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L.A. Science Teacher Suspended Over Student Science Fair Projects
An anonymous reader writes "A high school science teacher at Grand Arts High School in Los Angeles was suspended from the classroom in February, after two of his science fair students turned in projects deemed dangerous by the administrators. "One project was a marshmallow shooter — which uses air pressure to launch projectiles. The other was an AA battery-powered coil gun — which uses electromagnetism to launch small objects. Similar projects have been honored in past LA County Science Fairs and even demonstrated at the White House."
Suspending a teacher over such nonsense borders on drooling idiocy or insanity. Any decent science class unavoidably teaches students to build devices that might be used to do harm. If you teach a kid in chemistry class how not to make an explosion you are also telling him exactly how to create an explosion. That does not imply that teachers should not teach chemistry.
I am lucky I grew up in the 80s I guess.
This is part of the war on pretend violence which is really a war on boys who enjoy war and fighting fiction. It shouldn't surprise any man that if we give an assignment of write anything you want. That young men might write about what it would be like to be a sniper or hunt down a fish. But yet if they do that their must be something wrong with them.
Lets burn the lawyers offices down. Everyone is so freaking terrified of a lawsuit that nothing happens.
Its not fear of lawyers, its an anti-gun agenda. I'm not kidding, from the article:
... nerf ... airsoft ... a .22.
“supervising the building, research and development of imitation weapons.”
Things that look or function remotely similarly to a gun are not to be tolerated. If you let kids shoot marshmallows at stacked plastic cups they might have fun, take pride in their mastery of ballistic trajectories, and you never know where that might lead
Perhaps teaching kids that use of guns and violence in schools will not be tolerated is a good thing? Do we want to teach out kids how to use fake guns now, then careless use of real guns once in the real world? Schools need to keep zero tolerance on anything gun related if we want to see our crime rate go down (hint: Only a few countries have worse gun violence than the US... and they either have unstable governments, or no governments.)
The better thing is to actually educate children about the dangers of firearms, and how to tell the difference between real guns and toys/replicas/marshmellow shooters. I grew up playing with toy guns, but my grandfather had several real firearms that he kept in a wood and glass gun cabinet. I was taught that they were dangerous and to only touch them with my grandfather or father. Keeping children from getting exposure to guns other than in video games or on TV means that if they are over at their friend Timmy's house and find his dad's gun they start playing with it and blow little Timmy's head off. If the child knows what to do when they find a gun (don't touch it, leave the area, and find and tell the nearest adult) little Timmy gets to go to school the next day. Abolition won't stop gun violence or even get rid of guns (out of the 6 guns that I own only 3 have any documentation of me purchasing them, and one of those is a hunting rifle). But education will reduce gun deaths significantly.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
This is about office politics. The administration at his school has decided to make an example out of him, and they're using these science experiments as an excuse to make his life miserable. That's what this is really about. He doesn't toe the line, so someone with power has decided to exert their authority.
To make this about gun politics is as equally absurd as to say that we should stop kids from eating any food because there's an obesity epidemic. These science projects are no more related to actual firearms than the gas stove in your kitchen is related to a nuclear bomb. The only plausible explanation for this situation is that Schiller dared to butt heads with some administrator, and this is payback.
Perhaps teaching kids that use of guns and violence in schools will not be tolerated is a good thing?
Perhaps you're a blithering idiot. Oh, wait: there's no question about that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Gun safety is something every parent owes their children. Along with power tools, basic electrical wiring, plumbing, plant a grape vine, how to build a computer, tune an engine, build a computer and compile a Linux kernel.
Lets burn the lawyers offices down.
The lawyers are powerless without the courts. It's the Court orders, backed by ... wait for it ... men with guns that make this environment possible.
Do you know why everybody is so jumpy and the cops are doing summary executions now? Because everybody is a criminal, everybody is a suspect, and the cops and the courts enforce these absurd laws rather than than defend the Constitution as a co-equal branch.
Hell, the Constitution didn't even make it past 1803 intact in design, and FDR accepted the Supreme Court's final surrender in 1937 from Chief Justice Hughes as a settlement to his plan to expand the Court with its cronies. Overnight, SCOTUS began finding all of Roosevelt's programs suddenly Constitutional even concluding that growing wheat for your family farm is part of "Interstate Commerce" and suddenly of Federal providence.
The problem now is that it's impossible for the People to know what the Constitution says because (supposedly) it doesn't mean anything until SCOTUS tells us what it means, which might well be the opposite of what we "think" it means (that is, the plain English meaning). The catch is that the Constitution is what authorizes the government in the first place. If the People aren't competent to understand their agreement with that government, then they weren't competent to create it in the first place and the grant of power is void.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
... it's a stupid policy created by people that don't own guns ...
There is nothing wrong with not owning guns. Its a personal choice, OK for some, not for others.
However creating policy and regulations when you are completely ignorant and misinformed about firearms, that is something else. Some non-owners are quite well informed and not hysterical. Some owners are quite ignorant and in dire need of instructions and education.
Schiller, 43, also was the teachers union representative on the campus and had been dealing with disagreements with administrators over updating the employment agreement under which the faculty works. His suspension, with pay, removed him from those discussions.
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Its not about safety, its about removing the union rep from negotiations at the expensive of his students who are preparing for their AP exams.
The reason western europe and canada is compared to USA, rather than say mexico and russia, is because they are the one which ressemble much the cultural, economical environment but also far more important political environment of the USA. Mexico and russia may fullfil one or two of those, but not all 3.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org