We live near MS land and my son just finished a course where they sent a few programmers from MS to teach the course. While they did seem like capable programmers, they were not very good teachers.
THIS!
I rememberd my initial foray into Linux, I'd go online with a question, and the answer always came back:
"Oh, that's simple! All you have to do is" - and then immediately launched into a dissertation that had my head spinning in 5 seconds or less.
And I figured out pretty quickly that the person answering was trying to answer my question, but also trying to impress me with how smart he was. As well, a lot of things he took for granted that everyone knew.
And that is bad teaching. A teacher has to break things down, and bring them to the level of the person being taught. And most software engineers I know can't do that. Because they are pretty darn smart - just ask them.
An "administrator" who knows a bit about kids is unlikely to have fucked up in such a dramatic way.
This touches upon a hypothesis of mine, that the inability of large numbers of parents to allow their children to grow up, safety culture, and people who simply hate children have combined in an unholy triumvirate that is now getting to be a positive feedback loop.
All enforced by the police.
And it doesn't work. You would think that armed police and administrators ready to stomp out anything unnaceptable would have the situation in public schools pretty well cleaned up by now. A quarter billion arrests in the last 20 years should have the little bastards shaking in their shoes, and afraid to open their mouths.
But getting tougher and tougher on any "problem" just makes it worse. Which is why I call the present situation "America's war on children".
A one strike and you're out society, and the idea that that strike could be for sass, perfume, or just about any science project just means that after sassing the teacher, you are finished. And in the mindset of a teenager, that means there isn't much point of behaving at all any more.
The school system is supposed to groom and guide children toward adulthood, not be the entry level introduction to the criminal justice system
He is getting a lot more publicity and support than you, I, or any other kid who has made a science project...
Jealous much?
Yeah, there is a reason he is getting attention. And it isn't because he's muslim either. It's just that todays schools have been turnen into an insane asylum by administrators who have complete intolerance as their goal, and armed police who have turned sassing into a crime. We need to step back from this abyss of endless war on our children,
Because It Doesn't Make Schools Any Safer
But it does make science a taboo subject. Vinegar and Baking soda mixed should become a state secret. Maybe the Mythbusters shouold be incarcerated as well becuz trst!
Since schools are working very hard to install a War on Drugs type solution to ordinary teenage behavior, I expect before long, we'll have police popping kids to make certain we have proper order, and administrators declaring that it the new divide by zero tolerance efforts being implemented. "Sorry, Mrs Smith, we had to shoot your son because he disagreed with the teacher"
That's odd - I was working with scientists back in the day, and they thought exactly that thing. They also were 100% certain the "population bomb" would see us in a post apocalyptic, cannibalistic society living a roving mad max style existence.
The problem with claiming nobody I know believed it is that you didn't know anybody. It's called the the argumentum ad populum logical fallacy.
So you were working with scientists who were 100 percent sure of anything?
Ummm, no. if they were 100 percent sure of anything - they weren't scientists. Your handy little apocryphal story is seriously doubtful in its veracity.
Because if you ask a scientist about a population "bomb" as you put it, you'll get a dissertation first about Malthus, and how and why her was wrong, eg that Malthus did not factor in human ingenuity, and things like the green revolution - which was quite mature during the 1970's. Malthus suffered from the idea that food production would be stabilized at a point that was contemporary. And that proved to be his undoing.
And no actual scientist would ever make the mistake of thinking that we will not have any more advancements in food and health technology that will allow us to double or triple our present population. I've already outlines a plan for nuclear powered underground algae food production facilities that would allow us to circumvent the problem of humans and food production needing to occupy the same space. There is also to possibility of genetically modifying humans to be much smaller, thus requiring less resources.
But I would never assume 100 percent that it would work. I am certain I wouldn't want to live that way.
The closest thing a scientist would come to 100 percent certainty about in this regard is that it is not possible to have infinite numbers of humans on the earth.
And next time try to start out with a premise that isn't completely wrong and shows your complete misunderstanding of scientists and science. You have to start with there is no 100 percent certainty of anything. What you were arguing is called the absoluteum bullshitum fallacy.
Which makes your "question" silly. Because I can ask the same question of the public schooll system, and it fails miserably. That bar is terribly terribly low.
You misunderstand. It's not my question at all since I'm not home schooling anyone. It's a question for you to ask yourself and that is all.
Neither am I - I've said that in order to allow a child of mine today to have a better chance of growing to an adult with any kind of future, I'd home school them. Won't have to worry about police in the hallways arresting them for things that aren't crimes - or are you denying that perfectly normal children are now being turned into criminals for matters that are not crimes?
If you have some empirical evidence that you are better suited to teach then by all means go forth and educate people. Just know the world is full of reactionary idiots who will make a call on a completely unrelated matter i.e. thinking they are a more capable educator because a school has a single student arrested on dubious grounds.
First thing is that you have a talent for understatement that verges on the humorous if it weren't for young people's lives being destroyed. Just Duckduckgo "police in schools" and "police in schools statistics", then read a few, then come back and accuse me of being reactionary because I'm all upset that as you put it "a single student arrested on dubious grounds".
Back to the main thrust
I have personal experience from when I was in school, personal experience from when my son was in school, and enough evidence based on both scholarly reports and news stories that I no more want a child in the public school system than I would want them living in a meth house.
If you have some deep understanding of the principles required to educate your child, then you most definitely did not make that apparent in your original post. You just came across as someone with a typical knee-jerk reaction.
And fortunately you didn't come to a knee jerk reaction, eh?
For what it is worth - I do a significant amount of teaching, in the fields of electronics and computing. I also teach a course on emergency communications. And I'm rather good at it, if the demands for my time are indicative. I tutored my own son in math, and as was my own experience his grades improved a lot after that. I attributed it to a similar experience to mine in school. My first algebra teacher was so nasty bad, so boring, so uninterested, that my own grades reflected that, only to be "fixed" after my electronics teacher introduced our class to slide rules - then something clicked and it was D's to A's. Without using a slide rule. Something about that mathamechanical (tm) setup of the things, I believe. He was the one of two good teachers that I had in my entire public school experience.
Too bad slide rules aren't still in some use. Mine was the last class in our school to ever use them. And the batteries last like forever!
But no, I'm not accredited with a degree in each subject taught in school. And you might fire back with my experiences and my son's experiences as being mere anecdotes, not worthy of consideration.
But then again, neither are the teachers 100 percent accredited who are in there now, and most accreditation seems to be mated to taking tests successfully. Coupled with the gulag atmosphere in many schools, it has gone well beyond being about me. Schools aren't turning out particularly good products, and are not safe places to groom children for their futures. I could hardly do worse.
^^^ This.
Back then, conventional wisdom was that the earth was cooling and potentially headed for another ice age.
That's odd - I was working with scientists back in the day, and they thought no such thing. They thought that the couple years of off weather - which was what triggered the pop culture global cooling thought by fringers - was just a temporary anomaly. Which it turned out to be.
Otherwise, they thought that the greenhouse effect did exist.
In the mid 70's the big scare was climate cooling, not climate warming.
If you wanted to believe some fringers, and some pop culture magazines that loved the frightening headlines.
All based on a couple years of whacky weather. Which many (most?) scientists said was partially based on destabilization, based on - you got it - Global warming.
One does not look outside the window, see it is hot or cold that day, and determine that AGW is either real or fake.
2) I dislike their adverts sufficiently that I'm prepared to spend actual money to stop seeing them.
Which results in lowered income for ad-driven apps, which means your free/app website won't be available anymore because the developer can't pay his bills to keep a roof over his head. Are consumers incapable of seeing beyond their own myopic, selfish needs or portraying themselves as the victims?
Allow me to illustrate what happens when the advertisement becomes the main focus of the experience, as it has become in computing.
Let us look at (especially) daytime television. Roughly 50 percent ads. And such ads they are. Since retiring, I've tried watching daytime TV from time to time. While you don't get malware, you do get force fed a steady diet of:
Almost Pain Free Catheter ads - You're getting ads for little pipes you stick up your dick!
Vaginal mesh and mesothelioma lawsuit ads - Oh yea, there's supposed to be a limited time to file a lawsuit, but this has been going on for years now. You just don't need that 20 times a day. Any poor woman who has that problem probably know about it and what to do about it.
Ads for medicines that might just kill you. Ask your doctor if this anti-depression medicine that makes it's users commit suicide is right for you! Or this athlete''s foot medicine that might destroy yout liver.
Commercial after commercial of Injury and medical malpractice and Social security disability lawyers.
Annoying car insurance commercials pandering to people with bad insurance prospects.
Free knee braces. Yeah - right
Adult diapers for adults - mostly women, including a really disturbing one that tries to sex up the concept of shitting and pissing yourself in public. That's seriously getting near to scat porn - whic I have to confess, make me shudder at the thought.
It's all what the boys down at the shop call
Un-Fucking-Pleasant
And this kind of crap, along with the fact that the quality of the shows has gone way downhill - a lot of people have just given up watching cable TV and have cut the cord.
Hell the other morning at a hotel I saw an informercial - Some diet thing, that had a regular commercial interspersed within it.
Now I just watch stuff on Youtube and HBO. And I'm not the only one - far from it. Cable TV is getting really really concerned about dropoff. And the millenials mostly just forgo ever getting cable. But what do they do when their product simply sucks
People do not have unlimited tolerance for being force-fed shit. And if the internet gets to the same state as Daytime TV, and if I can't block out the unpleasant shit, I'll just find something new to do with my spare time.
Or of course, advertisers could form consortiums, regulate themselves, and produce ads that don't steal bandwidth, inject malware and creep people out. Then I'd unstall my adblocker, and take a little look at their unobtrusive ads. Boom! everybody happy.
I wanted to come here and make some snarky 1 liner about how advertisers are useless parasites on the internet ecosystem. This is far far better. Too bad we can't mod you to +11.
A Pennsylvania Housewife discovered a secret that has Slashdot editors confounded!
You make a judgement call, and the teachers here erred on the side of caution.
Jeezus Christ on a Mallowmar - do you piss yourself every time the doorbell rings? Saw an episode on TV where a doorbell was rigged one time, so we gotta be careful.
A) You can see the whole thing.
B) A Pencil case is not large enough to house anything with much power even if it were for some reason explosive.
To call in the police? Absurd.
The police were already there. We installed them into schools as part of the War on Teenagers effort, which is turning out to be as successful as the War on Drugs.
W I'm constantly hearing about shit like this in TX, but I really haven't heard about a lot of bad stuff in MS and AL in the last decade or two. Maybe MS and AL have improved a lot.)
Alabama has emplaced rules that mandate teaching of evolution and the greenhouse effect in schools.
I've got to give credit where credit is due - I think they've figured out that relying on the King James Version of the bible for science education is a trip to Stupidville.
IANAL and Texas is not my jurisdiction even if I was, but typically the crime is "intent to...", there's no evidence that there was an intent to do anything other then show off a cool project.
Min
You haven't been in a modern police state school lately have you? They have zero tolerance rules, which means anything they want to be a crime is a crime. And with police roaming the hallways, a whole lot of what used to be just kids growing up and learning how to get along with other kids is now a crime.
Then at least the cops should have taken the time to check to see if there was a CRIME committed before taking the poor kid into custody. That being, you know, their job and all.
Last I checked, building an alarm clock is not a crime. Having it go off in class is disruptive, but also not a crime.
At the very least some sincere apologies are owed the kid from the 'adults' involved.
I thought about that. I could teach my children any school subject they'd like to learn.
The problem is: how do you teach your child about dealing with idiots?
The question is: what makes you superior in being able to prepare your child for their future life?
That's your question, not mine. As a person who has goe through the public school system, as well as a person who's son has gone through the public school system, I've seen that it is so royally fucked up and has been for a long time, and is only getting worse.
Which makes your "question" silly. Because I can ask the same question of the public schooll system, and it fails miserably. That bar is terribly terribly low.
As a side note in terms of preparing people for life, having a major altercation with an authority figure in itself can be a good life learning.
Kewl! It is the logic that kids should be allowed to get addicted to crystal meth because that teaches them that there are some bad drugs out there, and will do them some good. And furthermore, that getting sent to jail, maybe becoming bubba's favorite anal insertion target, is teaching them a valuable lifes lesson.
The world is an absolute shithouse place full of idiots and sometimes idiots in power. Isolating people from these realities is not necessarily the answer, and I say that as someone who got suspended for defending myself at school.
Who is isolating? This is avoidance of that shithouse world, at least until the little one will need to commit an actual crime to be arrested for it. What good is knowing that there are assholes out there when you have a felony on your police blotter, and can't even be a full citizen.
That taught me a very valuable lesson about authority figures and who can be trusted to do what's "right".
I had my share of stupid problems myself. Fortunately, it was during an age when a kid might get expelled for three days instead of a night in lockup. Its odd, I look at this system as abusing children, and you seem to take joy in turning children into criminals so they'll know something about life. Maybe we need to start charging babies with criminal offenses when they make a mess in their diapers. Teach them important life lessons, you know.
Here's what you apparently approve of - as far as I can tell, because I would want my children to avoid this, and you want them to experience this:
It is not the public school system that is broken - it's only a symptom of a larger problem. The society is broken.
There are issues for sure - But the schools are behind the curve in not realizing that getting tougher and tougher on lesser and lesser offenses will produce the same things that teh war onn drugs created. More criminals for really petty infractions.
As William F Buckly noted:
"marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could"
And the same for the young lady who wore too much perfume, and is now a convicted criminal.
Just because the government knows you cheated on your wife (because it came up in your background clearance check) does not mean that your wife knows. This is leverage.
Considering the divorce rate, not very good leverage
My eye sight (and weight) starting going bad after college. I figure it was because I was spending more time sitting down and staring at a computer when I got my first desk job than before (where I used to usually sit at the computer only at home or at a class per semester).
Weird thing is, in the last 5 years, my eyes have become radically better. TO the point where my wife insisted I get them checked, in case of some inknown problem. But I can now drive without glasses, and my close vision is much better since I don't have to wear glasses that correct the far vision much at all any more.
Slashdot Mirror
We live near MS land and my son just finished a course where they sent a few programmers from MS to teach the course. While they did seem like capable programmers, they were not very good teachers.
THIS!
I rememberd my initial foray into Linux, I'd go online with a question, and the answer always came back:
"Oh, that's simple! All you have to do is" - and then immediately launched into a dissertation that had my head spinning in 5 seconds or less.
And I figured out pretty quickly that the person answering was trying to answer my question, but also trying to impress me with how smart he was. As well, a lot of things he took for granted that everyone knew.
And that is bad teaching. A teacher has to break things down, and bring them to the level of the person being taught. And most software engineers I know can't do that. Because they are pretty darn smart - just ask them.
An "administrator" who knows a bit about kids is unlikely to have fucked up in such a dramatic way.
This touches upon a hypothesis of mine, that the inability of large numbers of parents to allow their children to grow up, safety culture, and people who simply hate children have combined in an unholy triumvirate that is now getting to be a positive feedback loop.
All enforced by the police. And it doesn't work. You would think that armed police and administrators ready to stomp out anything unnaceptable would have the situation in public schools pretty well cleaned up by now. A quarter billion arrests in the last 20 years should have the little bastards shaking in their shoes, and afraid to open their mouths.
But getting tougher and tougher on any "problem" just makes it worse. Which is why I call the present situation "America's war on children".
A one strike and you're out society, and the idea that that strike could be for sass, perfume, or just about any science project just means that after sassing the teacher, you are finished. And in the mindset of a teenager, that means there isn't much point of behaving at all any more.
The school system is supposed to groom and guide children toward adulthood, not be the entry level introduction to the criminal justice system
I took a cold shower this morning.
I better turn myself in.
Although we could always build a life enabling facility to make certain that all sperm can bring all eggs to birth.
Of course after they are born, to hell with 'em.
Is a miscarriage manslaughter?
He is getting a lot more publicity and support than you, I, or any other kid who has made a science project...
Jealous much?
Yeah, there is a reason he is getting attention. And it isn't because he's muslim either. It's just that todays schools have been turnen into an insane asylum by administrators who have complete intolerance as their goal, and armed police who have turned sassing into a crime. We need to step back from this abyss of endless war on our children,
Because It Doesn't Make Schools Any Safer
But it does make science a taboo subject. Vinegar and Baking soda mixed should become a state secret. Maybe the Mythbusters shouold be incarcerated as well becuz trst!
Since schools are working very hard to install a War on Drugs type solution to ordinary teenage behavior, I expect before long, we'll have police popping kids to make certain we have proper order, and administrators declaring that it the new divide by zero tolerance efforts being implemented. "Sorry, Mrs Smith, we had to shoot your son because he disagreed with the teacher"
So, at what magical point does it become a problem?
Life begins at erection.
So the 'scientists' that say they are 100% sure climate change is mostly caused by humans aren't scientists? Good to know.
You have their names? they need to lose their scientific chops, because noting in the universe is 100 percent certain. Ever.
That's odd - I was working with scientists back in the day, and they thought exactly that thing. They also were 100% certain the "population bomb" would see us in a post apocalyptic, cannibalistic society living a roving mad max style existence. The problem with claiming nobody I know believed it is that you didn't know anybody. It's called the the argumentum ad populum logical fallacy.
So you were working with scientists who were 100 percent sure of anything?
Ummm, no. if they were 100 percent sure of anything - they weren't scientists. Your handy little apocryphal story is seriously doubtful in its veracity.
Because if you ask a scientist about a population "bomb" as you put it, you'll get a dissertation first about Malthus, and how and why her was wrong, eg that Malthus did not factor in human ingenuity, and things like the green revolution - which was quite mature during the 1970's. Malthus suffered from the idea that food production would be stabilized at a point that was contemporary. And that proved to be his undoing.
And no actual scientist would ever make the mistake of thinking that we will not have any more advancements in food and health technology that will allow us to double or triple our present population. I've already outlines a plan for nuclear powered underground algae food production facilities that would allow us to circumvent the problem of humans and food production needing to occupy the same space. There is also to possibility of genetically modifying humans to be much smaller, thus requiring less resources.
But I would never assume 100 percent that it would work. I am certain I wouldn't want to live that way.
The closest thing a scientist would come to 100 percent certainty about in this regard is that it is not possible to have infinite numbers of humans on the earth.
And next time try to start out with a premise that isn't completely wrong and shows your complete misunderstanding of scientists and science. You have to start with there is no 100 percent certainty of anything. What you were arguing is called the absoluteum bullshitum fallacy.
Which makes your "question" silly. Because I can ask the same question of the public schooll system, and it fails miserably. That bar is terribly terribly low.
You misunderstand. It's not my question at all since I'm not home schooling anyone. It's a question for you to ask yourself and that is all.
Neither am I - I've said that in order to allow a child of mine today to have a better chance of growing to an adult with any kind of future, I'd home school them. Won't have to worry about police in the hallways arresting them for things that aren't crimes - or are you denying that perfectly normal children are now being turned into criminals for matters that are not crimes?
If you have some empirical evidence that you are better suited to teach then by all means go forth and educate people. Just know the world is full of reactionary idiots who will make a call on a completely unrelated matter i.e. thinking they are a more capable educator because a school has a single student arrested on dubious grounds.
First thing is that you have a talent for understatement that verges on the humorous if it weren't for young people's lives being destroyed. Just Duckduckgo "police in schools" and "police in schools statistics", then read a few, then come back and accuse me of being reactionary because I'm all upset that as you put it "a single student arrested on dubious grounds".
Back to the main thrust
I have personal experience from when I was in school, personal experience from when my son was in school, and enough evidence based on both scholarly reports and news stories that I no more want a child in the public school system than I would want them living in a meth house.
If you have some deep understanding of the principles required to educate your child, then you most definitely did not make that apparent in your original post. You just came across as someone with a typical knee-jerk reaction.
And fortunately you didn't come to a knee jerk reaction, eh?
For what it is worth - I do a significant amount of teaching, in the fields of electronics and computing. I also teach a course on emergency communications. And I'm rather good at it, if the demands for my time are indicative. I tutored my own son in math, and as was my own experience his grades improved a lot after that. I attributed it to a similar experience to mine in school. My first algebra teacher was so nasty bad, so boring, so uninterested, that my own grades reflected that, only to be "fixed" after my electronics teacher introduced our class to slide rules - then something clicked and it was D's to A's. Without using a slide rule. Something about that mathamechanical (tm) setup of the things, I believe. He was the one of two good teachers that I had in my entire public school experience.
Too bad slide rules aren't still in some use. Mine was the last class in our school to ever use them. And the batteries last like forever!
But no, I'm not accredited with a degree in each subject taught in school. And you might fire back with my experiences and my son's experiences as being mere anecdotes, not worthy of consideration.
But then again, neither are the teachers 100 percent accredited who are in there now, and most accreditation seems to be mated to taking tests successfully. Coupled with the gulag atmosphere in many schools, it has gone well beyond being about me. Schools aren't turning out particularly good products, and are not safe places to groom children for their futures. I could hardly do worse.
^^^ This. Back then, conventional wisdom was that the earth was cooling and potentially headed for another ice age.
That's odd - I was working with scientists back in the day, and they thought no such thing. They thought that the couple years of off weather - which was what triggered the pop culture global cooling thought by fringers - was just a temporary anomaly. Which it turned out to be.
Otherwise, they thought that the greenhouse effect did exist.
Newsweek is not a peer reviewed science journal,
In the mid 70's the big scare was climate cooling, not climate warming.
If you wanted to believe some fringers, and some pop culture magazines that loved the frightening headlines.
All based on a couple years of whacky weather. Which many (most?) scientists said was partially based on destabilization, based on - you got it - Global warming.
One does not look outside the window, see it is hot or cold that day, and determine that AGW is either real or fake.
Have you ever heard of a remote and mute button? The ads you are talking about are so damn stupid, that is nearly the same as insulting people.
I did do that for a while, but the content I am supposed to be interested in isn't interesting any more, I just get my entertainment elsewhere.
Which results in lowered income for ad-driven apps, which means your free/app website won't be available anymore because the developer can't pay his bills to keep a roof over his head. Are consumers incapable of seeing beyond their own myopic, selfish needs or portraying themselves as the victims?
Allow me to illustrate what happens when the advertisement becomes the main focus of the experience, as it has become in computing.
Let us look at (especially) daytime television. Roughly 50 percent ads. And such ads they are. Since retiring, I've tried watching daytime TV from time to time. While you don't get malware, you do get force fed a steady diet of:
Almost Pain Free Catheter ads - You're getting ads for little pipes you stick up your dick!
Vaginal mesh and mesothelioma lawsuit ads - Oh yea, there's supposed to be a limited time to file a lawsuit, but this has been going on for years now. You just don't need that 20 times a day. Any poor woman who has that problem probably know about it and what to do about it.
Ads for medicines that might just kill you. Ask your doctor if this anti-depression medicine that makes it's users commit suicide is right for you! Or this athlete''s foot medicine that might destroy yout liver.
Commercial after commercial of Injury and medical malpractice and Social security disability lawyers.
Annoying car insurance commercials pandering to people with bad insurance prospects.
Free knee braces. Yeah - right
Adult diapers for adults - mostly women, including a really disturbing one that tries to sex up the concept of shitting and pissing yourself in public. That's seriously getting near to scat porn - whic I have to confess, make me shudder at the thought.
It's all what the boys down at the shop call
Un-Fucking-Pleasant
And this kind of crap, along with the fact that the quality of the shows has gone way downhill - a lot of people have just given up watching cable TV and have cut the cord.
Hell the other morning at a hotel I saw an informercial - Some diet thing, that had a regular commercial interspersed within it.
Now I just watch stuff on Youtube and HBO. And I'm not the only one - far from it. Cable TV is getting really really concerned about dropoff. And the millenials mostly just forgo ever getting cable. But what do they do when their product simply sucks
People do not have unlimited tolerance for being force-fed shit. And if the internet gets to the same state as Daytime TV, and if I can't block out the unpleasant shit, I'll just find something new to do with my spare time.
Or of course, advertisers could form consortiums, regulate themselves, and produce ads that don't steal bandwidth, inject malware and creep people out. Then I'd unstall my adblocker, and take a little look at their unobtrusive ads. Boom! everybody happy.
I wanted to come here and make some snarky 1 liner about how advertisers are useless parasites on the internet ecosystem. This is far far better. Too bad we can't mod you to +11.
A Pennsylvania Housewife discovered a secret that has Slashdot editors confounded!
Powered by AdChoices
You make a judgement call, and the teachers here erred on the side of caution.
Jeezus Christ on a Mallowmar - do you piss yourself every time the doorbell rings? Saw an episode on TV where a doorbell was rigged one time, so we gotta be careful.
It was a circuit board in a pencil case.
A) You can see the whole thing. B) A Pencil case is not large enough to house anything with much power even if it were for some reason explosive.
To call in the police? Absurd.
The police were already there. We installed them into schools as part of the War on Teenagers effort, which is turning out to be as successful as the War on Drugs.
W I'm constantly hearing about shit like this in TX, but I really haven't heard about a lot of bad stuff in MS and AL in the last decade or two. Maybe MS and AL have improved a lot.)
Alabama has emplaced rules that mandate teaching of evolution and the greenhouse effect in schools.
I've got to give credit where credit is due - I think they've figured out that relying on the King James Version of the bible for science education is a trip to Stupidville.
Probably not. Because he's probably not a paranoid moron with no ability to asses threats.
"asses threats"? That's only after they send him to jail and bubba decides he is his new girlfriend.
IANAL and Texas is not my jurisdiction even if I was, but typically the crime is "intent to...", there's no evidence that there was an intent to do anything other then show off a cool project.
Min
You haven't been in a modern police state school lately have you? They have zero tolerance rules, which means anything they want to be a crime is a crime. And with police roaming the hallways, a whole lot of what used to be just kids growing up and learning how to get along with other kids is now a crime.
Then at least the cops should have taken the time to check to see if there was a CRIME committed before taking the poor kid into custody. That being, you know, their job and all.
Last I checked, building an alarm clock is not a crime. Having it go off in class is disruptive, but also not a crime.
At the very least some sincere apologies are owed the kid from the 'adults' involved.
Min
Hey, in America today, perfume is a crime.
http://www.givemegossip.com/fo...
If you want police in school, you're going to have damn near everything turned into a crime.
I thought about that. I could teach my children any school subject they'd like to learn. The problem is: how do you teach your child about dealing with idiots?
Take them to a Republican Presidential debate.
The question is: what makes you superior in being able to prepare your child for their future life?
That's your question, not mine. As a person who has goe through the public school system, as well as a person who's son has gone through the public school system, I've seen that it is so royally fucked up and has been for a long time, and is only getting worse.
Which makes your "question" silly. Because I can ask the same question of the public schooll system, and it fails miserably. That bar is terribly terribly low.
As a side note in terms of preparing people for life, having a major altercation with an authority figure in itself can be a good life learning.
Kewl! It is the logic that kids should be allowed to get addicted to crystal meth because that teaches them that there are some bad drugs out there, and will do them some good. And furthermore, that getting sent to jail, maybe becoming bubba's favorite anal insertion target, is teaching them a valuable lifes lesson.
The world is an absolute shithouse place full of idiots and sometimes idiots in power. Isolating people from these realities is not necessarily the answer, and I say that as someone who got suspended for defending myself at school.
Who is isolating? This is avoidance of that shithouse world, at least until the little one will need to commit an actual crime to be arrested for it. What good is knowing that there are assholes out there when you have a felony on your police blotter, and can't even be a full citizen.
That taught me a very valuable lesson about authority figures and who can be trusted to do what's "right".
I had my share of stupid problems myself. Fortunately, it was during an age when a kid might get expelled for three days instead of a night in lockup. Its odd, I look at this system as abusing children, and you seem to take joy in turning children into criminals so they'll know something about life. Maybe we need to start charging babies with criminal offenses when they make a mess in their diapers. Teach them important life lessons, you know. Here's what you apparently approve of - as far as I can tell, because I would want my children to avoid this, and you want them to experience this:
http://ccjs.umd.edu/sites/ccjs...
Be my guest. I'll pass on that.
It is not the public school system that is broken - it's only a symptom of a larger problem. The society is broken.
There are issues for sure - But the schools are behind the curve in not realizing that getting tougher and tougher on lesser and lesser offenses will produce the same things that teh war onn drugs created. More criminals for really petty infractions.
As William F Buckly noted: "marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could"
And the same for the young lady who wore too much perfume, and is now a convicted criminal.
What did you change? i'd like to know.... can I buy some of your snake oil? :)
Its the craziest damn thing. No one knows, but after mulltiple checks, there's no problem, just that anomaly.
Just because the government knows you cheated on your wife (because it came up in your background clearance check) does not mean that your wife knows. This is leverage.
Considering the divorce rate, not very good leverage
My eye sight (and weight) starting going bad after college. I figure it was because I was spending more time sitting down and staring at a computer when I got my first desk job than before (where I used to usually sit at the computer only at home or at a class per semester).
Weird thing is, in the last 5 years, my eyes have become radically better. TO the point where my wife insisted I get them checked, in case of some inknown problem. But I can now drive without glasses, and my close vision is much better since I don't have to wear glasses that correct the far vision much at all any more.