopelessness, and complete sense of futility and frustration these victims feel at the hands of these gutless bullies. It actually makes you begin to understand why you read so often about kids that have been pushed to the end of their tether and then go in to school with a gun. The power these cowards attempt to wield at the painful expense of others should not be ignored, Minority groups want to give the kids more rights, we're told kids are equal to and should be treated like adults, discipline and punishment are illegal. WAKE UP! We are talking for the most part about irresponsible, immature, children! We are breeding a generation of hopeless, aimless CHILDREN who are constantly told they have all the rights of adults, but without any of the accompanying responsibility so they learn a healthy respect for others, and life in general. Whether or not the Principal was a prick or not doesn't matter, he and his family have been cruelly and visiously attacked by anonymous and gutless cowards, I say sue the pants off them! Even if he doesn't get any settlement, maybe these brats might learn the idea that actions may have actually have consequences! Theres an idea! And to all the people saying "so what", if it was your little darling that the principal published such guttertrash lies about in an international forum, would you still be saying, "it's only words, don't worry about it and it will go away"? "WORDS WILL NEVER HURT ME", what a load of crap! Tell that to a victim of these kids that should be sent to military school for these horrible actions.
The issue isn't that students in general need to learn respect, or libel, or slander, or even free speech.
Rather, the issue here is that too many teachers and principals are little tinpot dictators who view their schools as their fiefdom and students as little serfs answerable to them. It's part of why they become teachers and principals in the first place, a great chunk of them HATE kids but see it as a way to get a piece of their own little world, isolated from the adult world and with a more vulnerable, ignorant populace more fearsome of authority and thus more easily controlled. Oh, plus the summer off.
If there wasn't a way to force respect based on authoritarianism they wouldn't be interested, they're sado-masochists in disguise, mix them in with children and that makes them predators
Year after year there's always something or other frivolous thing they're trying to control. This year, in my neighbourhood, it was them trying to ban Axe body deodorant. I remember when I was a kid they tried to ban Doc Martens. Somewhere in between it was friggin' multi-colored shoe laces. Now it's MySpace. It never ends.
There's always that one teacher or principal who has petty tantrums and throws things around, forcing everyone else to either follow suit or take a stand on an issue when they would rather not. These become role models for the kids and we wind up with assholes like Bush growing up and doing the same thing to whole countries.
Yeah, sounds familiar. ;)
:)
One that happened to me was one of the IT staff at my high school was not really fond of me (because I was smarter than him, hehe). In 9th grade, we did have a linux box at school and on my student share I had TeraTerm (basically Putty except not as good) and some FTP Client, so I could interact with it from one of the Windows machines. Come 10th grade, we're in the computer lab during English (some kind of research assignment), I finish, and I have my student share folder window open in the background. The guy calls me and the teacher into the back room, then asks me for my share password. I tell him, and he looks at it, and tells my teacher that I had programs designed to bypass the school's security system. Wtf?
I'M NOT ANGRY!
The proper thing to do here is:
- Ask myspace to take the page down
- Secretly install keyloggers in the school computers, get the culprit's myspace account, and put furry porn on it
... c'est moi.
Well, at least he's being an adult about it.
I agree that the principle shouldn't have been expected to turn the other cheek, but he shouldn't have wasted so many school resources on a personal quest for vengeance either. If this guy was the President of the United States he'd probably have decalred martial law and then used the Secret Service and the National Guard to conduct a manhunt for the guy who made fun of him.
It's a classic case of "in order to save the village we had to burn it"...
It's completely different now in mosts schools. The IT department's are usually allocated a whole budget, and feel their primary objective is keep kids form getting to "Games" "MySpace" or any site that could jeopardize their funding if it got leaked a student was on it. An example here is that my school IT personnel is so paranoid, we're not permitted to go to "games.slashdot.org" because it's a games subdomain. I know for a fact that our IT department uses bot the iPrisim and the Barracuda Firewalls to prevent security breaches and students from accessing sites they disapprove of, but many of out staff and students think they take it too far most of the time. They also have a network-wide NetOp system setup for all computers, and a local one for every lab, so we have teachers who agree with the system on a huge power-trip during classes.
Also, some crack-head in the admin building decided they were in charge of theater budgets too, anybody know where that idea sprang from?
I'm willing to bet that there's plenty of "libel" about this guy on the bathroom wall.
50 years ago, when my father was in military college, they once went to the nearby airfield and brought in (by hand!!!) a DC-3 plane and set it in the middle of the main garden. The stunt includes flattenning a chain-link fence between the airfield and the garden. Also, a staff seargent who was overly fond of his Morris Mini Cooper often found it perched on top of the decorative fountain...
Slander is spoken and libel is written.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Funny you should mention this... did you know many districts keep their admins dumb?
Back in the day we had an evil systems admin (you could call her a BOFH except she had no skills). Essentially, she was a school bus driver who knew something about Novell and so they put her in an admin role (seriously, she used to be a bus driver).
In any case, this woman forgot to set the default passwords on Novell (which were, at the time, admin:admin, admin: , user:user, etc., etc.) with essentially 'root' access. Didn't take me long before I started to leave text files on her user desktop with messages like "you need to change the admin password" and the like.
Long story short, loose lips sink ships and I bragged to my nerdish friends about it. I wasn't doing anything harmful, but they ratted me out anyway (jealous!!!) In the end the principal agreed i did nothing wrong, sort of laughed about the fact that the admin couldn't do her job, and let me off the hook.
[fast forward to the year 2006]
And I'm working at a consulting firm in an IT capacity. I learn from my mom (someone in education) that the district computer guy is probably retiring from his 120k/yr job. Knowing that I'm a shoe-in, I throw my hat in the ring. I have all sorts of ideas about how to revolutionize the learning environment through technology and would be perfect for this job.
"You'd never get hired" says my mom. Why? "They don't want someone who knows what they're doing. The last thing they want to do is highlight the problems with the infrastructure and the lag in technical skills of the students and have to spend millions to fix it."
That's right, they keep them dumb. She says this isn't just a problem in her district, but is common in school districts across the US.
Still is. Some friends of mine set up a myspace for my head teacher. Guess what action he took? None. Its still up, but the novelty has completely faded away. No one cares any more. It was just a jab at him that he can take.
everyone at the school go put up a fake page.
Everyone on slashdot put a fake page of this guy somewhere.
Pretty son everybody will relize what it is, a joke.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When school teaches that criticizing/lampooning authorities is unkosher, that school is automatically unamerican and the principal should be shipped to Guantanamo without so much as a dildo to idle the time.
In this day and age, a myspace page like that theoretically COULD have serious negative impacts on the principal. The pages supposedly included (both overtly and implied) statements that the principal had sex with students, among other things. I really can't understand the "it was just a joke!" reaction among so many people here. He may not have handled it well, and I suspect that is because of an unfamiliarity with the specifics of such technology, but he most certainly had a right to be seriously upset and disturbed.
Seriously.
... so it was just socially assumed he was some kind of pedophile or something. He quit after one year (I'm guessing because of the rumors and such). Thanks to that, I never got to take a real programming course in high school (he was the only teacher with the backgrouind for it ... it was a small town school in the 80's).
... not the flattering kind. You don't know anything about computers. Your IT guy (apparently) dosen't know anything about computers.
Think for a minute what it's like to be a MALE teacher, in an overwhelmingly FEMALE dominated arena. I had two male teachers growing up. One of them was involved in a real sex scandal. The other was an incredibly gifted math and computer science teacher with mediocre social skills. He was a geek, and into computers, and shy
So. You've been in this game long enough to make it up to administrator, and principal. All it takes is a *HINT* of impropriety to get your ass fired by the school board.
So some smartass teenagers make a myspace page about you
What would YOU do? You have a family to support, this is your livelihood.
Not saying everything the guy did was right, but try that shoe on the other foot for a minute. I think I understand where he was coming from.
The same could apply to the kids now facing the legal consequences of their actions, no?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You were supposed to go for "Funny". Better luck next time.
FC Closer
My father once led a cow up several flights of steps into the principals office, at the top floor of his college's administrative building. This turned out to be a real prank, because although you can lead a cow upstairs, getting a cow to walk *down* a flight of stairs is another matter entirely. I believe the cow was up there for a week before they figured out how to get it down.
-JoeBoy
is report the page to myspace and they would have removed it...
This was the adult option. If he didn't throw feces this isn't even the worst principal story of the month. http://www.thestar.com/News/article/198600
The problem is, back when this rule was put into place, the percentage of reasonable people among the general population was far higher than it is today.
I would have called the entire school body into session and told them of the site. I would then announce the following:
The guilty parties would have 3 days to come forward and acknowledge both in public and in writing what they did. They would then subsequently be required to remove the site(s) under supervision.
If the guilty did as specified then I would give each a week's suspension and require that they pass the remainder of the term without sports or other extracurricular activities.
If they did not do as I specified, then I would call in the police and prosecute and expel the guilty parties, not necessarily in that order.
I would NOT announce the following, but for those who did NOT confess:
I would personally do my best to ensure that they repeat the year in school. Thus they would fall behind their classmates and their mental development would undoubtedly be permanently stunted (guaranteeing that they later become criminals, to be locked up by the state for their future malfeasances).
IOW unless they confessed they would likely be AFU'd for the rest of their life, whether the ACLU or any number of lawyers was involved or not. Which only seems fair to me. Life is too short for this kind of crap and these "children" are far too late in learning that lesson. It's time to permanently stamp an "A" ("AssHat") on their foreheads, if only to warn others.
BTW logging is far more useful than filtering, especially when presented in court coordinated with videos of the computer room.
In this day and age, the principal should have worn this prank as a badge of honor. He could tell other principals: "Your students are soooo stupid that they still do the old car on the dumpster/fountain trick. My students can at least create a half-way funny parody. Do your students even know what a parody is? Can they spell it?"
Now that would be some good principal trash-talk.
http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/06/23/15 21209.shtml
No. This is what teachers do. I know - mea culpa. Summarised from http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html Where you can find the complete text. by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
How about Ayaan Hirsi Ali?
Although I guess the treatment they got was a form of "civilization" - circa 10th century or so.
And it's a helluva lot worse than anything this principal did.
And let me (a geezer who is most likely older than the principal in question) defend the students.
These teenagers, as well as most teenagers in general, do not understand and will not consider implications of their actions before doing something stupid.
That's the nature of teenagers. Always has been. See Teenagers fail to see the consequences .
Purposefully publishing lies in printed form with the willful intent to harm someone's reputation is called slander, and is punishable by law. These kids clearly did exactly that.
If somethiong is so over the top that it is absolutely unbelievable, it's not slander. For instance, if I accuse you of eating human babies, it isn't likely to be slander (or at least I hope not, is there a lawyer in the house?) TFA lists all sorts of sordid things he's supposed to be doing, from molesting children to drugs. Clearly, nobody with an IQ greater than 65 would ever believe this crap.
The principal's daughter was emotionally distraught when she discovered the pages, as well as the principal.
Well, I've been emotionally distraught. Should I sue? That's just childish; even more childish than what the teenagers did. As an earlier poster mentioned, the principal is supposed to be the adult here, and clearly wasn't acting like one.
It's just a prank, and I, too, see where his anger comes from, but adults are supposed to be able to control their anger. I've finally learned personally that anger is almost always counterproductive.
This has, however, hurt his reputatiion; I wouldn't hire him. Not because of the stupid MySpace page, but because of his reaction to it. Most employers want employees with a little maturity, and this dumbass showed none whatsoever.
Were the kids wrong? Sure, but they're kids. The principal has no such excuse.
It might be interesting to note that there are more than 10,000 proxies on the Dansguardian blacklist at the moment!
As it's been noted before, it's not slander, it's libel.
And a MySpace User does NOT meet the standards required to violate libel laws. And once it's NOT illegal, look at it like this:
He threw a temper-tantrum about it and he's 'The Man' when it comes to shaping the minds and policies governing the youth and education for that institution. That's like doing something absurd like hiring people who like to have sex with little boys as priests.
We had stuff like this that happened at my school, I was usually the principled dissenter, i.e. I knew who did it, what, and why, but I just kept my mouth shut as long as nothing was getting hurt except feelings. It drives those Principals nuts not because it's libel, or even untrue, it drives them nuts because they are often narcissistic power-craving individuals, and it's the perceived undermining of their authority that sends them off the deep end. I am not going to instantly lump this principal in this group, but the principals I've known mostly fall into this category. I knew a few who felt that individual managing and cooperating with students, as well as treating them with a modicum of respect was the best way to 'govern' an educational institution. Most of them though seemed to prefer the 'Bad Cop' role.
Anyways, whatever it was, he apparently didn't like getting made fun of. Instead of approaching the problem in terms of rehabbing his image with his students he decided that what they REALLY weren't getting enough of was discipline, rules, and regulations... Great... I know THAT'S what kept me going in school. Here's an idea ass-nubbins [the principal], if it's striking a chord, maybe you ought to examine your life choices because guess what, you're at a fucking school, and maybe you missed it, but there are always assholes at school that make fun of people. You either beat the shit out of them (if you can, though you usually got in trouble), got better at making fun of them back (usually just leads to the aforementioned fight), or ignore them and cultivate your life and yourself to the best of your abilities and hope that your success is enough to rub it in their faces. There are still assholes in schools today. Apparently now they make fun of the principal. He decided to beat the shit out of them, allegorically speaking. The only problem is that it's going to prompt more ridicule.
It's becoming a situation he can't control. And I think it's funny as hell. I can't tell you how happy I am that it got Slashdotted. I know that's mean, but an entrenched authority like secondary education and its laughable figurehead (the Principal) deserves a good railing against, and often. I can't think of a system so polluted in different ways from top to bottom that can so immediately ruin or salvage our fortunes, and can't help but think that the whole thing needs a big fucking enema. Don't stop till you hit the back of their teeth.
...become sophomoric from too much contact with sophomores?
Goodness, couldn't some adult have stopped all this--by calming down the principal--before it went overboard?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
While I think you're over-generalizing a tad (I've met teens that were much smarter than college students so not all teens are idiots), I would dare say it's the principal's job to assist in the education of the teens in his school, including the one who put up the fake MySpace profile. Exactly what type of lesson has he taught them from all of this? That adults act like a bunch of kids fighting on the playground when insulted? That even the principal, the highest authority in their school will act like a total idiot and neglect his job duties to go on a personal vendetta when he discovers his students are insulting him? Sure what the kid did was libel (not slander, slander's spoken), but the principal has completely failed in his duties and provided a perfectly horrible example to ALL of his students, not just the one who put up the fake profile. There's no defending that part, suing over the libel? Sure, not a problem. Diverting school resources to a personal vendetta? Now that's a major problem, and much worse than the libel the kid did because it affected the education of every damn kid in the school.
One thing you failed to mention is that the kid created the libelous profile from home, not from one of the school's computers. The principal used pretty much all of the school's computing resources to go on a personal vendetta against the kids (the one who created the profile plus students posting comments on it). I'd say neither one was considering the implications of their actions ahead of time.
So sue, don't disrupt the entire damn school and fuck up the education of hundreds of kids just because you were "emotionally distraught". We pay teachers, and principals even more so, to deal with this type of stuff and to educate our kids. Also think about what's happened with this thanks to the principal's over reaction. How emotionally distraught do you think his daughter is about his looking like a total ass in front of the entire nation now? What's worse is he can't blame this on libel, people are going to look at his actions and come to their own conclusions, but many are going to think he's acting like a spoiled brat.
You kinda contradict yourself here, how can "the student's work [be] malicious in nature" if he "do[es] not understand and [did] not consider [the] implications of their actions before doing something stupid"? You can't have it both ways, if they didn't understand then it wasn't malicious, if they did understand then it was. In the first case I think an apology would have worked just fine, IF the principal hadn't over reacted and escalated this into a much larger issue than it could have been. Now that he's managed to drag it into the national spotlight I suppose an apology won't cut it, but neither will winning a lawsuit against the student get his reputation back. He's earned a new reputation for himself, one not based on the profile's libelous claims at all, and this reputation isn't beneficial to him either.
Graduating 3 years ago, I can tell you that the school staff are far less competent in computer matters than most of the student. This includes the IT supervisor of the campus. Some friends and I came across various flaws in the computer security all the time, including the ability to create a new user with admin rights. And when we would report the issue to the IT dude, that's what we called him, we would get scolded for doing so. Now I understand they wouldn't want us to try and break the security, but it it's that easy, they should be glad we didn't inform more mischievous students about it. .tk domain linking to the site. But there were many other ways which were just as easy.
As far as the blocking software goes... that is a joke. Within a day it is possible to get to any site you want. The easiest way was by making a
And to truly point out the flaws in their system, in my senior electronics class, the entire class would play Quake LANs, including the teacher. It was very simple when you just ran the game off a CD.
arrrg, (like a pirate)
Invoked 'em both first!
I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, Mister President, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million people
Why are we ganging up on this principal guy? Sure he sounds like a jerk, but there are plenty of other jerks out there, many in higher positions of authority. I'm not sure that it warrants hate-vibes from everyone who read this submission. I know, I know, he's circumventing the constitution and the courts (I am also familiar with the terms "precedent" and "slippery slope"), but I think it's time we let the courts handle it rather than turning it into a public and embarrassing media event.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I think he needs to talk to the janitor from the breakfast club to give him some insight on life.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
If those kids had half a brain they wouldn't have made a website with their principal on it, without his consent. Obviously now they are officially more stupid for doing do.
Not really.
Sure, string 'em up. There's nothing wrong with having gotten the page removed and tracking down the culprits. That's no excuse for punishing other innocent students at the school by removing classes and important internet access.
"Now the basic educational mission of the school was being compromised in order to keep students from visiting these profiles during school hours"
If my kids were at this school I was rally to have the principle fired on the grounds that he is putting my children's future at risk. This is no different than the story a few days ago - people were told that the myspace profiles decrying a principal were free speech - that applies here too. Period.
Fire him.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
This mySpace "prank" just isn't funny. In case anyone fails to remember recent events where cyber-bullying and similar "pranks" went unchecked and a kid committed suicide (See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/21/earlysho w/living/caught/main681867.shtml). I guess that was funny now wasn't it.
If that is the sort of effect this sort of idiocy has on kids, then consider the professional effect it has on adults, and I speak from experience. I was "not rehired" a while back after rumours were spread on the internet. A real barrel of laughs.
And don't play the "but that was an isolated case" falsehood. This type of malicious act is here now, and widespread. Saying this principal should "be an adult" or "take the higher moral ground" isn't going to cut it. Do you think if he'd done nothing that these kids would have stopped? Have you ever been or seen an anti-social or pissed off teen? If you have then you will know that it would not have stopped until they had their "satisfaction."
Oh, and for "it was fun to move the teacher's car" people, did they intend to pay for the car if it was damaged/destroyed, or should the owner of the car be expected to laugh and shell out money for repairs/replacement? Would you have liked it to have happened to your car, especially if it got wrecked in the process of the prank?
The best and the brightest rarely become school principals. No one in the third grade looks around school and says to themselves "Yeah! I'm wanna work hard and be a school principal when I grow up!" With few exceptions, principals are people stuck in an education career who hate the classroom and want to earn a few meager more bucks. The students were wrong to do what they did and they need to learn from the experience; that's what growing up is about. The principal should already know better, however, and has demonstrated his unfitness to administer a school. His next career should involve the implementation of "suggest sell" (aka "Would you like fries with that?") where he can develop a closer relationship with children and humility while building on his people skills. A lesson learned for everybody.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
As others have said thousands of times now, URL FILTERS ARE USELESS. Even a 5yo can get around them... proxies, rewriting rules, web caches, etc, etc, etc.
The best, and most productive, thing to do is enact a "No Myspace" policy and punish students who violate it. Don't block access; monitor access. Speeding is illegal, but we don't have cars with speed limiting governors (we'd just remove them anyway); we have police to punish you for violating the limits.
Jesus, you're part of the problem.
Welcome to the brave new world. Bullies have new tools and methods to use to screw with your precious little child. Either you armed your child with the correct tools to deal with the issue or you didn't. Sounds like you didn't. The environment is going to do things to you and your family that are outside your control, you are helpless. If your child doesn't have established coping mechanisms and the iron will self esteem needed to deal with the harsh environment that you are partially responsible for creating, then you failed.
It's never going to go backwards. It's never going to be like the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, or 90's again. Peer pressure has taken a new form and uses new routes to reach your children. Crying "OH MY GOD!, You people don't understand what this is doing!" is beyond unproductive - it's fucking moronic.
Evaluate and counteract, estimate and prepare - get a copy of the Art of War for Christ's sake. Arm your children with the self esteem they need to maneuver through the meat grinder that is school.
- Mark Twain, Following the Equator; Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
Which is great until a future employer searches for his Myspace profile and comes up with a number of ones detailing his drug habits and penchant for women's clothing.
It's one thing to prank someone for something that can be removed, but it's quite another to ruin someone's employability. Would you think it's funny if you went job hunting only to find out that someone you knew was calling all your prospective employers behind your back and telling them all about your drinking binges in college and how much pot you used to smoke?
What if they had done it to another student? Would you feel the same way? What if the students posted a fake Myspace profile for your child mentioning that he is homosexual and wants to become transgendered, enjoys copious amounts of Heroin and Steroids and frequently has sex with strangers. Is that such a minor act?
SRSLY.
Speeding is illegal, but we don't have cars with speed limiting governors (we'd just remove them anyway); we have police to punish you for violating the limits.
Actually we do. Not everyone removes them because not everyone knows how. They're usually set pretty high, but the point is that cars do have speed limiting governors.
... you insensitive clod!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
The school system, with the exception of a few special teachers, is an exercise in mind-programming. --Specifically, making sure that people grow up with a powerful, nearly hard-wired respect for authority and control systems. Training kids to be good little workers.
I barely survived high school exactly because of crazy authority figures. I was never rude, I was never mean-spirited. I simply came to the realization that school was 95% boring, brain-washing busy-work and stopped attending all but one class which I needed in order to graduate and get my 'piece of paper'. I'd already been accepted into the college of my choice, so the whole graduating process was purely a formality. I figured, "Why waste my time going to a bunch of classes I sleep through anyway?"
Many of the teachers didn't even notice. A few of the cool ones said, "Yeah. That makes sense. Good luck!"
A remaining clutch of staff members, however, perceived my actions as a personal attack of the worst sort and made it a top priority to prevent me from graduating. It had nothing to do with rules and everything to do with what they thought of as disrespectful behavior on my part. They thought I was cheating the system, which I suppose I was. (But then, I figured that the system was cheating everybody, so I wasn't about to feel guilty about not jumping through a bunch of silly hoops.)
I remember teachers saying, "But you'll get failing marks!" And I remember saying, "And. . ? Do you really believe I'm going to let a piece of paper stop me from traveling the world and doing all the things I want to do in life? If an employer is unable to see me for who I am without consulting my high school grades, then why on earth would I want to work for such a person? Whatever job they are offering is probably going to be more of the same stuff they pace kids with in high school anyway. No thanks."
"But you'll only ever be able to work as a cashier. As a burger flipper!"
"No. That's only true if you believe it, which I don't. --I spent last Summer working at a cool company which I found simply by walking in off the street to visit. I expressed keen interest in learning about what they did, and they let me hang around and help out. By the end of the Summer, they'd offered me a high-paying full-time position with lots of growth potential. I turned it down so I could come back here and finish my high school off and get my piece of paper. How foolish was that?" (I'd been conned into believing that the school system and its graduating certificates actually meant something. That programming took some time to undo, by which point I was already in the last third of the last year and pulling my hair out.)
Anyway, they were really upset that somebody would dare point out the flaws in the edifice of the 'unquestionable authority' which the school system was supposed to represent, and which they felt children must yield to, kneel before, fear and be willing to jump through hoops for. Instead, I just looked at it and yawned. This made some of the adults in charge fume with rage and indignation. I still don't fully understand why.
My parents were called, legalities were threatened, they tried to make me sign agreements through physical intimidation. It was all very strange. --I remember around the same time, one fellow in a suit who I'd never seen before, actually chased me down the hall, grabbed me by the arm and blustered in my face, "When you are a professional, you will understand that you cannot criticize another professional!" (Or something to that effect.) --I'd made the mistake of reading and laughing at a posted flyer for a course he was apparently in charge of and which I thought was ridiculous. I laughingly explained why I thought so to a friend, and bluster-man happened to be standing right behind me.
Maybe, deep down, such people know that they have ridiculous, frustratingly broken job descriptions and rather than just deal with it honestly or change things, they instead try to
Just out of curiosity... why? Really, I thought about it for a moment after initially agreeing with you, but after I actually thought about it now, I genuinely can't see why anymore.
FWIW, what I'm specifically talking about is putting up a fake website/myspace profile/... for your principal, not passing around notes in class, BTW. The latter clearly harms the learning environment in class, but the former, when it doesn't interfere with class, should be protected speech - otherwise, you could just as well argue that children should be punished for talking about how their principal sucks among each other after school.
Children, like everyone else, have the right to an opinion. They don't have the right to disrupt class, but what they do in their own private time is not for the principal (or the school) to judge. I can see why the principal felt insulted, but hey - as long as it's not libellous or inciting assaults on him or other crimes or anything, I don't think he should have a right to use the powers granted to him to punish the children.
butter the donkey
I think the issue is that there are no legal consequences because it was perfectly legal to do. What people are in a tizzy about is that the principle spent all this time and money in an attempt to punish students who had done something within their rights that he didn't like.
NOT A US CITIZEN but....
surely this cannot be protected speech- it is slanderous (and quite obviously malicious in intent - does anyone here think there's any chance at all it was "good natured ribbing"?)
We are talking about children who insult and attack authority figures because they "know" nothing can be done about it.
I hope that these children get everything that's coming to them
If this guy was the President of the United States he'd probably have decalred martial law and then used the Secret Service and the National Guard to conduct a manhunt for the guy who made fun of him.
Beaten to the punch.
What?
To be considered slander it has to be, at some level, believable.
No. Please don't come with such ridiculous "the world is getting ever worse" crap. The percentage of reasonable people is always the same. The same therefore is valid for the percentage of people who are not reasonable. It is just that with the advent of the internet more people, both reasonable and unreasonable, are much easier heard: They are just a Google search away, while in former times you had to buy a newspaper or go to the library or similar.
If somebody at work calls me a clown, I may dress up as a clown or set "Send in the Clowns" as my ringtone.
Sometimes you can gain more friends by having a sense of humour about yourself.
I remember when I was in high school in the early 1990's we had a policy here in Caddo Parish (yes we are so far behind in Louisiana that we have parishes, not countys) where you could not dye your hair any non natural color. A kid came to school with all green hair. he was promptly suspended until he came back to school with a natural hair color. now his parents said fine, and refused to bring him back to school until the school changed their policy.
The school board was saying that it was a distraction for him to have his hair a different color. Students all over the area about 14 different High Schools started dying their hair or wearing green ribbons in support of this one boy. What I think was more of a distraction was raising a ruckus over a child expressing himself. if we do not allow a child to exorcise free speech, if we do not allow a child to practice the things he has learned in school then what is the point of even teaching the child in the first place?
Obviously the school does not realize how insane and controlling this makes them appear. It does not make the students want to stop. overall it makes them want to lash out more. if the principal laughed of off and said "Good one, and by the way you misspelled moron here" he probably would have gotten respect from the students.
Well, if a student loses computer access here, we sometimes allow certain access times, for classes that they must use a computer for.
Or, if they lose computer access privileges, it's usually a teacher that requests it, and the other teachers can work around that.
Creating a fake MySpace profile is impersonation. Talking about how the principal sucks is not. (Nor is passing around naughty notes in class.)
This is a very big distinction.
IAmNAL, but I remember the requirements for slander as:
1) Must be false. The kids lose this battle.
2) Must be believable by the average person.
3) Must have an adverse effect on the guy's reputation. If they blew it all already, then slander is OK apparently. For a high school principal, this one is the key argument.
Student Manager - Take control of your education!
"Now the basic educational mission of the school was being compromised in order to keep students from visiting these profiles during school hours[...]"
They of course, in actuality, mean that the basic social conditioning of the school was being compromised in a futile attempt to salvage the principle's dignity.
Cleary if the kids are using MySpace (which is still a shame, but for much different reasons), they don't need what public school computer class is going to teach; this is how you use the Start Menu, this is how you open Internet Explorer--the only web browser in the world--and this is how you make PowerPoint presentations. Pff, right. Schools' focus on using PowerPoint should, in itself, dismiss the merits of technology focused classes.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
...an attempt to punish students who had done something within their rights that he didn't like.Blatant libel is a right?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
A common misconception is that the First Amendment gives U.S. Citizens the right to say whatever they want. However, the First Amendment does not protect slanderous and libelous statements made against another person. There have been many past court cases addressing just this issue. The case described in the article probably falls into this category. While you have a right to express your opinion as a U.S. citizen, you do not have the right to spread lies about someone for the sole purpose of defaming their character. Doing so infringes on your victim's civil rights.
If all the student did was post an editorial on his own web site stating that he does not think the school principal is doing a good job, and provided factual information to support his opinion, I would agree that the principal overreacted and the lawsuits were frivolous. However, this is not what happened.
If you do not think that what this student did is libel, I suggest you go to www.dictionary.com and look up the word "libel." Publishing a fake MySpace profile on the Internet and making it look like it belongs to another person should be considered libel. If you were to publish this false information about the school principal in a newspaper or other print format it certainly would be considered libel. Since millions of people around the world can potentially view the fake MySpace profile on the Internet, it is not like passing notes in class at all. It also does not matter that the student created the fake profile at home, in his own free time, since he posted the information on the Internet with the intent of defaming the principal's character. Since the student who created the MySpace profile tried to make it look like this was a profile created by the principal, I'd say what he did also borders on identity theft.
It's easy to pass this sort of thing off as a childish prank, until it happens to you. Maybe the principal did not handle this in the best possible way, but he is still the victim here.
I graduated from Hickory HS back in '99. The only dealings I had with Eric Trosch was when he was the assistant mens tennis coach. To say the least he was a total jerk. No one on the team liked him nor could/would say anything positive about him. I could defiantly see why he could be the target of something like this. The original article in the home town paper is below for anyone interested.
s tory_094195802.html
http://www.sharon-herald.com/archivesearch/local_
They probably did it because he was a DICK. Maybe he needs to look inward.
And if so, does the course mention the concept of "public figure"?
Surely the Principal qualifies as a public figure within the relevant community. That means he should expect sophmoric riddicule. As long as they aren't publishing anything that a reasonable person would think is an actual profile then as an educator he should have welcomed the students' exercise of their free speach rights.
And if all of the other students flock to the page, well at least they're reading something.
I don't suppose you've read any Mark Twain or Jonathan Swift works?
Lighten Up! It's a prank, and it's not even a malicious prank, it's a stupid digital profile on a stupid site that only 13 yr olds go to... The principle does not have the "right" to hunt down the people that put up a fake profile, and especially not with tax payers money. If it bothers him, he's more than welcome to contact the site and request his profile be removed, and create his own profile with the information he wants in it. But good grief, you make it sound like the kids took baseball bats and broke his legs. It's not that serious... Everyone always says the current generation is horrid (oh lets remember the 50's and that EVIL rock and roll that was going to ruin society, and lets not get the 60's with all of the hippy's, and my very own, Generation X) and we have to do something about it, but the truth is our society continues to learn and improve, and these "horrid" kids don't all end up as druggies and bank robbers. So Don't worry, Relax, and if it's your thing, have a homebrew, but please don't encourage this idiot taking a personal attack from students a valid reason to waste taxpayer money and cut programs that could lead to these kids actually learning something. Sam
As for the employer issue, any employer that uses MySpace profiles to determine the viability of a candidate has a serious issue to be dealt with.
Why? Its becoming common for employers to google the names of prospective candidates to see what turns up. It can often turn up glaring omissions or discrepencies in the resume.
It may also show an applicant to be irresponsible, even a liability. For example if you find their blog/myspace/whatever where they trash talk their former/current employer, boss, or even clients you probably don't need to even bother with an interview.
If you find them soliciting sex, or rating the women they work with pictures, bragging about going to work drunk or stoned, or bragging about how they sued their former boss for harassment etc etc etc. These are hassles you just don't need.
You're right anyone who uses a myspace profile to determine someone is a good hire has serious issues. However, using myspace et al to thin down that stack of resumes is both sound and efficient. How your employees conduct themselves in full view of the public is often a pretty good view of how they'll conduct themselves on the job. Fake myspace profiles and other such 'pranks', especially if they are done with enough care to make them look at least plausible to someone is easily enough to get someone reviewing resume's to pass over shortlisting them for an interview.
Slander and libel are not crimes, they are torts. The police don't care, won't contact MySpace, and will quite possibly be upset at having their time wasted listening to ridiculous demands. The principal would have to have the relevant MySpace information subpoenaed.
English is easier said than done.
And of course, just because it's on the Internet, it MUST be true, right?
Um, no. Students bullying a teacher is definitely not in the same category as students bullying a student or adults mobbing an adult. The balance of power alone takes care of that. These students have broken the rules. About the only thing they can get is detention. Anything above that - cutting computer classes in some perverted kind of collective punishment, or even litigating, is a ridiculous escalation.
The reaction of this principal shows that he should never have become a teacher in the first place. If he cannot deal with immature hostility in a superior and appropriate manner, he should stay the hell out of anything below college, where he can at least expect to deal with students as adults.
That's nothing. Back in 99 there where these two kids who got real pissed off with all the dickhead students and teachers at school so they brought M16s to school and started capping people. That was most awesome prank I've ever seen.
Y1:
A VW Beetle and a one-story school?
Y2:
Aye.
Y1:
You were lucky. We we taught for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We only had a Bigwheel(tm), sans front-wheel, to admire... and good luck getting those back tires around anything... fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
Karma: NaN
I don't entirely disagree with you, in that this is a serious problem. Where I do agree with you is where the problem is. I don't believe that this principal would have shut down classes and spent thousands of dollars trying to hunt down the perpetrator if it was one of his students that had this happen to them. If he is unwilling to spend those resources on the students, it indicates that he doesn't see this a problem, he sees it as a problem when it happens to him.
It is a little like the father of the bully who I outraged when one of his kid's victims finds the bully alone at night in some ally, and uses a tool, and the bully gets sent home with a broken collar bone. The assault at night is not where the problem started.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the principal deserved it. The problem is that the US public school system is broken, and is unfixable in it's current form. The problems start with the parent, and go all the way up to the President of the United States (who referred to the smart kids as 'The Nerd Patrol'). Parents don't want to bother raising their kids. Schools have become a business, and students are treated the same way that the local phone company treats their "customers". And, the government sees a way to increase power of the unwashed masses.
What kind of idiot puts their real name on a place like Myspace? Maybe I'm just too old (I'm getting really decrepit at 32), but I don't use or pay attention to Myspace at all, and even though I have my old personal website, I don't even have my full name there either, except in one small place (and only as a .jpg image so it can't be searched for). A google search for my full name (and my last name is very uncommon) will yield a lot of hits, but they're all things like postings to software development forums and the like.
What kind of idiot would make a webpage or Myspace page or whatever, reveal all his darkest secrets, and then stick his real name on it for the world to see? If I had any dark secrets on the internet, I'd only use a pseudonym for dealing with those sites. I even use a pseudonym for Slashdot, in case any employers or whoever doesn't like my sometimes-extreme opinions.
Yes!
;)
Well, maybe not so much the 2nd option...
However, why DIDN'T the principal (or at least the IT person!) contact MySpace and have them remove the profiles? Surely this wouldn't have been the first time something like this has happend. I don't think it would even require a court order as it's clear that the profiles are fake and it would be easy enough for the guy to prove his identity. Heck, MySpace might have even helped track down the culprits. Since at least one student created one of the profiles from home, would have been pretty efficient without having such an impact on the school.
Seriously, I hope the rest of the parents whose children had classes cancelled because of this gang-bang sue both the principal and the stupid school board for allowing this to get so out of hand. Clearly the Principal abused his power in tracking down these students, to the detriment of the rest of the student body.
It seems like it's a better idea to just remove them from school altogether, if you have the financial resources to do so. Homeschooling is a great option, and private schools are good as well. Growing up in the 80s, I went to both private and public schools, and the difference was night and day. While there's problem children in private schools too, they're a fraction of the problem they are in public schools. Kids who don't want to learn aren't usually allowed to stay in private schools, whereas public schools are required to keep even completely dysfunctional children, who then spend all their time tormenting the good kids.
I'm actually an alumni of Hickory High School, so I just wanted to give a little bit of perspective on who this principal is. In a very 24-esque plotline, Eric Trosch was made vice principal after the former vice principal was fired due to a total SNAFU over a bomb scare. A year later, he was made principal after the former principal took a position at another school district. So basically this guy was a middle school guidance counselor who was rapidly pushed into the principal position.
Basically, this guy has the mentality to treat all of his students as five year olds, giving people about zero personal responsibility. He's a very conservative principal, if you couldn't already tell. There are numerous examples that I can give of this, but I'll just give you my personal favorite. I was a senior during 9/11, and this guy's brilliant idea was to turn off all tvs and computers and force all students and teachers to pretend like nothing was happening. There was even a memo passed out that no one was allowed to talk about anything that was happening. Then, this guy had the audacity to say something about how we'll never forget about 9/11 in his speech at graduation. So now, whenever anybody talks about where they were when they heard about 9/11, we all get to say "I was in school, told to sit still and pretend that nothing was happening."
My point is that when you treat teenagers as five year olds, should you really be getting this up in arms when they act like five year olds on myspace?
He's a school principal, from my experience 75% of school administrators are morons and ego/control freaks. The ones that aren't in public schools quickly learn that they can get 4 times as much in a private school and when they get fed up enough they do just that.
On the other hand the low intelligence of the bad ones means that anyone with even average intelligence and determination can run circles around them.
This sounds an awful lot like the Bong Hits for Jesus prank, currently headed to the Supreme Court. I expect the principals to loose in both cases for one simple reason: these pranks are occuring beyond the jurisdiction of the school, so long as these pranksters are running things from a non-school PC.
As much as I hate it, this *is* the MySpace generation (born circa '88). In fact, my neighbor's son recently did the same thing, posting info about his principal's criminal record via a fake MySpace account. As you would expect, the principal screamed and threatened, but it was all hot air. At best, he might have tried a defamation civil suit, but being that the criminal record was accurate, he had no way to prove any damages. It was already public info to anyone who knows how to Google.
Psuedo-legality aside, my Psych 101 classes taught me that the best response to a MySpace prank is to ignore it. These kids *want* attention, *want* to stir up trouble. The more "the system" screams and yells, the more excited the pranksters become. And once the legal prescedent is set, that school administrations have no control over what kids do on MySpace, I expect the "fake principal page" will become a staple at high schools nationwide- if it isn't already.
And, to be fair to the schools, this prescedent is in their best interests too. Once it has been established that they can't stop kids from "MySpacing", it also must be accepted that they cannot be held liable either. As a tax payer, I don't want to end up on the recieving end of a multi-million dollar lawsuit against our local high school, especially not because some kid went on MySpace and did something stupid; like met a stranger or shared personal info like an address or phone number.
If you have teens at home, make sure to include the "MySpace talk" along with the "sex talk" and "drugs talk". All bullshit aside, it could save their life.
barack to the future?
Many employers have serious issues. That's not relevant to his observation. I can only assume then, that if I somehow convinced your employer you were unfit and he fired you, that would be OK?
Nobody really feels sorry for those little pricks. The issue is that the principal decided that seeing the guilty pay for the damage to his pride was more important than actually teaching.
If you're going to be elitist, it would help to be elite.
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
What possible difference does that make?
Selecting and hiring an employee is based on a combination of educated guesses, judgement calls, and first impressions. And they are often selected from pools of hundreds of candidates.
If you have 50 candidates after looking at resumes for content and professionalism (which could just be lies/embellishments and a few bucks to a professional resume writer) and you need to pare it down to 10 for interviews then you might look to the internet.
40 of them will come back with zilch. Say 3 might have have industry relevant blogs, 2 of which really impress you. 5 more show up with puff sites, pictures of a family vacation, and personal whatnot. One more has a myspace profile, one where he trash talks his current job, employer, wife, friends, and clients while bragging how he stole a company laser printer and 'went office space on it'. The last has a page dedicated to him and his friends hockey team -- and his player profile indicates he recently "Finally completed his grade 12 equivalency - Congratualations Gary", which is fine, except his resume says he graduated high school years ago and then went on to a 2 year state college program.
So... you end up with 2 on the short-list (the impressive bloggers), 2 in the reject pile (the jackass and the liar), and the task of choosing 8 more from the 46 left. Not bad for 5-10 minutes effort. Sure the resumes you rejected *might* have been a lie but that's life.
You NEED to pare down the list -- and let's face it -- you'll be rejecting another 34 more people on even LESS evidence!
you'll be rejecting another 34 more people on even LESS evidence!
Er 38 more people. Damn rewrites.
It does sound a bit like the High School version of 24.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
Of course, you could have made the error on purpose, and were just playing the honesty system. Hm....
Have you ever seen... seen Airplane!?
Dennis Leary actually, but I get the point...
Yup I agree completely!
Tons of them do it though.
A pile of them do it directly. They WANT their friends to find their pages, and read about the crazy cool shit they pull. And they lack the sense to realize that ANYONE else can find them too.
A pile do it accidently or indirectly too.
For example one could do something silly like post with your real name on a non-work forum like one for a sports club/team you belong too, or when asking a question about HDTVs etc... and then idiotically link back to your myspace in your sig. Or ask about a video card in a tech forum using your real name, which links back to your WoW guild site, which links back to your myspace, or your professional forum posts include a link back to your family vacation page, which links back to your myspace page... (This sort of stupidity happens often.)
It also happens a lot that other people will 'out' you. e.g. your buddy Carl's myspace page might have a copy of the roster of his hockey team, which you are on, with a link to each persons myspace account that has one. Or perhaps beneath the roster he'll just say 'You gotta check out the funny shit on Steve's myspace.../link/
Yeah, a myspace profile proclaiming someone is a pervert using their full name right next to it might seem to be 'too obvious' to be real... or it could just indicate they are particularly dumb.
After all people ARE idiots.
I suppose if I were ever victimized by an internet prank like a fake profile, and the site was showing up in google, the best way to deal with it would be to simply acknowledge it and call it out as the bullshit it is on my legitmate sites. Hopefully anyone googling me would find my disclaimer before judging me based on that bullshit.
LMAO - That was just sublime.
Thanks, you made my day.
OMG!! Goats you say????!!!
As a former principal, you'd think any potential future employers would understand that a myspace profile is:
a) not real
b) made by an angry student
c) a common joke against those in the profession
d) all of the above
This is why slander is harder to prove if you're famous. If this guy decided to serve in the public eye, he should be willing to accept that the eye will sometimes draw people who don't like him. The point is, if I find a profile about a congressman on myspace, I don't believe what I read.
This is not the same as a PRINCIPAL doing something to a student. One is a MINOR with no public image, while the other is a public servant (oh, and an adult) with a public image. One is already in the public eye (and paid to be there), one is not.
I'd say that as long as any of those things don't directly affect me or people I care about they can do as they wish. Yes, I've read about employers scouring the web for information on their prospective employees, but do you think they would take a MySpace page like that seriously? Especially with high schoolers posting comments, like the one the young lady posted, on it? If the place I'm applying to can't discern fact from fiction when it comes to things like that, or if they decide to listen to what some random Joe has to say about me over the phone, then I'm not so sure I'd want to be working there. How about we (Americans) suck it up and learn to take control of what our children do, instead of letting the courts do it for us. It is truly sad that we can no longer work things out among ourselves and litigate and the drop of a hat.
If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.
I think you fail to correctly understand where this is headed. Sites like myspace, youtube, facebook, any site that is a business (ie. every site) will eventually move to requiring confirmed ID of the person establishing the account and pages. As the personal attacks, copyright violations and other acts of total stupidity get worse and worse, the lawsuits against Google, News Corp, and the like will increase. In the end either the law making bodies of the countries where businesses like that are based will pass laws requiring confirmed IDs, or a judge will agree to an injunction or damages that shut down the business until they can fix their problems, which will lead to them "voluntarily" implementing the same thing.
Thinking that people will be able to hide behind network anonymity indefinitely is just the wrong prediction of the future. Society will not stand for the kind of abuses that come from the bottom twenty percent getting away with sociopathic behavior when it can be curbed by normal social pressures if the anonymity is taken away.
And you whole "prepare your child for reality" argument is just as applicable to the dickheads who insult, assault, aggravate, etc. when the "victims" finally get pissed off enough to stab the punks in the eye with a pencil. Having uncontrollable urges to tease and abuse others is as much a sign of an ill prepared human being as someone who over reacts to bullying. Saying the recipient of the taunting, etc. should have better coping mechanisms is a cop out for the pussies who can only support their self esteem by knocking down others.
Yes. I'd tell anyone who asks that the Myspace profile is a fake. They'd likely believe me, if they know enough about me and/or my family to care. I went through similar crap in school and part of the solution is to learn that the fact that people happen to be born the same year as you and live in your geographic region as you does not mean that you should care what they think about you, or be educated with them. Therefore, my children won't be put through the government school system.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
If you need to pare down the list, then you aren't hiring intelligently.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Considering the career field, even the slightest whiff of impropriety (esp. when it comes to such subjects as paedophilia or drug use) will be enough to bomb you on a job interview, whether it's true or not. 'Absurdity' and the level thereof on the Internet also differs vastly between a geek and an ordinary person.
IMHO he went overboard, yes... I would've simply suspended the kid and forced him (and his parents) to publicly apologize in front of a suitable audience - the entire school would do. OTOH, it is still well within his rights to sue over it, and let a jury decide whether it rises to the level of a legitimate and recompensable tort.
PS: Why the AC post?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
but he is still the victim here.
To quote some punk rock insight:
"You're only a victim when you admit to be."
Since the student who created the MySpace profile tried to make it look like this was a profile created by the principal, I'd say what he did also borders on identity theft.
You're kidding right? Identity theft requires you hijack an ID to accomplish some goal under the auspice of that ID. Please tell me one thing these students accomplished while posing as their principal?
All these kids have to say is that their stuff was parody. Happens all the time in other forms of media. Hell, people make good livings impersonating other famous people and doing things out of character. Is that identy theft?
Parody doesn't have to me nice. It can be malicious as hell.
Remind me to beat Carl's ass for linking me on his myspace.
One thing, though. As someone who has previously done the teaching thing professionally, I can say at least this: Sometimes you have to come down hard on miscreants if you hope to maintain any semblance of authority over those students who are within your purview. It sucks, but it's still there. Teachers and administrators have many means at their disposal - some more effective than others. In the face of increasing boundaries and limitations, some educators figure that maybe the legal route is one of the few means left. This does not supercede being fair and being courteous; just that it lets any other potential screwballs know up-front that if they try, the results will hurt. For this kid and his parents who are in the docket for libel, I'm willing to bet that the rest of the kids in his school (and more importantly, their parents) are paying very close attention, and won't be in any mood to duplicate the prank. Of course, there could be a backlash of sorts, but I doubt the parents (who are rather enamoured of maintaining sole ownership of their house, car, stock portfolios, etc) will be even close to eager to let their kid be the first to try it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
What the hell does any of what you said have to do with the now? No one predicted anonymity in the future. There was merely an accurate understanding of what the landscape looks like today.
Also, people who need to point the finger at other people doing wrong in lieu of accepting their own responsibilities are even bigger jack asses than those who didn't accept those responsibilities in the first place.
The last time I googled myself, it came back with a website of a homosexual real estate agent living down in Texas.
Now, according to you, this would cause an employer to immediatly assume my resume is a lie.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Of course, if the employer is really that stupid, I'm better off not getting hired.
...and obviously, I'm not going for mod-points here, since the article's so far down in the thread, but let me say these few things:
1) Sorry about the slander vs. libel mix-up, I always get those mixed around.
2) I do not disagree that the principal overreacted. He went way off the deep end, and I'm aware that he looks like a bigger fool now than when he just had the false myspace pages.
3) What I'm absolutely floored at is that no one is really putting any blame here on the teenagers. Just because they're teens doesn't let them off the hook. As a teacher, I've been made fun of plenty of times (a few bulletin boards allegedly claim that I'm gay and the like...). It (unfortunately) goes with the territory. But just because it exists doesn't mean that it's ok, and just because students do it doesn't mean they have a right to. If we catch someone doing that, they'll get suspended. I would expect that a minimally-appropriate punishment would be a week's suspension plus a letter of apology from each student responsible for posting the page.
4) IANAL, but the internet is still a gray area in terms of the legal sense of the word "publish." Plus, I have not seen these myspace pages, so I don't know how over-the-top they are. It may just have a bitmapped picture of a dick attached to his face, or someone may have posted a realistic-looking resume that claims that he was fired from his last two positions. The former wouldn't be grounds for libel, the later would. And with lawyers nowadays, we all know that it's the lawyers that bend the law to their will, so even a dickface might be called libel if spun the right way in court.
I'm sticking up for the principal, because I know where the anger is coming from. It's not easy to be a teacher and to work hard to help students who keep mocking you. The principal may have gone on a power trip, and that's where he went wrong, but it's still wrong for students to do this. They were caught, and they need to learn that what they did was wrong. Don't just blame the principal (even if he was the bigger ass) and let the kids off the hook.
If you need to pare down the list, then you aren't hiring intelligently.
If *I'm* spared the hassle of looking through a lengthy list of applicants, it just means I'm paying someone else to do it for me. Either way *someone* is going to be filtering that list.
he's abusing his authority and not acting like an authority figure, he's acting like a child who got called a faggot and is now "making everyone pay"
I had a school IT guy like this in HS. who tried EVERYTHING in his power to get me expelled from the system because he saw me as a threat to his job because I knew how to use linux and I knew more about computers than using internet explorer. He talked shit about me behind my back to teachers, and talked to certain students to get them to harass me. He put warez and porn on my student drive and tried to show it to the principal (I found it and deleted it before they came into the class I was in and tried to humiliate me in front of an entire class and make me look bad to the prinicipal.
He stalked me through school, etc. If I realized how hard I could have sued this motherfucker, I would have. He was a grown man who was, at the time, stalking and harassing a minor. I could have also pulled the conspiracy card on him and got him into some deep shit. But I chose to ignore his ass and drive him batshit insane. when he found out I was graduating he came up and told me he hopes they rip of the diploma and kick me in the face.
He also had the more advanced computer classes cancelled and to no longer be taught and people couldnt use the computer lab computers because they were "his" so they now just sit.
He's lucky I didnt decide to be evil and do some horrible shit.
This prinicipal reminds me of this guy. You know, letting kids get to him over little or no reason. in my case it was over no reason at all.
but still, adults who work with children should not react this way, in fact a man like this who is obviously this insecure and unstable does not deserve the job of principal.
if he were a reasonable adult, he would have contacted myspace and had them remove it for being inappropriate content.
anyone here who thinks he has a right to waste millions in tax dollars because he got pranked shouldnt even bother saying anything.
In the end, their online notoriety may be more damaging and follow them longer than any punishment from the school system.
This isn't automatically stupid. I'm almost 30, and I use my real name on myspace. Old friends that I haven't seen in years have found me through myspace.
Of course, when I put stuff up on my profile, I do so knowing anyone (present/potential future employers, family members, potential dates, ANYONE) can find it.
If you wouldn't feel comfortable telling your mother about what you did last weekend, keep it off myspace. If you don't want the whole office to know what you did last weekend, keep it off myspace. If you don't want the police, IRS, etc. to know what you did last weekend, keep it off myspace. Or use a pseudonym, but this doesn't work if you share the pseudonym with anyone you know IRL (for reasons already mentioned).
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
That only works if the applicant ever hears that the myspace profile was involved. No employer will ever tell you myspace was looked at. If they even bother to continue the interview, they'll just give you the old "your skillset doesn't match our needs" line of BS.
Remember -- any HR person who can't, on request, find a legal way to disqualify any arbitrarily chosen candidte just doesn't understand their job.
Now, according to you, this would cause an employer to immediatly assume my resume is a lie.
Obviously, there was an implied assumption that there was corroborating evidence of an identity match. In the case of the Jackass - he was trash talking his job -- its quite likely he mentioned the company names and his boss -- which would line up with his work history and perhaps even one of his references.
In the case of the liar the team name might well be on the resume when talking about his other interests.
In a case like that what you proposed its obvious, the employer is going to think he's found someone with the same name as you...unless "his" contact cell number matches the one in your resume or something...
"You're only a victim when you admit to be."
That's a load of crap. Granted, there's a "victim" card that gets played at times.
But if I run over you and paralyze you from the waist down, you're a victim of careless driving. If a genocidal political regime puts you into a detention camp, you're a victim of political oppression and genocide. If you get mugged, you're a victim of crime. Gratuitously avoiding the "victim" tag when it applies is pretty ridiculous. Most people don't like being victims, but it happens.
I don't believe it is a load.
There is very rarely a situation where I would get run over where more diligence on my part wouldn't have swayed the outcome of an accident.
If a genocidal political regime puts me into a detention camp I chose to let them do it to me instead of killing me while I resist.
If I get mugged, it's because I didn't properly prepare myself for violent crime - or wasn't willing to take the necessary precautions to prevent it.
It is a matter of personal perspective.
I've never been a victim. Quite often I think people who claim to be victims do so when choices they made in their life didn't live up to expectations or a small percentage chance event occurred in place of normal events.
That only works if the applicant ever hears that the myspace profile was involved.
What only works? I think you are confused about something.
Remember -- any HR person who can't, on request, find a legal way to disqualify any arbitrarily chosen candidte just doesn't understand their job.
You are quite right there.
But in this case, the applicant doesn't ever even make it into the interview. He's already been rejected before he's short listed for an interveiw.
The only defense against 'myspace' harassement/abuse/prank is too point out what it is on legitimate sites in the hope that whoever finds the myspace page *also* will find your disclaimers. And even that will only get you so far. An employer who sees the myspace page and the disclaimers might still reject you simply because you seem to be the sort who attracts this sort of 'drama'. I guess it beats being rejected for being suspected a perverted idiot... but either way you didn't get the job.
My school uses DansGuardian. I copied the "good phrases" (one's the have that negate the "bad phrases" on a page) and set up PHProxy, making the simple change to add the "good phrases" in a hidden div on the page. The keyword filter becomes useless. I was ready to scan the page and replace all the "bad phrases", but it turned out to be unnecessary.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
If a genocidal political regime puts me into a detention camp I chose to let them do it to me instead of killing me while I resist.
Even if you are killed while resisting, you are a victim of the genocidal political regime. After all, if that regime hadn't come into power, you'd still be alive. Oops! I forgot. No victims here. It's probably your fault for allowing the genocidal political regime to attain power in the first place. In fact, you could say that you were a victim of your own political apathy and stupidity for allowing the regime to take power.
I've never been a victim. Quite often I think people who claim to be victims do so when choices they made in their life didn't live up to expectations or a small percentage chance event occurred in place of normal events.
Maybe you haven't ever been a victim, or maybe you have been and are just in denial about the experience. It doesn't really matter to me. However, I've generally found that people who think it is a choice to be a victim have either lived sheltered lives where they are totally protected from malicious behavior or they are actually the people doing the victimizing. Bullies who feel the need to victimize others typically do so because they are unable to accept their own insecurities and are emotionally immature. By victimizing others, a bully doesn't have to accept his own failings because he can use the failings of others to give himself the appearance of superiority. No one likes a bully, so everyone will do their best to find the bully's insecurities and exploit them. In the great scheme of things, the bully will eventually become the victim of his own failings.
Everyone will be a victim at some point in their lives. The only question is, will you be unfairly victimized by others and have society leap to your defense, or will you be a victim of your own arrogance who has not earned sympathy or kindness from others?
I attended 5 different private schools in the first 15 years of my academic career, and one or two were pretty good (I don't remember preschool very clearly), but by and large, private schools don't kick out the worst kids. The worst kids are usually the ones whose parents are the wealthiest, and kicking them out means turning away its largest donors and subsequently going out of business and shutting its doors to all its students. My personal opinion is that we all would have been better off if it had, but that's not the point.
They keep up the pretense of ruling with an iron fist by enforcing things like dress code, but they turn a blind eye to things like drug abuse, bullying and generally disruptive behavior. All the students and faculty are aware of it, but as long as the potential parents/funders don't see it, it's not a problem. And because a family has to be reasonably well off to send kids there, the kids have that much more money for drugs.
I had no problem with the drug use; I had a problem with the school's arrogance and constant self-congratulation about how it was so exclusive while actually having little respect for any of the principles it purported to stand for. Which leads me to have little empathy for the principal. He chose to be a tool of the meat grinder (as the grandparent post so accurately described formalized education), he shouldn't be surprised when somebody who doesn't want to be ground up strikes out at him.
Unfortunately, depending on the field you're going into -- education is one of them -- there may be as many as 300, 400, even a thousand applicants for one job. Anything, no matter how insignificant, that can be used to winnow you out, will be. And what ought to appear to be an obvious practical joke, only makes them ask "who did this guy piss off and how?" You might as well not even bother bringing it up in an interview, if you even get one -- they'll be thinking "Next!" before you've finished saying "Some kid..."
Yeah, 130-145 on the faster subarus, which should be plenty for anyone who isn't racing. I think it's mainly so you don't drive 150 on H rated tires and blow them up.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It all depends on whether or not your name is common. I have an extremely uncommon name. When I Google for my name, I only get hits that are directly associated with me. I get about 200 or so hits, and yes, I have checked to make sure they are really about me. If anyone else in the world has the same name as I do, they do not have a presence on the web. I find it rather frightening that it is so easy to track me down using the Internet. Fortunately, those search engine hits associated with my name are related to community service projects and membership in professional societies. Unfortunately, if someone were to post something slanderous or libelous about me on the Internet, it would be incredibly easy to find because my name is so uncommon. It could potentially ruin my career, as I might have a hard time defending against the allegations or making the person who posted it remove it from the web site. Once someone slanders you in this manner, it is incredibly difficult to restore your reputation, and it still could have repercussions even after the material has been removed from the web site. If this were to happen to me, my only recourse would probably be to sue, just as the principal in the article did. My career hinges on my reputation and my field relies on the Internet to disseminate information, so you can bet that any potential employer is going to look me up on the Internet. And they are going to find me, because I have a very unusual name.
/. user name provides a big clue to my identity. Anyone with a bit of patience who reads through my posts and Googles for my nickname can probably figure out who I am. I thought it was a clever nickname at the time, but I've come to realize that it is incredibly difficult to remain anonymous on the web even when you use an alias.
I'm even posting this as an "Anonymous Coward" because my
*You do realize that this will never happen right?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
When the access was restricted, we were pissed. It's amazing what kind of damage can be done to a computer even if you cannot enter the case!
Blar.
To Trosch: To damage one's reputation in an effort to prevent damage to one's reputation. The self-inflicted damage is typically 3 or 4 orders of magnitude greater than the damage one originally sought to prevent.
It's easy to pass this sort of thing off as a childish prank, until it happens to you.
So, all you principals out there: when your disgruntled students exercise their right to free speech,
don't be a jackass and sue- Use this page, designed specifically for such an event.
Its unbelievable how those who take personal accountability seriously are ridiculed by others for being blind of their own victimization.
There is a huge difference between attaining self reliance and being a bully. I often find those who can't understand that are often the first ones to cry "I'm a victim" when they aren't.
While true cases a being victimized do exist, they are no where close to as ubiquitous as our whiny as culture would lead you to believe.
Am I the only one who sees a difference between "learning" and "doing school work," and thinks that school should mandate the former, but not the latter? And that blocking Internet access may help with the latter, but never the former?
Yep, that's a good start. You get points for effort. However I already went through the PHPProxy/CGI:Proxy code and gave all the variable names the form uses a score of 1 million.
Getting Myspace to take down a fake profile isn't actually easy - a couple months ago my girlfriend found a fake myspace profile of herself complete with pictures taken from the angelfire site she made in 8th grade or so (7 or 8 years ago that is). I presume it was created by my ex-girlfriend or one of her cronies. They have a form specifically for this problem and it requires that you submit a picture of yourself holding a sign with your myspace ID number (if you don't have a myspace profile already, I guess you would just make one rather than trying to fight it some other way). This seems like a good way to verify your identity, and it shouldn't take much time for someone to look at the picture and take down the fake profile. She is clearly identifiable in the pictures taken from the old website and in the one we submitted with the removal request.
However, we never heard back from them and the fake profile is still there. I guess we have to try again. In the principal's case, considering what he did do, it seems likely enough that he DID ask to have it removed, but got no response and no action was taken. After a couple of weeks and repeated requests that went unanswered, he then decided to do what he did. Pure conjecture, but entirely possible based on my experience. Also, I didn't read the article so I don't know if it has details about exactly how it went.
Myspace is often too popular for its own good; every time you visit, no matter what time of day, some part of it breaks and doesn't work. It is always slow. They obviously need to work faster than they are to step up the site's capacity and probably hire more people. If they don't already have them, they probably need employees whose sole job is to investigate abuses like this and take care of them quickly. I'm sure they do their best to take care of these things, but I'm also sure they get a lot of these requests that take a good amount of time to investigate fairly.
While waiting for someone at myspace to hear your case, one or two weeks of false and demeaning words can be torturous for people who already have low self-esteem and have trouble making friends (like this principal?) When nothing happens as a result, it'd be even worse.
There is such a thing as "libel per se."
No argument. No excuses.
What is "Libel Per Se"? When libel is clear on its face, without the need for any explanatory matter, it is called libel per se. The following are often found to be libelous per se:
A statement that falsely:
Charges any person with crime, or with having been indicted, convicted, or punished for crime;
Imputes in him the present existence of an infectious, contagious, or loathsome disease;
Tends directly to injure him in respect to his office, profession, trade or business, either by imputing to him general disqualification in those respects that the office or other occupation peculiarly requires, or by imputing something with reference to his office, profession, trade, or business that has a natural tendency to lessen its profits;
Imputes to him impotence or a want of chastity. Bloggers' FAQ - Online Defamation Law
So True.
It's not that the principal should "ignore it and it'll go away." What's pissing us off is the extreme that he's taking it too
But then you brag about it, Daniel Wolstenholme.
Too much coffee will do that to you
What?
Get rid of this stupid notion that anyone has a right to conceal their identity, and ALL the sordid little messes like this one will vanish pretty quickly, as will much of what makes MySpace the cesspool that it is. These horrid children wouldn't have been able to pull off this crap if 'Net anonymity wasn't a presumed right.
Kids rebel that is part of their growing up. I did, most "normal" children do. The difference here is that the adult, rather than taking the high ground and appropriate action and "EDUCATING"(he is an educator) these young minds, has decided that he will drag it out, waste public funds and the courts time. In other times the principal would have contacted the parents and a reasonable solution would have been reached. All this would have been done without punishing the entire school and bringing this to national attention.
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Myspace, Facebook, etc have been used for bullying since day 1. There is no educational content on any of them. Why are they (and all the proxies) not nullrouted at the firewall already? I bet playboy.com and stormfront.org already are. Any site that is nothing but trouble should be nullrouted by default (both by name and IP block) at a school. Myspace sits squarely in that category. Let the little turds look at it from home.
Amen to that. Kids need to learn that their actions have consequences. Everyone out there who is saying he should just let it go is probably raising a bully. And yes, this is a case of bullying.
Cameras? You really think that could or would stop the vandalism? Whatever makes you sleep well at night :)
As for my fellow students...we were the nerds and got hassled anyway, and the others didn't really want to use the computers. When the lame 'administrators' couldn't get them to work properly, we didn't have to work! Now if we had vandalized the gymnasium or the sports fields, then we'd have some trouble 'on the school yard'. Well, we would if High School students got recess.
Blar.
When school teaches that criticizing/lampooning authorities is unkosher, that school is automatically unamerican and the principal should be shipped to Guantanamo without so much as a dildo to idle the time.
(Reposted, account being moderated as flamebait)
I agree. I despised this when I was in school because I was the good kid. But working at a school now I realize that not only are consequences necessary when they question the authority, but that in general, using their peers against them is very effective. By depriving all of the students, instead of hailing to culprits as heroes, they will be angry and that anger will be shown to the guilty students. The group will probably hate the principal more, but they will respect his authority and be quicker to dismiss any idea of doing this themselves.
And since I know some here will start saying let's not blow this out of proportion... the culprits apparently are apparently stealing the principal's identity and defaming him. If someone did that to me I would want to find them in a dark alley. This is almost certainly a crime and was possibly committed using the school's own computer network. A lock down of the network or locking students out seems like a pretty standard procedure if administration believes it was used in a crime.
No. The principal was made a fool of by a bunch of immature kids. One of the kids was put in remedial education as a result. I would say that these two events are not comparable in scale.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
> "The kids committed what may well have been libel, and they (as well as their parents) are about to find out what happens when you do that."
Free speech is the right to say to hell with somebody else. The fact that it's in the non-transient form of electronic publication should not make a difference (ethically speaking, not legally speaking, of course). A kid should have every right to say "fuck authority" to his classmates, regardless of whether it's in person, over an IM chat room, in a mailing list, or on a public blog.
And what you say about maintaining order and control in a school environment may be true, but it would take only a few word substitutions to make that paragraph read like an Orwellian nightmare.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
The Japanese offered a great example a few months back. .
You want to your country to become a military super-power in fifteen years? You do two things; you legislate legal military growth, and you start brain-washing the kids you'll want to recruit.
School may have some cool teachers, and I did mention this, but it is also a powerful tool which is indeed being used to strip kids of their individuality and their ability to think for themselves.
There are better ways to provide people with education than the current system.
-FL
please stay on topic.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Read the MySpace page in question. It's obviously not real and the only hints of 'pedophilia' I noticed anyway was that he belonged to the 'Baby Gap Inc.' club and that he said his favorite clothes style was "XXXSmall". Everyone tries to make a mountain out of a molehill and bend the truth in court cases.
Free speech is the right to say to hell with somebody else.
Read this. Then come back.
And what you say about maintaining order and control in a school environment may be true, but it would take only a few word substitutions to make that paragraph read like an Orwellian nightmare.Bad argument there. Not all control is "Orwellian", and unless you can produce evidence of said principle using truncheons or rat cages to maintain student discipline, it's not even a close comparison.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Your link dropping doesn't address my argument; that article failed to convince me that satire and name calling can constitute libel. I'll do one better than you and actually quote something relevant from the linked page:
"In 1974, in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., (418 U.S. 323), the Supreme Court suggested that a plaintiff could not win a defamation suit when the statements in question were expressions of opinion rather than fact. In the words of the court, "under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea". However, the Court subsequently rejected the notion of a First Amendment opinion privilege, in Lorain Journal Co. v. Milkovich."
And - without doing any more research on that case as I have no interest in learning about it at this hour of night - I believe it's a shame they did overturn it. Anyway, I don't know what the applicable precedent is now, but my contention is that what the kids did *should* be allowed, not that it is necessarily not libel under the law.
"In 1988, in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, (485 U.S. 46), the Supreme Court ruled that a parody advertisement claiming Jerry Falwell had engaged in an incestuous act with his mother in an outhouse, while false, could not allow Falwell to win damages for emotional distress because the statement was so obviously ridiculous that it was clearly not true; an allegation believed by nobody, it was ruled, brought no liability upon the author. The court thus overturned a lower court's upholding of an award where the jury had decided against the claim of libel but had awarded damages for emotional distress."
Well, that's a bit closer to this case, although the decision wasn't about libel but about emotional distress. Again, I think that the same argument would be appropriate for libel, but I do not necessarily claim that that is legally true.
I will accept that the word Orwellian is not the most accurate description of the kind of control you described, but my point still stands.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Schools could indeed be an extremely useful tool if they worked universally at all levels from a positive set of intentions. --Such intentions might include making available a wide and unbiased range of knowledge and an encouragement of the act of learning itself; An awareness of how the dark side operates so that it can be recognized and chosen against. I'd also like to see the age groups of children mixed. --Bullying, for instance, I think becomes far less pervasive when children are intermixed into age groups of varying levels. Segregating according to age gives kids nobody to look up to for guidance, or to offer leadership to. Removing this creates confusion and unhealthy competition.
I grew up on a street which had a couple dozen kids between the ages of 2 and 17. There were certainly difficulties, but these were the exception. It was amazing to see how well designed humans are when they are intermixed in a natural environment. We learned more together, and cared more about each other than I've ever seen in the alien school-yard and class-room environment. I am fairly convinced that this natural system is disrupted on some level deliberately so that bullying and confusion become the norm in schools. This way, kids stop trusting their peers and instead look to the school/government/corporate system itself for the ultimate guidance. It's just another step in isolating people so that they can be better controlled.
One of the best ways to empower humans is to allow them to network. Networking cannot take place without a reason for them to trust oneanother.
War, in all instances, is the result of nationalistic propaganda and of greed. While I believe that war is not likely going to go away in this level of reality, it does not mean that one isn't allowed to choose against it on a personal level. I know of some people who have gone to great and difficult lengths to avoid serving in military agencies which they feel are performing evil. But they are able to opt out and live their lives according to their choices and to find alternative ways to give to their communities.
I opted out of school because I found its negative qualities offensive and jarring. I think I might have been lucky, because I was operating largely on instinct at the time. I didn't have the breadth of awareness I do today.
-FL
Who said the profile was made using school computers? It could just as easily been done by a student at home. Plus, don't schools have internet filters? I've never been to a school that didn't! They could just add myspace to the filter. Still, even if they don't have a filter, they handled it really poorly.