Entries Tagged 'School' ↓

Found a great picture set of a school house in southern China. The school is located in the small village of Miao in the Guizhou province. The entire school is run out of a huge cave. The buildings, basketball courts, and recreation areas are all housed inside of the cave.
Check out the entire article for a lot more pics.
Reuters: School in a Cave

A student in a Houston area High school was arrested after school officials discovered that he had made a CounterStrike map of his school for him and his friends to play on. The student had no history of violence, and had not threatened any students or teachers. Nevertheless, he was arrested and sent to an “Alternative Education Center.” Alternative Education Centers are high security schools for violent and abusive students, or for repeat drug offenders. School officials were quoted as saying the situation was a “terrorist threat.”
CounterStrike is a popular team shooter game, that allows users to create maps of their own. Commonly players will create maps of their neighborhoods, local workplaces, and schools. Playing on a map that fits a local setting, that you know well, can make the game a lot more fun.
How many of you have fantasized about playing paintball or laser tag in your local mall or school? I know I have. CounterStrike with it’s map creation tools allows you to do just that. When I was in college, several of my friends made CounterStrike or Quake(a similar game) maps of various school buildings. Some of them were a lot of fun to play on.
What this kid did wasn’t against the law. He didn’t threaten anyone. He didn’t do anything wrong. All he did was enjoy playing a perfectly legal and very popular game. Not a crime! Once again, the people in power are scared and are overreacting. Just like they did with the student who wrote the essay that “disturbed” a teacher.

What bothers me the most about these stories, is not that people are checking up on suspicious behaviour. Or that people are worried about it and more cautious. The problem is that in both of these cases, the students did not break any laws. They were both punished because something they did made people think they might break laws in the future. Is it really okay to punish people for things they didn’t do, but might do?

Check out the story here: Teen punished over violent video game
And here: Fort Bend school trustees put off video game appeal

[Edit] Some pictures of the map have surfaced. Check them out at Joystiq: Images of the Clements High student’s “terroristic” maps

Allen Lee, a high school student in Cary Illinois was arrested after he wrote a violent essay in his creative writing class. The teacher directed her students to write in an uncensored stream of consciousness format. The assignment said, “write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing,” Lee wrote a rather vulgar and extremely violent essay and handed it in to his teacher. The essay didn’t threaten any particular person or group. Nevertheless the teacher was very disturbed by the essay, and called in school district officials for consultation. It was then decided that the police should be called.
Lee was subsequently arrested for disorderly conduct. If he is convicted, he could face up to 30 days in jail and a $1500 fine.
First off, I want to say that I don’t think we should be encouraging students to write essays of the type that Lee wrote. Nor should we be endorsing or condoning it when it does happen. Schools should have rules about this. And punishments, academic ones, should be applied.
But that said, I have a big problem with this whole incident. He didn’t really break any law, and yet he got arrested and very likely will be convicted simply because people are scared of more school violence. He was charged with disorderly conduct, which is all they could charge him with since he didn’t threaten anyone in his essay. Disorderly conduct generally is applied when a public disruption is caused.
In this case the only person who was even disturbed by this was the Teacher, who arguably brought this upon herself by stressing uncensored stream of consciousness writing. If he had written the same outside of school and published it on the Internet for thousands to read, potentially “disturbing” many more people, he wouldn’t have been arrested. More than likely, in that case, no one would even care.
The only reason he was arrested was because he was in a school. It all comes down to his teacher and the school board having more influence than he does. So they have the ability to twist laws and get him arrested even though he didn’t really commit any crime.
So how long will it be before you and I can get arrested for writing or saying something that disturbs people in power above us? I understand why they are worried about this in light of recent school violence, but if they get away with arresting him, they are setting a very bad precedent.
The kid may have been wrong to write the essay, but the truth is that he didn’t break any laws.

You can check out the news story here: MSNBC: Student charged for writing violent essay
And Here: Chicago Tribune: Student writes essay, arrested by police

School officials in trying to track down a bomb threat that was called in to a hot line at 4:17 am, arrested a kid who called in to the same schools information line at 3:12 am.
It seems that the hotline’s logging function was not able to handle the daylight savings time change correctly. So the bomb threat was actually logged as coming in at 3:17 am. The school officials found the students call to the information line and assumed that it was the same person. They then confiscated the kids cell phone and confirmed that he had made a call to the school that morning around the same time. The kid was arrested and spent twelve days in jail before someone noticed the difference.
I know that bomb threats are a serious issue at schools, but so is arresting someone falsely. Couldn’t the school officials have made sure they had a little more evidence, and that they had their facts correct before getting this kid arrested? Even if the time in the log was correct, they still have a 5 minute difference between the cell phone call and the bomb threat call.

Via Techdirt:Early Time Change Costs Kid 12 Days In Jail and The Register: US teen jailed for school’s daylight-saving cock-up