Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who is both a former student with authority issues and a former high school teacher, this story leaves me with a whole bunch of feelings. You would think that teachers have the maturity to be more or less immune to the impressions of teenagers, but it's actually quite a challenge to maintain face [1] as the instructional leader of dozens of humans. In my experience in Teach For America, it was a fashionable meme that it's the adults that make education hard, not the children. But I think that's not quite honest. While adults are ultimately responsible for everything that's wrong with education, on a day to day basis, you're put in very delicate and stressful situations with children, who are impulsive, emotional, and myopic. It's really, really hard to deal with adolescents at scale.

Yet, in this case, like so many others, it's very clear that at some point, some of the adults decided that it was appropriate to wage total war on the child who offended them. They allowed their hurt feelings to suspend their sense of empathy and proportionality. Even worse, as the role models for the school, they set a standard of absolutism and intolerance. I can identify with them, while also seeing how badly they failed to take the high road.

It's interesting how this same dynamic has played out in criminal justice as well. We struggle with the ability to treat the incarcerated in a humane manner, to hold police accountable for their excesses, to provide security without domestic militarization, and to fully rehabilitate and reintegrate ex-cons into society.

I guess it's probably an inherent tension in human society, when there is a boundary of authority. I just hope we can learn and progress.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%2...

>While adults are ultimately responsible for everything that's wrong with education, on a day to day basis, you're put in very delicate and stressful situations with children, who are impulsive, emotional, and myopic. It's really, really hard to deal with adolescents at scale.

I'm not sure that this can truly be qualified. The statement that their job entails a stressful situation, does not (inherently) excuse them from inviting it. This is the same argument used by or on behalf of police officers who abuse their post(i.e. He had a hell of a day, witnessed two murders, so it's understandable that he just shot a minor suspect for fleeing). One might forget that they don't need to be a police officer or school teacher, that they made a free and conscious decision to be one and feel no shame for failing at it.

The problem is that individual teachers do not, on their own, have as much ability to make the situation a good one; it takes an effort from the entire system(from other teachers to headteachers to parents to politicians) to change the day-to-day reality, and so it seems as though the situation is "out of our hands".

I hope it's clear from my original comment that I 100% agree. My point was that from moment to moment, teachers are human beings. They're going to have human feelings and make mistakes. I can empathize with the initial hurt feelings and perception of loss of control. But I'm not justifying their behaviors in response, by any means.

Shooting a human is a mistake orders of magnitude beyond what I'm talking about. And in this story, it's inexcusable that some of the teachers and the principle were able to de-empathize with the author so much, due to their bruised egos and sense of authority, that they put on a prolonged Draconian push to expel the author. Reminds me of MIT and Aaron Schwartz.

Oh come on, I dropped out of grade 12 (did not complete) and went on to be very successful in college and then university. Getting suspended in high school is really no big deal. This is hardly war.

It says 'expelled', not suspended. Totally different outcome.

The author closed the article with:

That being said, I heartily do not recommend expulsion as a rite of passage for high school students. I’m fairly certain the extreme levels of stress and anxiety I experienced shaved a few years off my life.

I went to a Catholic school with a noted hockey program where I was required to recite Jesus' family tree from Abraham through his parents and, in biology, had to remember to mention that evolution was more likely than creation, but God still started evolution (to this day, the words 'alpha and omega' hurt). Personally, I would have welcomed expulsion as between the hockey love and the jesus love, I was not exactly enamoured with the state of my education.

Unfortunately, this didn't happen to you or me. It happened to someone who experienced a massive amount of stress as a result. And over what?? Some dipshit adults who decided to squander a learning opportunity in the name of showing how tough they were??

But then there's a difference in dropping out and being expelled, and as someone who was expelled from highschool, it can seem devastating at the time it happens, even if it has minor impact on your future life. Being ground through the wheels for school administration is a harrowing experience for any teenager.

Matter of fact, my little brother who also went through an expulsion has still not quite recovered. The school suspended him for months in middle school, and I think it has impaired his ability to function as a student. When we tried getting him into the German school system again, he failed his reentry exam out of anxiety (he most likely knew the answers, he just filled in nothing), and another year of schooling at a lower tiered school because he couldn't bring himself to fill in exams for the first half of the school year.

So I certainly would not discount the impact an expulsion can have on a student, and I think that school administrators should not use it lightly. It could work out just fine, or utterly demoralize a student that most likely is already marginalized.

I'm sorry - both you and your brother have been expelled, and you think the fault is with the system and not how you're being raised?

Well, in my case it was absolutely my fault. I angered some of the school administrators and i was academically underperforming. And in retrospect it was the right call. I got thrown into the K12 system in 9th grade from a German school, had a relatively weak academic track record before that, and the school was a private school looking to churn students into the Ivys. The 3 years I spent there were hugely eye opening in regards to what I could or could not do with my life, but ultimately, it was not the right place for me.

But for my brother, it's a little different. He was kicked out of a public school for altercations with another student, and I would say that the situation was not handled in a fair manner. The school claimed that the reason for the suspension was that the other parents didn't feel safe sending their children to the school anymore, which was bogus since my mother actually went and personally called every single parent in the grade. None of them had any concerns over the incident. I'm suspecting that the school was simply overly cautious since about 20 years ago one student (one of the pastors children) murdered another student by stabbing him on a staircase inside of the school building. Whilst I don't fault the school administration for overreacting and deciding to deal with the problem through sweeping it under the rug, I do think the issue could have been handled more gracefully than sending a 12 year old for police questioning AND a psychologist.

Also I was not making a point about whether my or my brothers expulsion was justified, I was commenting about the effects of expulsion, and how variable they can be depending on the student and their upbringing.

I believe that public school systems should act as an equalizer against how you're raised at home instead of compounding these problems.

> I believe that public school systems should act as an equalizer against how you're raised at home instead of compounding these problems.

That's a commonly held belief, and I think it's a lot to put on the public school system. As a teacher, when I wasn't busy, you know, instructing, I was a mental health first responder, surrogate parent, law enforcer, stenographer, and so forth. I agree that, in general, social services should provide a baseline so that every child has a shot, regardless of what life situation they happen to be born into. I'm just not sure it's fair for that to fall so heavily on the schools.

In practice, this is exactly what seems to happen. And I think this over-reliance is a big part of what brings down low income schools. Even within inner cities, there's effect where the most prominent and successful schools tend to scoop up the kids with the greatest relative advantage and the most challenging students are pushed down to progressively more impoverished schools. We end up with multiple layers of elective and systemic segregation. As Paul Tough put it [1], there are big distinctions within poverty, with those who are the very worst off -- in "deep poverty" in Tough's terminology -- often being the people least effectively served.

The neighborhood schools often serve as social glue within their communities, but they're measured academically against schools in more affluent communities that have the privilege of being focused much so on being good educational centers. When these neighborhood schools are labeled as "failing" for academic underperformance, they're closed down and it can be a very traumatic local event.

Now I'm not saying that schools that aren't educating effectively shouldn't be reformed, or sometimes shutdown. I'm just pointing out that the reality of the role they serve and all they're doing isn't typically acknowledged or supported.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/obama-poverty.htm...

I've always thought that measuring schools by student academic performance alone is an incredibly lazy way of measuring performance across the board because it doesn't take into account massive differences in the average student different schools get.

Measuring difference in student performance between two points in time would provide a better heuristic, and even using that as a measure for funding is silly as it creates a feedback loop. I'd rather see this data being used to identify and study top performing schools and the findings being applied to schools performing in the bottom percentile.

But then this entire problem hinges on how we as a society want public schools to work. Do we want them to act as an equalizer in the sake of social stability and mobility, or do we want them to amplify existing situations so that our top performers perform even better?

Whilst there is obviously already a deep relationship between teachers and their students, another method for taking weight off their backs in the regard of being mental health first responders could be having mental health responders on site, whether that be social workers or child psychologists which is how things are handled in Germany. At my previous school we had a psychologist that was shared across different schools in the area, who would be open to talk about any mental health issues a student might have.

Now in Germany we also have a 3 tiered system, where the lowest performing students go to a "Hauptschule", which focuses on putting students into trades, a "Realschule" which opens up moving into either higher reaches of the trades or moving into a "Gymnasiale Oberstufe", which is the conclusion of the "Gymnasium" that focuses on funneling students into universities to pursue further eduction.

Whilst this tiered system has its issues despite possibility to move into higher tiers later in your educational life, it also allows for dividing up certain problems. Students from a "Gymnasium" are usually assumed to come from a stable background, which means less social workers and stronger focus on academics, whilst students from a "Hauptschule" are usually offered more guidance in exchange for a less strict and more practice oriented scientific curricullum.

I didn't see anywhere where he said he was expelled, he only mentioned his younger brother.

I was expelled, or rather "denied re-admission", which means it doesn't go on your academic record but for all intents and purposes is the same thing.

I think it was the right call though, it was the wrong place for me. Much MUN and Community Service, but the CS classes weren't strong, and that was the only technical class offered. I went on to go to an ITG, which is short for "InformationsTechnisches Gymnasium" which is a highschool with a curriculum centered around stuff like OO and microcontrollers and UML diagrams.

It's a shame that this got down voted because there is a bit of truth to it. After my son had an issue similar to this in his sophomore year of high-school he choose to simply drop out and get his GED. He wasn't invested in school activities, was a bit of a geek, and too bright for his own good. He also didn't need a scholarship in order to go to college. He got a six month break from school, passed the GED with perfect scores in three sections, scored high on his ACTs & immediately applied to the local university where he was accepted and carried a 3.8 GPA. For me this was a wake up call. I'd never taken school as seriously as my parents, my mom being a school teacher, but I did buy into this myth that high-school graduation was a necessary evil. It turns out that it really can be very optional for some. Once you have a semester or two under your belt at university no employer really cares about a high-school diploma, and for many employers, a non-traditional route can be attractive.

Consider this statement (which the author used to conclude his article):

That being said, I heartily do not recommend expulsion as a rite of passage for high school students. I’m fairly certain the extreme levels of stress and anxiety I experienced shaved a few years off my life.

I'd argue that your son is lucky to have you - you sound like the kind of parent who not only weathered the storm, but turned it into the best possible experience. If I'm ever in your shoes, I hope that my child comes out the other side looking as good as your son did!

Great work.

That's one of the reasons I share this story as often as I can. I've run into too many parents, mine included who thought that dropping out of high-school is the beginning of a downward spiral. We choose to not look at it that way and instead viewed it as an opportunity for our son to get a jump start on college. Our daughter wanted out of high-school for other reasons and took as many online classes as she could to get out a year early. Our youngest just skipped third grade after switching from a private school to the public school system and we are already preparing for her to drop out and go to college at sixteen. Honestly, I didn't have a good time in high-school, my older two children didn't have a good time in high-school, so I'm more than willing to explore more creative options.

> Once you have a semester or two under your belt at university no employer really cares about a high-school diploma

This felt like a complete non-sequitur. You were talking about education, and suddenly you switch to employment? The purpose of an education is not to serve a boss.

These days, in this capitalist world, most of us do have to subject themselves to the will of an employer or another. So we do have to look good to them. Education as I understand it is supposed to help us out of this servitude, so we can be emancipated citizens and responsible adults.

Remember, an employee is not free. Better off than a slave or a serf, but still not independent.

>Remember, an employee is not free.

Free from what? I can choose to quit whenever I want.

You are speaking from a pretty privileged background pretending that employees don't have freedom.

Freedom doesn't mean you should be able to do whatever you want and have society be forced to support you in doing so.

I believe parent's point (which I am not agreeing with) was that employee's are not free because in a capitalist society you more or less need to work to survive

You used to have to hunt to survive. In general you (for like a quadrillion values of "you") have to do something to survive and thrive, and it generally involves depredation or parasitism...comensalism...etc.

Especially because employees have to work for someone who tells them what to do.

You need to work for someone to survive. The point is, there is a tiny minority of capitalists, who decide what to work on, and how. The rest of us hardly have a say. In terms of personal freedom, this is just as bad as a command economy (no more, no less). Also, remember that in some places, people can't even chose their employer. It's work in the mine, or starve. We westerners have it easy.

An independent contractor will still need to work to survive. But at least she's free from any boss… if she's really independent —that is, she can afford to turn down contracts.

Pensioners, or otherwise "financially independent" people are even free from lucrative work. They don't need to work for their continued survival. They can instead like look over their grandchildren or do some community work.

I'm sure there are higher attainable degrees of freedom yet. But let's work on the worst problems first. We more or less solved slavery and serfdom. Now there is employment. Next will be the need to survive. Next… I don't know, physical limitations?

This isn't correct. Look at the number of small business owners in the US. It's a minority, but it's not some tiny elite like your comment leads people to believe.

It doesn't take much for a regular person to start a business. If they provide a good the population likes at a reasonable price, they will succeed.

A link with the actual numbers would have helped.

> It doesn't take much for a regular person to start a business.

Generally in the order of 50.000€ for your average starting business —even a simple bakery. Not the end of the world for a Bay Area software engineer. A moonshot for minimum wage workers.

Sure, you could ask for a loan. But if you're poor, you will likely not get it.

Not so long ago, societies were structured to foster intellectual curiosity. Now, they are structured to kill any form of innovation. Just because you live in a broken, intellectually devoid capitalistic society, doesn't mean that's the optimal or even correct way to organize society.

If what you are saying is true, why is the US the leading tech innovator by a wide margin? The entire bay is centered on the concept of disruption via innovation.

Most of the technical innovation in the US is financed by military sources and state-sanctioned monopolies. Things like the internet and self-driving cars basically came from ARPA and DARPA fundings —at least initially.

Compared to those thing, the typical web startup we see in the Bay area innovates little and disrupts nothing. They're just facilitators and middle men. The likes of DropBox, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, even Facebook… none are needed. They only compensate for our asymmetric bandwidth, without solving the real problem.

If you want real innovation, you need to finance fundamental research. You know, things that have no short term benefits, uncertain long term benefits, and uncertain monetisability.

In any case, the US is one of the most militaristic countries out there. It wages war all over the place for oil, and develops nice military devices to secure its supremacy. That's a pretty good drive for technical innovation.

Pretty feeble argument IMO. You restrict your analysis to companies you deem trivial and then you claim they aren't innovative. Yet you ignore the entire smartphone revolution that was started by Apple and Google.

Innovation and invention aren't the same thing. The invention of a technology is only a small component of its success. Combining it with other components to fulfill a good usecase is what makes it something useful. Google is the main player making self driving cars actually something useful,not DARPA funding.

You can continue to be apologetic for other countries being so far behind in tech innovation, but it doesn't change the point that it's happening in the US even though some ignorant commenter thinks the education system gets rid of innovation.

> Pretty feeble argument IMO.

I agree.

I want to stress however that there are many factors that drive innovation. The military setup is one. The economic system is another. Education is yet another. The mass media have substantial influence. Even if it sucks on some fronts, it may be compensated elsewhere.

Simply put, even if our economic system and our education system thwarts innovation, that's not enough to kill it.

> Free from what? I can choose to quit whenever I want.

Lucky you. Many people don't have that privilege. Some don't have any saving, so switching employers isn't an option. Even in a country with good unemployment insurance, you are generally denied the benefits if you just quit —you have to be fired.

And of course, there are some horrible places where there is only one employer, and your only choice is to work for him (sometimes risking your life or health in the process), or starve.

> You are speaking from a pretty privileged background

May I ask what do you think that background may be?

Not having savings doesn't mean you can't quit. A one employer town doesn't mean you can't quit. In both cases you just quit and immediately move or take any job you can find while you look for something better.

Being free isn't having someone feed you grapes with a silver spoon while you ponder on which industry you would like to support with your intellectual prowess.

Now who's talking from a privileged perspective… Searching for a job takes time, and quitting is risky. Sure, most of the time it will be fine. But sometimes you just end up searching for a job (any job) for more than a few weeks, and next thing you know your landlord is kicking you out.

When I say "no savings", I do mean zero. Nothing. Like "I can't buy food this week" nothing.

Then there's social pressure. Why quit your job in these times of mass unemployment? That would be crazy. Even prospective employers will not see that with a good eye: in white collar jobs, you can always say "it was time for me to go", or high-status non-explanations like that. But picture a cashier looking for a cashier job. The employer will want a real reason, and you'd better forge one that doesn't look too bad. (Disparaging the previous employer looks bad, mentioning material constraints often looks bad… following your spouse might not.)

I think you're mixing up education and credentials. Attending high school is an important part of most peoples' education in much of the world, but obtaining a diploma is not an education. In fact, getting expelled for publishing what other students have to say about the teachers is likely far more educational than completing the final two or three months and obtaining a diploma.

How did you get in to college without finishing High School? I thought that was a pretty hard requirement for most programs.

It all depends. A number of colleges will let things slide in high school if the student shows promise. It's not uncommon for intelligent kids to be rebellious in high school from boredom etc., and so a number of colleges will take a chance on admitting such a student. I knew a guy who was clearly way smarter than the rest of us and when he was motivated to do so could easily pass any class. He got expelled from two high schools and proceeded to ace every class in college.

It's interesting, I graduated from that school in '92, and I was surprised when I read it. The faculty I knew, most would have encouraged such a project. My drafting teacher let me do a 3point of a x-wing for my final project. The school let me take 3 years of art in one year. I got caught smoking in the stairwell, and was just told to go outside. I did nudes, a controversial art projects that my college would have raised an eye to. This wasn't a bad school, or at least it wasn't the 5 years before this story occurs. So while I'm sure this happened, my own experience makes me believe that were not getting the whole picture.

The difference is that your experiences didn't directly challenge any member of staff. You might have challenged some abstract rule or social norm, but you likely did not personally and publicly attack a teacher. This guy named names and went personal, he crossed a much bigger line. His "crime" was not to lampoon the official magazine, but to personally attack school staff. I don't think any school, as good as it might be, would have tolerated that (although they could have handled it better, as he pointed out).

The difference is the teachers took it personally.

The crime was serious, but not expulsion serious. But authoritive figures often overreact when their very governance is questioned. Which, like the author, is a lesson I've had to learn the hard way (albeit I never landed myself in quiet as serious trouble as the aforementioned)

> The crime

What crime!

> The crime

"The crime"? Did we read the same article? What crime was committed? Making a low-tech version of ratemypreofessors.com?

I meant "crime" in a colloquial sense rather than the author literally having committed a criminal offence. But that said, deformation of character is a liable offence in the UK, so I assume the same would be true in Canada as well.

You can't equate a ratings site with an obvious satirical (at best) and potentially malicious outlet for angry students.

To the other two replies to the op, I think he meant "crime" in the figurative.

The author titled a section of the post, "My Crime".

Yeah, it's not a crime technically. Everyone is using the word figuratively, here.

Pretty much all of your post talks about art class. That's the way most art teachers are.

I was really surprised by how it all went down as well. Up to that point, I had felt that the school, teachers, and administration were all very progressive and tolerant, which was a huge factor in my decision to go forward with the whole project and keep it going as long as I did.

As far as not getting the whole picture, I shared everything I could to the best of my recollection. I also had one of the friends who was involved go over it and it was his opinion that I have left nothing salient out as well. It did all happen close to 20 years ago, however, so it's entirely possible that we've forgotten something significant.

It's amazing to read that first-person account. I recall reading about it at the time. Or maybe it was the other case that you refer to. Thanks! I'm curious about your perspective on a few things, though.

What free-speech rights did Canadian students have then?

Do they have more rights now, or less?

Teachers are "public figures", right? Or is Canadian libel law more like English than American?

I'm pretty sure that a high school teacher would not be considered a "public figure" in the US.

Fair enough, and my memories are 25 years old. So it's very easy that my brain is only remembering the best memories while forgetting the bad. My brain tends to do that with ex's I haven't seen in a while.

What I missed both in the article and in the consensus that "you personally attacked and offended teachers", is drawing the important distinction between authoring those comments, and merely publishing them. Also, the issue of whether they were subjective but essentially honest, clearly humorous, or malicious fabrications.

In any case, I do not think that taking a personal offence is at all an appropriate reaction to someone merely facilitating an anonymous survey.

Which Winston Churchill is this? There are two in Ontario alone. I was unable to tell from the article or from briefly researching the author.

Good question. Since his friend put him in touch with the Calgary Herald in the article, I assumed the one in North West Calgary (Alberta).

I wouldn't underestimate the pride and power-trip of those teachers and administrators. The same thing happened to me at a middle school in los angeles, and our newsletter didn't have anything remotely libelous, only criticisms of school policies, dress code, etc. The most poorly-written column compared the school to a concentration camp, which is of course an offensive statement, but not a personal attack. Four of us were suspended and had some other minor punishments. The dean was level-headed and reasonable but others were out for blood.

> I guess it's probably an inherent tension in human society, when there is a boundary of authority.

It's for that reason I think authority should be used as an organizational tool of last resort. Sadly it is the first thing many people reach for when they have a problem to solve.

Last resort implies it would mostly never be used. But do we have any reason to believe flat hierarchy could ever be effective in a 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 person organization?

I'd also direct you to some of the discussions of the subversive hierarchies that evolved under the surface of 2nd wave femenist, supposedly flat, groups.

Maybe we should also have less 10,000+ person organizations. The note about informal hierarchies arising in the absence of formal ones is very true, but that doesn't mean we can't reduce the problem if we aren't naive about it.

... and isn't the best way to combat the problem of informal hierarchies, to put formal ones in place eliminating the power vacuum?

Well, not if your goal is avoiding hierarchies.

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