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Student in Court Over Suspension For YouTube Video
kozmonaut writes "A model student is in court this week over 40-day suspension for posting a mocking in-class video to YouTube of 'Mongzilla', a high school english teacher. The student is arguing he had First Amendment rights to publish the video, though it was filmed without permission in the classroom. 'Kent School District lawyer Charles Lind says the suspension had nothing to do with online criticism of the teacher. Rather, it was punishment for the disruption created by the students secreting a video camera into Joyce Mong's class and dancing in a mocking, disrespectful manner while her back was turned. "It's quite clear that the district is talking about conduct in the classroom and not the videotape," Lind said.'"
What online rights is this about? Your right to post videos on the internet without being held accountable for what they contain?
the school district is desperately backpeddling to find a good reason why they should be able to sue over a youtube clip. Even IF their given reason for the suspension is legitimate (which it isn't) 40 days is utterly disproportionate. 40 days is 8 school weeks which is over half a term. Even a ONE DAY suspension for getting up and dancing behind the teacher's back is disproportionate.
FGD 135
would consider a less than B average in high school as "model student" material. from tfa [quote] Cohen said her client has "no disciplinary record at school, and he is the model student" with a 2.97 grade-point average. [/quote]
Try getting a man on the street photo published sometime, you'll see.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Mongzilla is still up on Youtube.
This is totally different than the students who videotaped their teacher being a complete asshole in class and posted it. They were punished for embarrassing the teacher and no other reason. If they were acting like the asshats (in class) that the article describes, then they deserved to be smacked. That said, 40 days is DAMN ridiculous. Students do not need to be bringing cameras to school in order to record themselves acting the fool, but suspending them for 8 weeks is nonsense. Stop with the knee-jerk reactions because kids are being kids. Suspend them for a day or two and hope they learn. Sheesh.
mmm...muffins
If you hold them to their stated reason (or rather, excuse) for the punishment, it's for "disrupting the class." 40 days is several orders of magnitude too extreme. It's like executing somebody for spitting out their gum on the sidewalk.
No, they're punishing him for embarrassing the teacher (and exercising his rights), and now they're just trying to cover their asses.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
All kids involved in the video taping the teacher are morons. I remember when it was common sense not to do something so blatantly stupid and self-incriminating while in school. What ever happened to being able to sit for 45 minutes without acting like a jackass?
Why is the summary making it a point to say that that student was a model student? Do these model students have more rights than nerdy students, ugly students, non-bulumic students and fluncking students?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
668: Neighbour of the Beast
According to the article, all the kid did was post links to the video. I can understand suspending the kids who were causing trouble in the room, but also suspending people for just posting links (for the same amount of time, anyway) seems a little over the top.
Of course, as a teacher, if you're so oblivious of what's going on in your classroom that a kid can walk around behind you and give you bunny ears and make rude gestures, then this kind of thing is no surprise. I say that as a high school teacher, by the way. Bad classroom management creates way more problems than bad students.
I also thought it was funny that the video that was making fun of their english teacher had several spelling/grammar mistakes.
If you read the article, it isn't even clear at this point that the kid who's being suspended was involved in producing the video, either by acting up in the classroom or by assisting in filming it. It sounds like all he did was post a link to it on his Myspace page, and the school is busting him because they want him to rat out the people who DID make it.
We're talking about a 40-day suspension. If the student had previous 10, 20 and 30 day suspensions for selling drugs to kindergarten students or something, then maybe a 40 day suspension would be more reasonable.
But if a student has never been disciplined before, jumping straight to a 40-day suspension for a first offense that is neither illegal nor dangerous seems a tad unreasonable.
So no, model students don't have more rights than non-model students, but model students probably deserve lighter punishment for the same offense than students who are constant sources of problems and have been disciplined several times before.
paintball
"What happens if all the students produce a video of this nature? Expell all of them?"
Yes. Disruption of the classroom is a common reason for detention, and in extreme cases, expulsion. As a first offense, it might be a bit much, but if the offenders are continuously causing problems, they deserve the punishments they receive, even harsh ones. Pandering to the crowd of "save the children" and "no child left behind" is a mistake we're beginning to see the results of now. It will only get worse if we keep it up.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Couldn't the student claim it's a parody and eliminate any chance of a case against said student?
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
But pot and fights never hurt anybody. He gave her bunny ears. There's no recovering from that kind of humiliation.
How can that be?
After watching the video, I have to say, that's pretty worth a lengthy suspension. It wasn't just a stupid prank, it was premeditated and fairly vulgar. If I were a teacher, and the whole school had watched the video, I'd be pretty embarassed. From a legal sense, sure, he has a 1st amendment right to 'say' what he did...but they also have the right suspend him for however long they want. It's too bad they don't have the legal right to backhand him for it too.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
You're not even allowed to take pictures in schools without express permission.
The thing that really gets me about this sort of case is this idiot goes and films a bunch of other people without their permission and posts it online then says it's his right to freedom of expression. Somehow that right is violated if the people in the video or in this case the school have an objetion to the video being posted for public display. When you deal with the media or photographers, you have to sign a model release form stating that you give express permission to the person taking the video to use you in whatever they're going to use the video for. The same thing applies if some random jackass with a video camera decides to film you. They have absolutely no right whatsoever to put that video on the internet without your permission. Let alone film you.
I have nothing compelling to say
Funny, I was never expelled for 40 days and I remember tossing my text book out the window in complete defiance. This kid posts a video of other kids dancing behind the teachers back, note he didn't record the video, and he gets expelled for 40 days. That's 10% of the school year, for postiing a video on the Internet outside of class.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
You obviously haven't watched the video. It shows him insulting the teacher in class by waving his hand at her as if she smells, holding up fingers behind her head, doing a lewd dance behind her - all in a row. It's a self-incriminating video, giving the school the evidence it needs to suspend him. That said, a 40-day suspension is obviously over the top.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
...expelled for 40 days. That's 10% of the school year...Really? A school year is longer than a calendar year?
If you are in a public space, and presumably public schools are considered public space, you have no right or expectation of control over media that includes you.
I found a picture of myself in a book last summer, completely uncredited, and certainly unasked. The same truth holds for video or audio as well.
As for the whole "not allowed to take pictures in schools without express permission", that depends upon the school district, and the specific school in question. Most students are not discouraged from taking pictures, however, as long as it's not a disruption of the classroom environment. According to the article though, this kid wasn't even involved in the filming, he simply put it up on youtube and/or myspace. Suspension for disruption of class; fine, but not for 40 days. Suspension for thinking the disruption is funny and telling people about it? Not fine.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
The school should be embarrased to have her working there. The video points out she's unhygienic, the classroom looks disgusting, nobody respects her. That's just what I got in the first 60 seconds.
The school is alleging the video disrupted class - so that's why the student was suspended. So how disrupted was the class that they had to find the video on YouTube to know about it? Did the teacher not mention how 'disrupted' her class was? Ok then fire her.
Allowing this to go on is a disgusting example of a school board as a whole.
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Bride of Mongzilla?
Ace
Based on the math, I'd say the parent poster went to a school that had an extremely short school year.
Did you seriously just say that if the teacher wasn't bothered, there wasn't a disruption in the class?
Schools don't prevent disruptions to help the teachers have a nice day. They do it to foster a learning environment for the students. If 3 or 4 of the students are doing something majorly disruptive like dancing behind the teacher's back, -nobody- is learning at the point, and probably not for a while afterwards.
The punishment may not fit the crime, but I don't remember a time in school when it -did-, so that's nothing new. I was once written up for not doing my work in class (I had finished already) and when the teacher tried to rescind, wasn't allowed. Why? The vice-principal didn't like me. He actually had the nerve to say 'I just wanted to see if you'd show up' when I got there. I still had to do clean-up duty for something I didn't even do. Oh yeah, fair.
I've always seen expulsion as a way to let the kids that didn't WANT to be in school, not be. If they want to pass after that, they're going to have to work their little butts off just to pass. They won't have time to disrupt the class any more when they get back. (Nevermind what they'll have to deal with from their parents.) Nobody I knew ever had it happen to them, though. They cared about their grades too much.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
You know, if I was a teacher and my name was "Mong", I would change my damn name.
Similarly, do not go into teaching under your original name if your name is "Tard", "Spaz" or "Ho".
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I think you need to read again. What I said was "so there couldn't have been too much disruption of the class, as far as she was concerned."
I'm not arguing your point about a "learning environment" because I agree. My point was: sure the kids knew about the disruption, but I doubt in a class where the teacher was that clueless, disruption was anything out of the ordinary. Your argument was my point exactly, that the teacher was incompetent and thus the disruption, probably wasn't much of one anyway. We've all sat through classes that were a mandatory waste of our time. From what the article implied, this was one of those classes.
As for the rest of your comment, I was suspended for 3 days because someone else hit me. I didn't retaliate (it wasn't worth the effort) and went directly to the office and waited for the teacher (who had seen it) to arrive and report it. I still got suspended for fighting. At another school I had to make an official apology for cursing in front of (not at) a teacher whom I thought was a student because he was so young. I was speaking to a friend, after school, in the parking lot, but I still got in trouble.
Punishment is part of growing up, and it's as much a learning tool as anything else in school. It teaches us tact, and common sense about when to keep our mouths shut. It teaches us about consequences for our actions, but that doesn't mean it's a reasonable thing we shouldn't argue or disagree with when it's appropriate to do so. Do I think the kids involved should be punished? Yes. Should it be this severe? No.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Second, according to the article, the suspended student may not have been involved in the filming at all. He's not the student seen making 'rabbit ears' behind the teacher, and you can't know if he was the student running the camera.
He was targeted by the school board because of a link to the video on his myspace page.
From the article:
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First this isn't an issue of privacy, it's an issue of your personal rights to not have people take pictures and videos of you and do whatever they want with them.
Uhm. How is your 'personal right to not having your picture taken' NOT an issue of privacy? Oh, right, because then you'd have to admit that in PUBLIC, you don't have a right to PRIVACY. You have a right to privacy in private, not public. That's the very reason that we have two words: private, and public. I know it's confusing, but when you are not in private, you are in public. Do you think that everyone who makes a travel video with a camcorder has to get a release from everyone who is shown in it? What a hellish world your world would be.
Say if I were to take a picture of some random person walking down the street, and then put the caption 'pedophile?' on it then just stuck it on the internet for free. If they found out about that they'd want to break every tooth in my head.
Depends on if it were true or not, and if you could prove it. See, instead of breaking your teeth, they'd just sue you for libel. If you couldn't prove they were a pedophile, they'd win. They're not suing you in this case for taking their picture, because they can't. They're suing you for lying about them.
Most people don't know about the protocol for this sort of thing.
Including, apparently, you.
Generally it's only professional photographers and the media pay attention to this stuff because they can easily be sued for showing somebody on TV.
Funny, I doubt that newscasters get releases from all the people walking by in the background of their reports, yet they aren't sued into oblivion. I wonder why? Could it be because those background people are in PUBLIC and have no expectation of PRIVACY? Maybe.
Generally because nobody knows about it.
Damn, already made this joke in this post. Oh well.
http://xkcd.com/386/