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Police Called Over 11-Year-Old's Science Project
garg0yle writes "Police in San Diego were called to investigate an 11-year-old's science project, consisting of 'a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics,' after the vice-principal came to the conclusion that it was a bomb. Charges aren't being laid against the youth, but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.' Apparently, the student violated school policies — I'm assuming these are policies against having any kind of independent thought?"
What's the student supposed to get counseling for? The trauma the school put him through for no reason? More likely, so the school authorities can point to the fact that the kid got counseling to show something is wrong with him (and not them)
I'd like to recommend the authorities get some counseling. Either that, or a clue, but counseling is easier to come by.
This is what happens when the students are smarter than the teachers.
In the wild there are no dumb lions tigers or bears. Only humanity subsidizes the continued existence of the stupid.
Don't do anything to attract attention to yourself ever.
The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.
...Stu
The real question is why are we letting people this stupid in charge of educating our children?
This is part of the "nervous Nellie" reactions that have developed over the past few years. We should be encouraging inquisitiveness, exploration and learning in our children or we will just produce more mediocre administrators. Kids do things at home, bring them to school and show their friends. As long as it was not clearly a weapon or some other prohibited device there should not be a problem with it.
We are applying the same "sterile area" rules that supposedly exist in our airports to our schools. Will TSA be staffing the schools to keep out prohibited items?
Unless the child lied about what the device was it appears that the principal overreacted and did not apply too much common sense. It sounds like a pretty cool idea to use a Gatoraide bottle as a focusing point for a sonic device. Smart kid to think that through and to try something with it.
How many people who read /. have tried out other things like this in their childhood? Most of us have.
Tisha Hayes
So, it wasn't enough that the device from the poor kid (who showed some practical skills) was perfectly harmless, his home also had to be checked just in case he was a terrorist?
That's fucked up beyond 1984.
Bomb and NotBomb are not equally likely possibilities.
So you propose that NoReaction is inferior because you're screwed if it was a bomb, while Reaction is inferior because its safe either way. I think you're wrong, NoReaction+Bomb is the worst outcome, yes, but its astonishingly unlikely. Getting hit by lightning in your office likely. OTOH, Reaction+NotBomb is still somewhat harmful to you (if nothing else the kids family and their friends think you are a monster) and NotBomb is very very likely.
On average having a the more tempered reaction is the best outcome. Sadly, people are stupid.
And the politicians wonder why it is that America has trouble getting kids interested in the sciences.
I can understand that an assistant principle might not have any idea how bombs are made. There's no shame in that. However, he probably should have talked to the child's teacher before he called the fire department. My guess is that the kid had to tell his teacher ahead of time what he was making. I have never heard of a science fair where you weren't required to pre-register your experiment. How hard would it have been to talk the the science teacher before calling the bomb squad?
Now, if the teacher thought that the device was a bomb (especially if he knew before hand that the kid was working on a proximity detector) then shame on him. I mean seriously, how hard would it have been to do a little research beforehand.
So they told you that you had a great way to grow marijuana? Thats nice of them. I wonder what experience led them to that idea.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It isn't necessarily ineptitude that causes school officials to make decisions like this. The basic reasoning boils down to the fact that the school officials will take little if any flack for over reacting in the name of safety, but they will lose their jobs and be raked through the mud if they fail to react to an "obvious" threat.
Part of the problem is that no one ever gets rewarded for the issues they chose to ignore. So there is no benefit to the principal to ignore what they think is a possible threat even if the probability of it being a threat is vanishingly small.
The end result is that school officials with a high self interest will put their self interest in front of everyone else (the authorities who are wasting their time, the students out of class, the student directly involved, the parents who have to come pick up all the students early, etc), since they are more worried about the ramifications to themselves than the trouble they may cause for others.
Everything you said makes sense ... if the moron did not suggest the kid seek counseling.
Once you realize that YOU over-reacted, the correct action is to accept the fact that YOU acted like a fool. It is not to shift blame to the kid.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
it is stupidity. An intelligent principal could have ascertained the necessary information by sitting down with the student and asking questions calmly thereby by avoiding all the resulting mess.
I actually read TFA, and it states, as the summary quotes, "Apparently, the student violated school policies", but the article doesn't state the policy in question. It is hard to know if this is a case of stupid overreaction or a real violation of the rules. Does anyone know the exact wording of this "policy"?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
that vice-principal is a terrorist. ;)
It’s exactly what the dictionary says. (I don’t mean the 11th edition of the newspeak one, that you may think of.
He terrorizes an 11 year old child. (Think of the children!) He terrorizes the whole family. He causes fear, terror that requires police intervention.
I say, make an example and ship him to Gitmo, in exchange for a honest American who sits down there just because his parents immigrated from the wrong country. ;)
I’d call that the American spirit!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I don't think you can frame this as game theory; the staff of the school are not reacting in this way in order to maximize their personal benefit (or minimize their personal loss). Whilst I concede that some people do think in this way, teaching selects out that characteristic by being an underpaid and overworked profession for the level of education and aptitude they have.
The problem is that the staff are not permitted to make any kind of decision themselves; they are completely servile to the institution and the institution cannot be expected to exhibit human rationality.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Kid, keep up the good work, and move to a school with smarter officials.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Reading the article (I know, but someone has to :-) ) it seems that it wasn't a Science Fair project, it was just something the kid had been playing around with at home and then brought it in to show his friends. The kid violated school policies
No he didn't... the school policies are here:
http://www.mtechmiddle.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=58810&type=d&termREC_ID=&pREC_ID=87933&hideMenu=1&rn=8708720
After looking twice I can't even find the part where it says "may not bring guns or knives or other weapons", let alone "may not bring anything that could possibly at a distance be mistaken for something dangerous".
and that is why they said he should get counselling.
Personally I think the school should pay for counseling, since the only reason he would need it is for the trauma of being treated like a terrorist :-)
So the school has a policy banning kids from being inventive and wanting to show that inventiveness off. Anyway - thats one kid the school system has scared off technology - well done San Diego Unified School District.
The ironic thing is that this is supposed to be a "Tech Magnet" school. Quoting from their mission statement:
All Millennial Tech Middle School students will cultivate their technology skills to enhance their motivation and curiosity to excel academically in order to become productive citizens that will drastically impact the developing information age.
All Millennial Tech Middle School students will cultivate their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics skills to enhance their motivation to excel academically in order to become global leaders and productive citizens in their chosen career path.
That sounds like the kids might be expected to construct fun things related to science.
Granted, it also sounds like you should expect your kid to be traumatized by the teachers. Not by the police, though.
School administrators are often failed teachers or P.E. instructors with a career in the classroom that can be measured in 5 years or less. They are truly inept and feel that a tasted of the education system of any kind makes them qualified to then lead entire schools in turn.
The man in this story is simply a moron who did not rationally discuss anything about the construction of the device with the child to draw intelligent conclusions. He had a knee-jerk reaction because that's what stupid people do when presented with things they don't - or refuse to - understand.
Sadly this is absolutely the norm in school districts all across America, and has been for a few decades. The education system isn't flawed, just that the standards for these types of positions are _incredibly_ low.
An excerpt from "The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to wo
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This article didn't make sense. It says the student broken no laws, but he was in violatino of school policy? What kind of policy prevents them from bringing in harmless science projects?
"The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said."
Why the hell would they recommend counseling for a non-violent and non-criminal act?
Is there a better link regarding this article?
"The principal doesn't know enough about electronics..." How could he not know? He's overseeing a *technical* school. Does he ever venture out into the halls or talk to the kids? He's a fucking absentee landlord and deserves to lose his job two weeks ago. And shame on the parents for letting the gestapo inspect their house and suggest counseling after "da bomb" was determined to be harmless.
Police and fire officials also will not seek to recover costs associated with responding to the incident, the spokesman said.
Translation: We realize we screwed up and don't want to be laughed at in court.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
If they treated kids like this in the 70's, I would have been declared a threat to the free world. I taught myself how to solder when I was 10, and I was into building all kinds of electronics kits and projects. I was also into model rocketry and built multi-stage rockets capable of reaching altitudes of 2500 ft. I brought crap to school to show my class all the time. Luckily, I didn't grow up to be an international terrorist - I became an engineer. We are in deep trouble when our education system treats the kids that should be leading us to the next technology leap forward as criminals.
In most cases, "Don't make Admin look stupid, especially if they are." is implied policy #0.
This is in no way confined to schools, of course.
Maybe it was this bit, "The Millennial Tech experience will enhance educational opportunities, prepare students for the workplace and allow all individuals to feel comfortable and secure." Clearly he should have anticipated the paranoia of his vice principal and refrained from making anything he could mistake for something else and thus feel unsafe. *shakes head*
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
I live in an Australia city now, but when my kids get to the inquisitive age, I'll have to pack up and move back to the bush - I like north queensland ... barrier reef.
We used to combine all sorts of nasty chemicals together as kids to see what would give a good bang. After many experiments we worked out which ones generally reacted together. Dad made sure there were textbooks lying around so we could work out what the reactions were and why (we were left to do this on our own - not forced to do so). We also built lots of electronics and mechanical contraptions from supplies we found and collected from the farm dumps. All kinds of shit really; No such thing as boredom.
I now have three science degrees; Mathematics, Computer and Organic Chemistry. Brother is an orthopaedic surgeon.
There is no way we could do that in the current environment where we live now. Too many nannies would get their panties in a twist. I do feel sorry for kids today. Kids will be kids.
.
"The solution is going to be that eventually kids will get used to the idea that they shouldn't bring things in that scare their administrators"
*twitch*
" unless we can somehow reduce the risk that people are going to come and shoot their classmates,"
To negative numbers? The chances of a kid dying in a violent crime involving explosives at a school are so low that you need a scientific calculator to display them. Compare that to the mortality rate in high-school football: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19980610033631data_trunc_sys.shtml
The problem won't be solved until idiots that fail to understand basic statistics aren't allowed to graduate high school. Though jailing any idiot that ever excuses incidents like this with any permutation of the phrase "they['re] do[ing] the best they can".
There's a quote which I fear I cannot find in order to cite, but to paraphrase:
"If all the well-intentioned were killed at birth, the remaining evil-doers would be small potatoes by comparison."
You and people like you are exactly why the situation in the USA gets ever worse.
...
You are constantly obsessed with un-real threats, fixing problems that don't exist, and simply a GENERAL denial of common sense, justified on stupid rules and panicky process. Eg TSA
This kid was VICTIMIZED, should sue the vice-principle, inter alia, for slander of reputation (in his trade of profession, as a school student) and for distress and the suit should enjoin the school Board, and the County. His parents should have at least one with balls.
He is entitles to an APOLOGY, DAMAGES, and full reparation of his REPUTATION, and equal publicity, if necessary paid for by the Board, and since the costs were vicarious should be sanctioned across the Board members by a levy.
It sounds like a Simpson's chalkboard gag: "I will not expose the ignorance of the faculty"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Maybe some instruction would be in order.
Rule one. Don't scare the sheep.
Rule two. Don't scare the sheep that thinks they are in charge.
I think that making this guy look like a fool might be a good thing. I would have been all with letting him keep his dignity up till the CYA part at the end.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The terrorists do not have to win in order for us to lose.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Well it's quite obvious. They couldn't find anything illegal or wrong whatsoever. So of course they're going to make up bullshit "the student needs counseling" and "he violated school policies" to make it sound like they aren't a bunch of incompetent shitheads.
This happens all the time with terror suspects, like that guy who was puking in the bathroom on the plane a few weeks ago. He was labeled a "terrorist" because of the color of his skin and yet the government and the racist airline employee managed to come out looking like heroes. How? They spew this bullshit about "have to be cautious" and "he was suspicious" and they imply there was actually danger "we were lucky it was a false alarm".
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Why the hell would they recommend counseling for a non-violent and non-criminal act?
By recommending something vaguely punitive (and "magnanimously" forgoing billing the childs family for the expense), the authorities are attempting to prevent blame from shifting from the child and his family to the place that it actually belongs: the authorities
recommending counseling is an attempt to maintain the appearance that the child actually did something wrong.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
The sad truth is nobody is thinking of the children. They are our future and it looks like a pretty bleak one right now. Where every kid who displays an ounce ingenuity, exceptional achievement, or even exceptional interest in a particular topic of field is labeled as a potential threat.
How likely is this kid after this experience to want to participate in a science fair again? How likely is he to share is projects with teachers who might be able to mentor him? Now even if teachers would be willing to put the extra time in the kid is going to be afraid to ask.
We are looking at a system that is effectively geared to NOT develop the talents of our best and brightest!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html