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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."
Imagine if these things fell into the hands of tairsts, or pediofiddlers? Someone could lose an eye.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Then Chemistry labs.
Now this. Sigh.
Lets burn the lawyers offices down. Everyone is so freaking terrified of a lawsuit that nothing happens. We have to give everyone a medal for participating, not discipline kids who tell teachers to go f**ck themselves, can't teach controversial subjects requiring critical thinking skills, can't flunk them, etc.
We are not doing them any favors when they get out in the real world afraid to take risks or wonder why their boss fired them instead of giving a raise for participation?
http://saveie6.com/
I am lucky I grew up in the 80s I guess.
if you cross the streams.
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."
http://spiritplumber.deviantar... This is a SLIGHT fictionalization of what happened to me when faced with a derpy administrator -- the dates and names have been changes but you can probably guess my age by the stuff referenced in. Ultimately, teachers and administrators operate in loco parentis; the parents have to get mad.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
I approve of this decision. Someone finally thought of the children; just think how many lives were saved! Science is dangerous, and definitely has no place in our schools. Clearly, the children that built these have some severe mental problems, and all right-thinking people know their parents must be fat, conservative tea-baggers. The kind of violence exhibited by these devices cannot be tolerated. This is exactly why children should not be allowed to think for themselves in school; they are too unpredictable.
I'm glad we were able to stop these domestic terrorists before they killed anyone.
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.