Middle school evacuated because of a science project
signonsandiego.com
signonsandiego.com
Imagine if Jobs and Wozniak had lived today during this sort of thing. They'd be sitting in Gitmo.
Kids gets dropped of at a massive imposing building, he walks endless corridors looking for room 101, with fear in his heart he opens the door and enters a dark room. When he shuts the door, the lights click on and Woz is there and tells the kid... "don't worry, the world is full of idiots, let's make something cool"
That's what the kid really needs and more importantly deserves!
Personally, I think this story has broader implications than simply that American students are discouraged from pursuing interests in science and technology. I think it illustrates two socially destructive trends:
1. To perceive anything science or technology related that has not been marked with the corporate stamp of approval as a potential threat. Any device with exposed wires that are not hidden behind a slick case with a logo must be a bomb. Anyone that's using command-line instead of a slick GUI must be a hacker, etc.
2. To consider perception of safety above all; that is an over-reaction on a massive scale is not considered anything short of normal. It's normal to send a bomb squad to a kid's house on a mere suspicion of a school official. It's normal to close down a major airport because of a battery explosion. And so on, and so on.
I think it is more subtle than that. If it was about safety, they would cancel cheerleading and football. I know I have been repeating myself in 2 other comments on the same thread, I feel strongly about this, see here http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5538a1.htm for some CDC stats on 2005-2006 ).
What seems to happen is that schools are interested not in safety but in avoiding litigation. So they are only concerned with the perception of safety. It all revolves around "Would we get sued?" or "Legally, did we cover our asses?"
Schools should just merge with TSA, they both seems to share their delusions about safety.
Not by AOSSM: "With more and more kids participating in sports, injuries are on the rise – an estimated two million occurring each year, resulting in 500,000 doctor visits and 30,000 hospitalizations" [http://www.sportsmed.org/tabs/newsroom/AOSSMPressReleaseDeta...]
"Almost one-third of all injuries incurred in childhood are sports-related injuries." [http://www.chp.edu/CHP/P01650]
I'm not going to comment on that - I just wondered what the actual injury rate is and found this.
Ever since then America's developed severe allergies to everything bombs and explosives or dangerous.
What's worse is an incompetent TSA that's trying too hard all in the wrong places. The only reason the recent terrorist attempt failed was because the guy just happened to be as incompetent as the TSA. Or maybe the plane would have landed on my house and killed me (and would have disrupted my stream of consciousness; I live in the Detroit area) and so in my universe he failed.
But to be completely fair, China's TSA seems to be just as incompetent, probably more so since they really don't have as many terrorist attacks to test their strategies. I had a really small bottle of children's Moltrin confiscated, but it got through USA TSA. I wouldn't be surprised the next time I get on a flight with two sticks to be stopped and questioned. God forbid I start a fire by rubbing the sticks and burn everyone to death while they are sleeping.
I was expelled from a "science and technology" magnet school for finding some holes in their network. The IT admin's password was "north" so I could basically do anything.
Based on the way they did logins (Novell on Win2k workstations) any time a user logged in on a machine, I could get their password. It was a matter of booting a live linux distro, mounting a usb stick, copying a few files from the windows drive over to the usb stick, and then brute forcing once I got home.
I screwed around a little bit, rebooting various Netware servers from the web admin for fun. Unfortunately the "shut down" button does a graceful shutdown and sends a message to every single machine on the network... so it wasn't very stealth. All in all, I never did a single malicious thing. I explored their network, restarted some servers, and logged in as a teacher occasionally to screencap the "Logout blah teacher name" to show off to my buddies. Never once did I look at anyones personal documents or change any grades. I was a pussy, just an explorer.
Long story short, being a cocky 16 year old kid with a ton of user passwords, I blogged about it and got nailed. The way they handled it wash horrible, literally dragging me and my buddies out of class by the arm and cursing at us for embarrassing the school. This all happened the day after returning from a thanksgiving break, but the interesting thing is one of the teachers there was dragged into the "investigation" (every single post/page on my blog was printed into little booklets for the majority of the staff to read and analyze) and personally called me the day before the break, to let me know that I better watch my ass.
I'm a good guy, I give money back to people who drop it on the sidewalk, give up my seat on the bus to women, kids, and the elderly, etc... but they didn't realize it. The staff there is so elite because their public magnet school only gets the "smart" kids in the district. They kicked me out as soon as they had the chance. Their infrastructure is probably still vulnerable and their IT staff are just as clueless. I'd have happily done anything that I could to prevent other jacknobs in the school from doing what I did, if they had just asked for my help or even just noticed there was a problem and made changes. Instead... I'm some crazy hacker kid who doesn't belong amongst the elite kids.
I remember booting a live cd once before I even had a reputation at the school, and it was as though I was beating off in church. People were so incredibly offended by the terminal and lack of gui, like I was some kind of hacker just waiting to destroy everything.
Looking back.. I wish I hadn't been such a wimpy 10th grader. I should have screwed around way more in high school. For some reason the second I was expelled and sent to the "normal" high school I grew some balls and started acting like a regular teenager.
Oh yeah the dump I speak of is called Clark Magnet and it's in La Crescenta, California.
In the end my parents went to the headmaster and gave him an earful.
The good news is that the school's behaviour had a lasting impression on me: people in authority act like assholes because they are in authority.
This sounds very counterintuitive to many people because it's not the way we would like it to be. Many studies of adopted siblings, twins separated at birth, and natural siblings who grew up in different families support this hypothesis.
I realize it's just a model and not intended to be entirely accurate. Just seems like a very small piece of the story.
As a kid I did briefly a whole lot of stuff, from swimming to skating dance to karate. Most of it didn't catch at all - I still have two left feet - but the stuff that did made a real difference. And almost all of it was at my parent's initiative.
What possible sane school policies could exist at the "Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School" that the student could have violated? Don't do anything with what we're teaching you outside of school?
I suppose there might be a rule of "don't bring in anything unless you get it screened first", but ... geez. Given the level of screening they considered necessary for this device, that doesn't sound likely.
I'm really glad I went to school in the 1970s; heck, for my 2nd year in JROTC teaching unit (my senior year in high school), where we went beyond writting a lesson plan to actually teaching a lesson (in anything we wanted, didn't have to military related), I used a page from the Ranger Handbook to show how to build an improvised booby-trap, with a bottle rocket as the thing which went "boom" (mounted in a 2x4 block of wood; much better than a firecracker, makes a lot of noise building up to the boom without as high a single impulse).
The instructor was concerned for a moment until he remembered who was giving the lesson ^_^. If someone tried that today they'd probably end up in jail (then again, I suspect my home school district isn't this insane).
At least that case was cooler.. IIRC, he was taking over the PA system to play rock music the final day of school.
I was thinking the same thing (though more 80s than 70s for me). I was very interested in chemistry from 7th grade and up, and did a lot of home experiments including some more or less flammable stuff. This was at least in part encouraged by both my chemistry teacher and my parents and grandparents. Had this been today and in the US and the police had gone through my garage, it seems likely I would be in jail.
This stuff is extremely troubling to me. This hysterical overreaction will, as many have already pointed out, serve to completely discourage kids from nurturing their interest in science, and it makes me really, really hesitant about the prospect of raising kids in the US.
> I suppose there might be a rule of "don't bring in anything unless you get it screened first", but ... geez. Given the level of screening they considered necessary for this device, that doesn't sound likely.
Their policies are available at http://www.mtechmiddle.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=5881...
I don't see anything relevant to this. Perhaps the word policy is congruent to ``whatever we make up'' at this school?
In case they decide to change their policies, I've downloaded a copy along with the time of retrieval. Others may wish to do the same.
To be honest, it's a pity we don't know the name of the student so we can start sending him presents consisting of subscriptions to Make, electronics books, chemistry sets etc.
ADDED: Presentation also counts, e.g. if the police show up without the son, and say (as a worse case) the son brought a bomb to school, can we check for any other dangerous materials in his room?
Although his science teacher had agreed to take the solutions for disposal before the break, I was still cautious when I brought them in first day after break. I left everything in the car, went to the office, asked them to call the teacher to get his permission, and then brought the chemicals in, all the while trying to look like a straight citizen as I walked by the sheriff parked out front as usual. I had exactly the OP's scenario in mind. No sense pushing things when the world is nuts.
Yet we have no qualms about our kids playing sports where they easily can break their necks and knees. If you go to any school in US, you'll see students with casts and bandaged knees and elbows. Most of those are sports injuries. See how many children have "science" related injuries -- you'll probably see none. So it is not that we want to protect our children, because then we'd have to cancel football, but instead we end up teaching and perpetuating certain attitudes and values that ultimately will put our country at a disadvantage.
...but we don't want the first science-related injury to be a mushroom cloud.
</sarcasm>
Hello -
I was very concerned recently to read of your school being forced to evacuate after finding a suspicious device in the backpack of one of your students, as reported here:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jan/15/students-evac...
I realize that the press often distorts facts in order to better fit their own narrative, but the idea that a child at a technical magnet school is being embarrassed at a school-wide level for doing experimental technical work in his own time is extremely worrying. The suggestion that he is being sent for "counselling" is even harder to believe.
As I'm certain you're aware, America has an ongoing problem with adequate science education, a problem schools like yours are meant to correct. This kind of hysterical overreaction is only going to discourage children from building their own devices, and from creative play in general. It is part of a deeply worrying anti-science trend in this country, and I hope you agree that the real changes needed here are at the administrative level, to prevent these kinds of misunderstandings from getting so out of hand in future.
Sincerely, Laurie Voss.
The _parents_ need counseling!?
These news stories are not shocking anymore (sadly) due to how frequently these absurd reactions are. What is very angering is how the reporter/news outlet never indicate how disproportional and inappropriate the 'official' response is. There's never a cautionary lesson on over-reaction; rather, they always praise "erring on the side of caution" (i.e. erring on the side of irrationality). Yes, fear will keep us safe, eh?
Who said anything about keeping us safe? Fear puts butts in seats, which is the entirety of the media's interest in the matter. Now stay tuned for the shocking truth about child abductions in broad daylight - a report no parent can afford to miss!
Well that will teach him to be interested in electronics. It's a good thing that there's an overabundance of kids going into science and engineering, otherwise this sort of thing could become a problem.
IMHO An 11yo school student would be more deserving of the benefit of the doubt on his project, than the girl at MIT
Millennial Tech Middle School 1110 Carolina Lane San Diego, CA 92102 (619) 527-6933
What gets me is that in our school, in one of the best schools in the country, there's so much idiocy - I can't even imagine the levels of stupidity and prison-like institution present elsewhere. (Funny anecdote: at one point last year, the school staff started putting up bars, expandable bars, in the hallways to prevent people from leaving the cafeteria during lunch. There was quite literally no way to get out and go anywhere, without bumping up against an angry security guard.)
The warrant was later quashed, don't know how or if the case concluded.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/mass-sjc-tosses-calixte...
The comments on Schneier's blog are interesting. I was surprised at the number of people saying that the warrant was reasonable.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/boston_police_...
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
You can be too careful, and schools need to realize it. Incidentally, so does liability law.
Mayhap this is a good time for getting back into the habit of parent involvement with schooling?
I somehow doubt any school with a hacker club run by a couple of science&engineering orientated dads would have these kinds of problems.
Wait for the school system to catch a wake-up and we'll be waiting forever.
Remember we must protect the dear little children.
Teacher unions -> They are welcome to complain but fortunately they don't set school policy.
Complaining about how impossible the situation is may make you feel better but fixing it will make you feel good.
In fact, we should probably take their own children away from them.
/'tis a sad world we live in :(.
Well now, we wouldn't want our precious little snowflakes to blow their fingers off. But we'll sign them up for cheerleading and football, where they can break their knees, heads and spines.
So we are basically banking on them all being professional athletes and dancers. But then, of course, we wonder how come we are so behind all the other countries in science and math.
The end goal of the education system should be a self-sufficient, literate, mature, responsible adult, yet there are precious few indications that today's education system has anything even remotely close to that as a goal.
If any of these 'adults' had been paying attention in 9th-grade science class, they'd be able to tell what the kid's up to without calling in Sandia.
It's a phrase true mostly in the public school system. Doesn't hold so much for universities or other educational institutions.
In all likelihood it’s probably both, with feedback going both ways.
If you don't understand it, segregate it and isolate it ! What sort of sick kick do people get out of cowering geniuses into corners? Here we are, improving and saving the world for everybody, all day long.
I wish there was a way to let the kid know that he's a little bit of a hero.