Slashdot Mirror
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?"
That everyone should stick some coloured wires into cardboard tubes, then leave them lying about all over the place. The more the merrier.
Deleted
To an Idiocracy!
Public school administrators are leading the way!
I told ye it was forged by Lucifer himself!
I am not a crackpot.
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?
I mean, did anyone, for example, ask the kid what the device was and perhaps he said "It's a bomb! I'm going to blow myself and all of you up as a sacrifice for the great god Satan!" because had he said that, I'd suggest most of the rest of the article makes sense.
"I don't blame the school...it's the continued pussification of America that is the real problem at hand". Wish I had said that. WTF is going on with these school admin? Dude is staff a magnet school, got to expect to come across situations like this and be able to deal with it. I think the school staff needs counseling not the kid and his family. Pussies.....
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
Tend to show the deranged thoughts of the teachers more than anything else... I remember my project netted me a month of drug counseling, because the application "could" of been used to grow cannabis.... The project was just a kid showing how plants grew differently in different media, hydroponically, with soil, with microorganisms that were advertised to help bind nitrogen in roots and increase growth, and with plant hormones. (All save hydroponically done in the same bag soil, just with the different additives...)
So my project was removed, and I was instructed not to build any more hydroponic settups in my spare time... Which my parents told me to ignore in my own home, but still.....
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
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.
>And we wonder why US is behind all other nations in educating our young.
The rest of the world knows though.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
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.
vertigo (Jesse Crittenden) says
Ironically while flying out of KMCI on my way to Iraq for the Air Force I had to go through the extra security screening. Mind you I'm in full military uniform, desert BDUs, boots, boonie hat, M4 in tow sure enough though I had to take off my boots and all metal objects and get the wand ran over me and extra check through my carry on. Let's ignore the fact that I'm carrying a rifle onboard!
Common sense sometimes does not apply.
In the case of the elderly lady I see nothing whatsoever wrong with her getting the same screening as everyone else. Terrorists will use whatever they can to exploit a weakness; that could be a handicapped person, the elderly and children.
Stop the world, it has gone mad, I want to get off.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I thought I couldn't be more surprised by crazy school administrator and police stupidity, but I was wrong.
Everyone really should read TFA this time.
From TFA:
So, having electronics in your backpack is grounds for evacuating a TECH MAGNET?
Seriously?
What happened to the country that put the first man on the moon? We have gone completely insane.
Luque said the project was made of an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached. There was no substance inside.
This kid is clearly a genius. He has created the worlds first 100% hard vacuum, in a soft drink bottle no less. He has even eliminated zero point energy.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
When I was in college, I would periodically bring my electronics homework home from Albany to Phoenix. I would usually work on it the entire time tray tables were allowed. Often I didn't need a textbook, only my engineering paper (overpriced graph paper) and my calculator. I would often make those next to me nervous, but obviously I couldn't harm anyone with paper and a pencil. Well, significantly anyway.
As I got to the intermediate classes, I would often find myself with schematics, a bag of chips and wires, and a breadboard. Again, plenty of time to just sit there, I would wire up my breadboard with the chips, wires, and my Leatherman. I had more than a few flight attendants strike up a conversation with me long enough to find out that I was going home / to school, was an engineering student, and was working on a finite state machine / simple computer / complicated blinky light thing. "Wanna see? This is so cool! Watch these eight lights blink! I can program it with these switches!" The only time the conversation lasted even a sentence longer was when I was building laser tag. "No, it doesn't actually have any lasers, they just use that name because it sounds cool. It actually works like your remote control to your TV."
Even at the time, I was fully aware that any technical work done in a public place would draw the skepticism, imagination, and periodically, fear of those around me. Of course, this was in the mid 90's. Times and personal liberties on airplanes in particular are very different. Now, they'd throw a fit if I tried to take my Leatherman near the plane, let alone the chips and bundle of wires running off a 9 volt. I'm much more mature now, and now I see no reason to make people uncomfortable on an airplane in order to stretch their preconceptions.
The kid and his parents now learned a valuable lesson. Work transparently. Don't hide it in a bottle. When it's complete, more times than not, it shouldn't have a top case. If it needs a case, no external wires should be visible.
What a fuckwhit - the school principal should be fired.
He bolted out of bed and carefully defused the alarm clock before it went off, after concluding that... it was a bomb.
He went to shave, but before turning it on decided to throw the razor out the window after concluding that... it was a bomb.
He decided not to make toast after concluding that the toaster was...
Better not drive, he thought...
Got on a bus. There was a guy with a radio. He called 911. Got off the bus before the police arrived though.
Arrived at school. Reported science fair project as possible bomb.
Police showed up at school. Hey? Are you the guy who called 911?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If you RTFA, it looks like the cops are saying that they should get counseling because the kid and parents were upset by the incident.
Regardless of whether the search was reasonable, do you realize how misled you (and many others, including those who've responded to you) have been by the summary's "scare quotes"? The summary makes it sounds like the kid is being sent in for "reprogramming".
I'm probably wasting my time typing this, because it won't change anything anyway. Slashdotters will primarily continue to curse the way the government misleads the citizens, then turn around and fall for this kind of crap.
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
...his home also had to be checked...
Yes, that's the most shocking part of the story to me as well. I'm not sure I'd be very cooperative with the authorities if I were the parents. I think I'd turn it into yet another learning moment, showing the kid how not to bow unquestioningly to authority. I'd have called an attorney, and politely declined the search until a proper warrant was served.
I'm guessing the parents were horrified to learn of the inconvenience imposed by the morons in charge, and wanted to get it over quickly and prove that their kid was good, so I don't fault them at all for cooperating. But they weren't responsible for the hysteria, and they shouldn't have been pressured to comply. It's as if the authorities allowed the administration to hold the entire school hostage, until this unfortunate family was forced to prove its own innocence. It's quite insane.
There's a new DVD out called The War on Kids. The thesis is that schools are prisons and are about surveillance, metal detectors, and control. One of the best parts is where they are receiving a tour through a school, and they ask to see the library, which has a high-security metal door with metal grate over the glass. The principal can't find the key and asks, "did you really need to get in here?"
Learning is against school policy.
That's why I think people shouldn't criticize the vice principal too much for calling authorities to look into this. He wouldn't have done so unless he thought there was a reasonable chance that this thing was a bomb. Maybe he should have known better, but he didn't, and I'm not going to fault him for erring on the side of caution. But, I am troubled that the school and authorities seem to be blaming the kid and parents for this, like they should have known better than to bring a geeky home project to a *technology magnet school*. I would consider this a non-story if the school, vice principal, and authorities showed a little embarrassment over this situation, but they really seem to think this family did something horribly wrong.
That's fucked up beyond 1984.
This is nothing like 1984. 1984 was about censorship and oppression, this is just paranoia. It probably happened due to a combination of the fear of terrorism and people's fear of technology they can't understand. Not they I don't think this both sad and slightly scary, but there are other things that can be wrong with society than trying to imitate 1984
Here's the Contact Us page for Millennial Tech Middle School.
http://www.mtechmiddle.org/apps/contact/?rn=8783875
Maybe if enough people ask, they'll actually tell someone why they have a complete fucking moron in a position of scholastic authority over their kids.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
Next, he'll invent a bomb that doesn't look like a science project.
My friends and I used to carry our BB guns around the suburban neighborhood. By today's standards we would be considered, if not terrorists, at least in serious needs of counseling and immediate suspension from school.
The real problem is lawsuits. If the school officials get it wrong (and lets face it school kids HAVE attacked their school in the past) then they are sued, so nobody plays it safe anymore.
One of the reason the US medical bill is through the roof is that because if a patient demands X procedure while the doctor knows it is silly, he gets it, because else he might sue.
Say you are a station attendant and see a bag that seems to have been left behind. In the "real" world, you take a look, the changes of it being a bomb are remote and even if it is, bombs rarely explode just by looking. BUT what if you can be sued if you get it wrong? Loose not just your life (and nobody thinks they are going to die) but every thing you own? (Silly? Count the doctors that smoke or drink or drive without a seatbelt but do have malpractice insurance.)
If you are sued for millions if you don't follow the book, you follow the book. And if you don't you loose your insurance and the first court case could bankrupt you.
Calling the people involved stupid is the easy lazy answer. The real problem is the sue happy culture of the US, where any slightest mistake anyone not following the rule book to the letter can be sued for millions. If I saw an American have a heart attack, I would let them die. I could be sued for breaking a rib while saving their lives. No thanks.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just a few days ago I read an article about DARPA complaining that not enough students were taking science degrees. Now we see why! Here is a principal at a tech magnet school, seriously unqualified, that cannot discriminate a simple electronic device from a bomb. The real question is exactly who hired this incompetent idiot to administer students that are obviously smarter them himself and the HR person. Instead of panicking and calling 911 he might have called one of the science teachers first. But no, he went into chicken little mode and assumed that Armageddon was at hand.
What we should all do is send letters of protest to the school. I have just written them asking them to apologize to the student and his family. I have suggested that the vice principal in question should be counseled on the proper way to react in such a situation. I know the chances of the school issuing an apology is low, but enough of public pressure will eventually force them to. And anyone who lives near this school should be their for the next board meeting to protest what has been done. You can contact them here: http://www.mtechmiddle.org/apps/contact/
Kid, keep up the good work, and move to a school with smarter officials.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Someone set us up the bomb!!!
We get signal!!!
How are you idiots??? All your sense are belong to us!!!
...they send home a "Rules and Policies" that must be signed by the Parents and the Student. I cross-out any ambiguous and ill-defined sections, initial them, then sign the document.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Counseling for what? The trauma of being accused of being a bomber? I hope that's what it is, and not the fact that the kid has a hobby and was showing it off to kids.
When I was in middle school, the school got evacuated because of a kid with a CD player in his locker. It was on pause, and the CD was in kinda crooked, making a faint ticking sound. They definitely didn't even bother to ask the kid, because he was in the same class as me (gym, mind you, so we were stuck standing outside in shorts in 30F weather. And no, sonny, walking to your house across the street is NOT okay), and got hauled off by the cops.
In the same middle school, I pretty much was all the teachers' techie. As a result, I had the admin password to all the classroom computers. My last year there I was suspended for knowing the password (even though the teachers tried to defend me).
Really think I'll be homeschooling my own children. Had I been this kid's dad, I'd have popped that vice principal square in the teeth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Now I understand! This is the 'socialization' that the home schooled kids are missing!
Counseling for being so stupid as to take some initiative and build something on his own. That's not what schools want to teach. Schools want to train the next generation of assembly line workers, Wal-Mart employees, and gas station attendants. Scratch that, they don't even want to do that, what they really want to do is make sure everyone meets the minimum requirements set by the state/federation so that they can continue to get funding.
Teachers, on the other hand, want so much more for the students than they themselves have the time or money to give.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Has anyone heard of this sort of thing commonly occurring outside of US schools?
I don't want to sound like a self-righteous Canadian, but I've worked in three school districts and I really don't see that kind of fear-of-technology/intelligence happening here. I do see teachers that aren't great with technology, but I haven't met anyone that is outright paranoid like those in these type of stories (which seem to be rather frequent over the last few years).
So does anyone in Canada/Europe/Australia/Asia/etc have similar stories, or is there something really, really weird with the US Education system?
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
Someone please find these asshats emails and post them here ! 2 million emails jamming the local system should help get the point across although it will probably just make the poor admins life miserable. !We really need to get rid of clowns like these (the school authorities involved). It is a constant irritation that they are "not filing charges". THEY (the school authorities involved) should be charged and it should be dam serious enough to make them think about throwing a families life into disarray the next time. As for local police, well you can't fix stupid.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
When I was at High School I was caught by one of the deans making black powder in a science lab. Instead of taking the opportunity to turn the incident in to a lesson in basic safety or chemistry this teacher went nuts. I remember the science teacher trying to step in and do the right thing. I was threatened with expulsion. My parents were called. I clearly remember him calling me amongst various things , 'A clear threat to society'. What I was actually interested in at the time was model rocketry not bomb making. But like any half smart 13 year old I was capable of both. I figured since had labeled me in his tiny mind as a threat the onus was on me to deliver his nightmare. The very next day this same teacher found under his chair in the teachers staff room exactly what he was afraid of. A plastic lunch box containing two steel pipes a stereo counter and some simple electronics to drive it all. It looked for all the world on first inspection like every bomb MacGyver has ever tried to diffuse. Until you looked closer and saw that the metal tubes were packed with tissue. I was told later that the teacher actually wet himself in the process of trying to diffuse it like the big hero that he was. In those days where I lived we did not have any special response unit for these things. He called the fire department. The whole school was ordered to line up outside on a series of tennis courts. In a strange way rather than confirming that he was right about me the incident merely confirmed that he was a complete idiot. I remember one of the Fireman walking past holding the lunch box and laughing. Anyway the point I was going to make was that if your going to label bright intelligent children as threats when they are merely exploring the world and not intent on hurting anyone then fully expect them to confirm your worst fears 10 times over and then some. I might also ad that this experience was the start for me of a long war of hatred with all forms of authority. Thankfully it was a war I won!
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.
I thought it would too, but as an embedded developer, I've had to fly across the world carrying strange devices with wires and chips all over the place. Surprisingly it is rare that I get stopped and have to take it apart to show what it is. Usually when I do, I get the feeling that the security guards are more curious about what they are looking at than that they have any fear over it being a bomb. Maybe if I were Iranian or wore a turban I would get a different response, maybe I will try the turban thing sometime.
Qxe4
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.
They may have students a lot like Dylan Klebold in their school, and don't know how to ensure that they don't go off the deep end, so they do the best they can.
Forensic analysis of the massacre concluded that it was orchestrated by Eric Harris, who was a clinical psychopath. Dylan Klebold was just a maladjusted doofus that Harris took along for the ride.
They may think this is their justification: "Staff, parents, and students agree that we should follow guidelines for Socially Responsible Behavior during the school day and at all school sponsored events.Socially Responsible Behavior includes, but is not limited to..." (my italics) -- i.e. 'we can make up the rules after the event'. The speciousness of a supposed policy document containing this sort of language should be obvious to reasonable people, but I cannot say what position the law would take on it.
The official statements appear to be trying to give the impression that the student was at fault, without actually saying, much less doing, anything that would get their sorry asses sued.
>> Maybe he should have known better, but he didn't, and I'm not going to fault him for erring on the side of caution.
And therein lies the root of the problem: There is absolutely no consequence to acting, reacting, or over-reacting in an unreasonable, ignorant, or just plain stupid way.
All actions should have consequences, even those obviously foolish ones taken with the best of intentions. This is precisely the reason why people who constantly "abuse" the 911 emergency services for--what some officials deem--trivial reasons, get police warnings or have to pay penalties for wasting everybody's time.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
For the period January 1990 to February 28, 2002 the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) recorded 1,055 incidents of bombs being placed in school premises.
And apparently, there are 125,000 schools in the US
.
So, assuming an even spread (no two "bombs" in the same school), a school has a 0.84% (less than 1 in 100) chance of being involved in a single incident over the last 12 years. Now, IIRC, US schools run on the four-year system (grades 1-4 in one school, 5-8 in another, 9-12 in the third, right?), which means that over 12 years, that's three generations of kids going through the doors - two-thirds of the student population over the time listed, even if their school was "hit", weren't a student there when it happened anyway.
If my 8am math is working right, that gives your school a 0.281% chance of being involved in a "bomb incident" during your child's four year stay. And that's before you start removing the incidences where the bomb is an alarm clock with a few wires sticking out (the "I didn't do my homework" bomb) rather than an actual explosive of any kind.
is that, even after finding out that the kid's project was harmless, they went to his house and inspected his garage. There was no rational suspicion of wrongdoing, no evidence to justify further investigation. I can only assume that this was the "We always have to be absolutely sure" excuse used far too often to go where they don't have a real right to.