Slashdot Mirror
Internet Pranks in Schools
Ferante125 writes "An interesting article about online pranks by students and teachers' responses to them. There are some interesting stats that sounded a little hard to believe. My immature side finds it funny and my more mature side is interested in the legal aspects." For the most part it seems like this article thinks pranks are basically just name calling and flaming on websites.
Hmm, interesting article. The definition of "prank" isn't just name calling and flaming. We have to re-define the term to include modern equivalent actions that corresponds to the term "prank". What is an acceptable on-line prank and what isn't?
:(){
Hell, teachers today have little authority on anything that happens on school grounds. My wife teaches elementary music, and even at that age it's a little less than Lord of the Flies because the teachers can do little about behavior and the kids know it.
What is there to do when the kids keep upping the ante and there's no recourse on the school ground? Hit 'em were it hurts. Maybe if parents have to pay for a lawyer for mommy's little bastard's behavior, some parents will start, you know, parenting...
I think this is very true. As a rule, the general 'trend' of knowledge and capability is increasing- we see the percentage of 25 year olds who have undergraduate degrees today is the same as the percentage of 25 year olds who had high school diplomas forty or fifty years ago.
But the maximum, the possibilities, have increased immensely- in 50 years, we've developed in every field, from metallurgy to medicine to computers in ways that would never have been dreamed possible seventy-five years ago.
And, as you posit, our transition to a knowledge-based economy has made it possible for those who aren't interested in self-development to essentially stagnate, comfortably, at an unusual lack of development, especially compared to those who DO focus on development and continue to advance.
The financial gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase; and yes, so does the knowledge gap.
Essentially, I think, you are starting to see a striation into class-like bands in our society- between those who want to develop and advance for advancement's sake and those who merely want to live their lives.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I have met some exceptionally talented high schoolers. In school have the free time to really keep up on all the new tech and enjoy the legal protection of juvenile criminal sentences that allows them to explore that side of the net with less risk.
When I worked at IBM in Connecticut I met a core of about 8 high school students who had set up their high school computer lab and entire network by establishing close tie with a local college and then riding on the colleges internet connection. Three of these kids worked support at a local ISP as tech support, at least one was an open source developer, and the rest were mostly dabblers. But still they set up the entire computer lab and were more up to date on security than the security response team in IBM. They were the first to demonstrate to me how you could teardrop attack a competitor during a Quake match to lag them so you could get an easy kill. This was long before I heard of teardrop on the CERT mailing list.
I had some great discussions with these kids and they helped me on rebuild my laptop (it needed some custom drivers for Linux as Linux distros for laptops were pretty rare back then.) Two went to work at priceline straight out of high school (with salaries higher than mine if I recall correctly.)
Yet another example. One of the best programmers I met at MIT came into college knowing more about assembly programming than I knew when I left. He was the head printer driver developer for an American branch of a Japanese firm while in highshcool! He supplied me with free printers all through college as he would hand me the test prototype after he finished coding the driver. He would just sit down for a a weekend with a new device and code up a driver from the specs I still have no idea how he did this while doing a full coarse load. So don't imagine that age or education determines 1337ness of programming skills. They are potentially just as smart and creative as any adult, they just have less experience to make them well rounded. But if they focus on a single domain they can have a lot more breadth than you or I and as they have been learning more recently they will know all the latest techniques that us old timers will not yet have absorbed.
Children are not dumb. They are the same as adults. Some kids are truly brilliant, others could kill a brick in a padded room. I know at least one teenager whom is fully self sufficient: working a job, paying rent, paying her own way through college, cooking meals, cleaning, etc.
The self sufficient kids are almost always the ones I found to be intelligent and articulate beyond their years as they had no choice but to grow up. But on the other hand if the parent treated the kid like dumb pet that is almost always what they get. Luckily most kids grow out of that once they get out on their own.