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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?
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If the gap between teachers and pupils is as large as the one between parents and children then it is no surprise that todays teachers really don't know what to do with the technology savvy generation that is about to supplant them.
Schools haven't got a clue about the internet, how to use it and what it could bring them. Pupils are running circles around their supposed betters and are showing earlier in life a degree of independence that teachers wished they had had when they were young. Todays youth are so connected using cellphones, the net and social networking that they are as alien from the previous generation as any that has ever been.
MP3 Search Engine
Obviously these students need to be indoctrinated in the latest Internet memes:
There were no rickrolls, and not even a single Longcat reference.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
In the so-called "Teacher Sux" case in Pennsylvania, for example, a high school student put up a website about a teacher with threats and comments such as "she shows off her fat ... legs."
Critics, however, contend that words like "annoy" and "embarrass" are too broad and may infringe upon First Amendment protections of parody.
Honestly, if she had fat legs and someone pointed it out to her in person would they have criminal/civil court documents filed over it? No, they would get detention/short-term suspension and move on with their lives. The recent rise in people being upset that a co-worker won't speak to them and is "threatening" because they dress in all black and wear sunglasses or that someone doesn't like them is created by this trend in secondary education that teaches people to behave like this.
I just can't understand why a grown adult would not be able to leave the house because some little fucking bastard said she had fat legs on the Internet. Both the adult and the student need to grow up -- fast.
Exactly. What do you think is going to happen when you willingly put yourself in posistion of authority over adolecents. I really don't get why labelling things as "online" makes them new and edgy. Making fun of the teachers is going to happen in middle and high schools. It will/has happen(ed) by whatever means of communication kids use. A teacher claiming she can't work because she got made fun of is like a firefighter complaining he can't work because fires are hot.
If it was something dumb and non-harmful, it was good for a laugh... this is where most teachers fail it.
If it damaged an OS install, I'd make the kid stay after school the entire week and re-load every workstation image in the classroom each day.
If it escaped the local network and damaged something else (fortunately I never saw that happen), then the kid gets to face the consequences full-on, and I would've been stuck with preparing a forensics report to show how it happened and what I would do to prevent it in the future.
The point is to make this clear up-front, and if it isn't harmful, use it as a teaching aid. It also helps to know, as a techer, WTF you're doing around the machinery (unlike one Texas teacher who IIRC had a kid arrested for "hacking" because he used Windows Messenger to pass notes in class... can't remember the specifics, but it was a dumb overreaction to say the least).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Dating.
Putting your high school up for sale is a prank.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Can you imagine the digital trail these kids are unknowingly leaving about their behavior on the net? Even now it's not unheard of to have employers google/myspace their applicants, on top of all the info aggregation services that are running wild out there.
It's going to be a hard lesson to learn (for those that commit serious enough 'offenses') but I strongly suspect that the next generation of kids will know the risks as they get pummeled by their school with "Cyber Bullying awareness" classes and such along with all the other becoming an adult type sex education classes.
It's always the low-tech pranks that take people the longest to fix.
I unintentionally freaked out my poor mom when I got smarmy and edited the Win98 logoff screen in mspaint. I changted a W to a T so that it said "It is not safe to turn off your computer." She left it like that for 3 days until I let her in on the joke. Oopsie.
this article vastly undermines the severity of this situation.
my wife is a teacher, and believe me, it is bad out there. she teaches 6th grade mathematics, and she is dealing with the internet, bullying, and humiliation on a weekly basis because of it. fortunately, the kids at her school aren't really old enough to know how to create proper websites yet, or dont have the money to sneak small webcams into the classroom, but their internet usage definitely affects the school environment.
with the prevalence of myspace, many kids are threatening each other and bullying each other over the internet (i still dont see how cyber-bullying is possible, since you can always just "not go to that site", but whatever...). they get caught up in the "he said, she said" game, and say some very awful things. teachers are all advised not to have myspace pages or facebook pages, for if they post pictures of them at the beach, at the bar, or even at home, children can and will spin them so that the teacher somehow comes across in a bad light. and the kids are so resourceful that they dont even take into account what a teacher says about themselves. one of my wife's coworkers had a friend sign her "wall" or whatever in myspace, and the comment left made a reference to a stripper or stripping (something along the lines of "you looked like a stipper that night"), and the kids in her class saw the comment and started telling people around the school that one of the teachers was a stripper. of course, this made it all the way to the parents, and they began calling the school. the kids spun something that someone else said, not even what the teacher said.
they are threatening each other, and posting inappropriate material about each other, which is creating fodder for the classrooms. 5th and 6th grade girls are posting pictures of themselves wearing little clothing, talking about their sexual experiences and knowledge online, and are basically begging to be preyed upon. what is worse is that the parents don't know and don't care. people can dismiss it as much as they want, and believe that it doesn't happen or that it is just a small percentage of kids. well, believe me, it is not. it is much worse than you think.
it is a parent's responsibility to know what their child is doing on the internet. those who say that it is "too much work" and that their kid is "smarter than i am" are full of it, because we often do meet the parents who put in the work, who monitor their children properly, and who properly look after their children and prevent this kind of behavior. we know that parents can handle it because there is still a small percentage out there who do it right. the rest of them need to look at themselves, and not their children, and certainly not the teachers.
teachers get paid a small amount of money to do a ton of work. my wife works 10 hour days, gets a 15 minute lunch, and is not only expected to be the one to educate them with the material that the school board deems appropriate (which grows larger every year), but yet she is expected to be their moral educator as well; a job she gladly does. most of them take pride in their work, and believe me, they hate giving out bad grades and low test scores because it makes them look bad. the problem with education these days is not the school, nor the teachers, nor the funding (believe it or not). it is the parents. parents have stopped being accountable. they have stopped checking their kids homework, monitoring their activity, and disciplining their children. they make excuses for their children (ADD, ODD, ADHD...), and often laugh at the behavior that their child is displaying. parenting in america has become a dismal affair.
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...
In my day we pulled a prank where we changed the number of beads on the Math teachers abacus. Oh man, I'm old!
When I was in university, I worked in the campus computer lab. One night after hours, a friend of mine and I recorded 35 distinct and separate fart sounds. They were all very small toots: a squeak here, a poot there... they all sounded like the farts you try to sneak out when you're in a public space, but they come out a little louder than you'd hoped. We then set each of them as the hourly chime on all 35 of the Mac 8500's in the Mac lab. Since the clocks on all the Macs were off by anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, the farts didn't all sound at the same time.
It would start a few minutes before the hour: over there in the corner of the room you'd hear a little "squeee." The poor CS student working on his midterm would look around, embarrassed. A few seconds later, another student's machine would respond with, "brrrt." As the hour approached, the farts got closer to each other until the entire lab was abuzz with flatus. And as the hour receded into the past, the farts would peter out slowly.
It took several days before the staff finally caught on to what was happening.
I was going to point out that I was home-schooled through high school, and am perfectly well socialized... but then I remembered where I was posting this. :)
Stop! Dremel time!