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."

Comments

Sudden outbreak of common sense

[Hognoxious]

Imagine if these things fell into the hands of tairsts, or pediofiddlers? Someone could lose an eye.

Re:Sudden outbreak of common sense

[gman003]

tairsts

For a minute I read that as "tsarists", which was arguably more interesting.

Sick Society

[JimSadler]

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.

Re:Sick Society

[litehacksaur111]

This is exactly what is wrong with the schools here. Stupid administrators making decisions on what should and should not be taught in the classroom and disciplining teachers for actually inspiring their students to think and build things. All administrators want nowadays are kids who are only capable of mindlessly following a given set of instructions.

Re:Sick Society

[meerling]

Go to the article source and read the comments.
There are a number of them by the locals involved with that school.
It looks like this is a not uncommon tactic variation certain higher ups use to punish those they don't like, as well as those peoples supporters.
All very questionable and completely unethical. Hopefully this time it backfires in a big way.

Re:Sick Society

[GrumpySteen]

So you think that schools would be better if it was easy to fire teachers who had opinions that differed from the administrations, leaving only the mindlessly obedient ones to teach the nations children how to also be mindlessly obedient?

Re:Sick Society

[bill_mcgonigle]

This is not about science, it is about tje progressive anti-gun stance.

Seriously - stop spreading their propaganda. They explicitly want those in power to have all the guns they need. They just want the People to be disarmed and figure their friends will be in power.

This is not at all an anti-gun stance, it's a central-control stance. This gives them a sense of security, like those living under Mao or Pol Pot.

Re:Sick Society

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. If that's the case, they should be going after actual guns

there are over 100,000,000 gun owners in the united states, owning more than 300,000,000 guns.

you cannot "go after guns" and expect to accompish anything in one year or even ten years. you have to play the long game, and that includes any number of tactics, including conditioning kids into being so scared of even talking about anything remotely related to firearms, so that 50-100 years from now, gun owners are a tiny minority, at which point there's no real opposition to your idiotic control schemes, because really, gun control is people control.

british history lesson: http://www.guncite.com/journals/okslip.html

Re:Sick Society

[Shakrai]

As long as the NRA and RWNJ refuse to acknowledge that we have a gun problem, not a people problem, the deaths will continue and there will be nothing to stop it.

~300,000,000 guns, ~100,000,000 gun owners, with about ~14,000 annual homicides committed with firearms. Rhetorical question: What's 14,000 divided by 100,000,000 or 300,000,000?

It is a people problem. Studies have shown that the vast majority of first time murders already had extensive violent criminal records. Clearly the justice system is not doing these people or society justice, since there were ample opportunities to intervene before they took a human life.

It's also a socioeconomic problem, because crime is driven in large part by poverty. You want to cut gun violence? End the war on drugs, increase education and job placement funding, and start to look at seriously reforming our mental healthcare system.

Of course, all of those things are hard to do. It's a lot easier if you can just blame the guns, as though inanimate objects are possessed of powers of their own.

Re:Sick Society

[luis_a_espinal]

It is a people problem. Studies have shown that the vast majority of first time murders already had extensive violent criminal records. Clearly the justice system is not doing these people or society justice, since there were ample opportunities to intervene before they took a human life.

15% of murders are committed by a domestic partner. 56% of murders are committed by friends or acquaintances. The notion that murders are committed against random people by some set of hardened, life-long criminals is not supported by data. Perhaps all the more so, given that convicted felons are generally prohibited from owning firearms.

Likewise, given that 65% of gun deaths (as distinguished from murders) are suicides, I have to say I consider it highly unlikely that the vast majority of gun violence is committed by people with extensive criminal records

There is data collected by the FBI and local state agencies if you'd like to check. For starters not all homicides are gun-related. Secondly, the question is not whether it is strangers murdering strangers, but whether 1) poverty and drug-related crimes/drug-related environments are fueling the bulk of homicides (and gun-related homicides in particular) and 2) the typical perpetrator has already a crime record.

The data I alluded, collected by various law enforcement agencies and 3rd party organizations/analysts points into that direction. African Americans and Hispanics (my community) are dis-proportionally represented in gun-related homicides. When you break down gun-related homicide by race, we find that among non-Hispanic Whites, the murder rates are comparable (slightly higher but still comparable) to those in Western Europe.

Furthermore, 80% of gun-related homicides are committed by hand guns, not the ZOMG assault weapons politicians like to ban. I cannot find the link to the FBI study where it showed the type of handguns used the most in homicides, but it clearly mentioned the majority of them were on the cheap end, 2nd-hand saturday night special type of hand guns, not the $500+ firearms the typical law-abiding gun-owner possess.

So, clearly, race and income are a factor. Since race and income are (still) tightly correlated in the US, we can generalize this by simply saying it is a class-related phenomenon. Add to the fact that drug-related crimes significantly affect African Americans (where there has been a marked breakdown in families and an increase in single-parent families), Hispanics and to a lesser extend Caucasians in the South due to the "meth" belt, we see a strong correlation with the war on drugs.

Now, I'm not saying we should not have tighter controls with firearms. I own firearms, and I conceal carry wherever it is legal. But I also acknowledge we should have much better ways to track who buys or sells what. Illegally acquired firearms and straw sales are a major factor in gun-related crime. So we have to deal with it.

But the primordial factors here are race/economics, poverty, even health ([a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/" target="new"]refer to lead poisoning as a possible cause in the spike of crime from the late 60's to the 80s[/a]). Most importantly, it is culture.

Fins and Swiss have significant %s of gun-ownership, and the Swiss can open carry, and yet you do not see the significant murder rates as in the US (though there are rates of spousal murder where alcohol is involved, but that is a universal.)

Honduras is the capital murder of the world, and although gun laws are flexible, most people simply do not own a piece legally (prices are out of reach to most - ownership is for the well-to-do). Poverty is rampant, the police is ill-equipped to deal with gang/drug related violence, and the country lacks institutions to deal with recidivism.

Nicaragua, adjacent to Honduras is the poorer of the two, with gun laws and legal private own

First they get rid of shop

[Billly Gates]

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?

Yeah, sure.

[drolli]

I am lucky I grew up in the 80s I guess.

Re:Yeah, sure.

[cultiv8]

I suspect there is a secondary motive here, the science teacher was also the teachers' union representative and had been dealing with disagreements with administrators over updating the employment agreement. His suspension removed him from those discussion. Source and quote:

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.

Marshmallow shooters can be quite dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

if you cross the streams.

Its the anti-gun agenda, seriously, read article

[drnb]

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:
“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 ... nerf ... airsoft ... a .22.

Re:Maybe anti-gun measures are good?

[jcr]

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

Its not about saftey

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

cite
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.