37 ms·

The Website That Got Me Expelled

639 points by Rudism 11y ago

spacemanmatt 11y ago
Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants. I'm lucky I was not more harmed by the sadist VP that ran my middle school.
- proveanegative 11y ago
  I think it is only a matter of time until MOOCs start eating into high school and even middle school-level education. Considering that many adults do not remember their high school experience fondly it will be a welcome alternative.
  - pistle 11y ago
    Snake oil salespeople jumped into moocs and have pushed their ascendancy back by years. They, presently-generally work great for a specific set of people, but don't yield sufficiently effective results for broad groups. Check out the research thus far. It's not as engaging and lacks the habit-forming that drives people to complete and compete for high marks in areas which aren't in alignment with the interests of the student. For mature learners focusing on a topic of interest, great. For young learners build a general foundation, not so much. Now, it's a different conversation to cover curriculum, but that's not of MOOC's concern. And, to wit, "adults not recollecting fond experiences" is double-edged. There are few other times in people's lives where they are essentially forced to rub shoulders with such a cross-section of their culture. These experiences do afford experience in cross-pollination which have positive benefits as much as they cause angst for participants. If parents are able to shield their kids from "others" a certain solipsism is a consequence. During formative years, there is a value to broad cultural experience that should be balanced with providing a safe and nurturing environment for the primary task of learning.
    - firebones 11y ago
      How would one go about designing a "how to learn mooc"? I'm serious. If you think about it, a lot of why employers require college degrees is that it vets many life skills around being organized and having it together enough to earn a degree. Factor that out and you have MOOCs for the knowledge * the life skills. So the life skills themselves (such as meeting deadlines, working in groups, showing up on time regularly, learning how to learn, etc.) would have to become some hybrid of MOOC for study habits and a long-running college-experience LARP for the social interaction.
      - pistle 11y ago
        Good point on personal management being something employers value generically by someone completing a degree. Then again, I also know enough people who don't have all that together even with a degree. If the question is more along the lines of how can a MOOC be part of the effective development of a desirable, hire-able person, then this is a big discussion. There are all sorts of areas needing review. What's a cost-optimized way to get to a balanced personal portfolio that looks good on paper (resume)? Do resumes matter when performance can speak volumes (your github repo, your stack-exchange + hacker news profile, your start-up you did in high school? Beyond that, are those things true indicators of appeal for hiring HR/recruiters, managers, peers during interviews? Is all of this actually helpful in estimating the likelihood of positive performance? It's all very hazy. Each thing bodes well, in ways, for the total, but most people are flawed, to some degree, if measured by other people. Myers-Briggs type personality profiling is rough pigeon-holing, but there is an underlying truth somewhere that different people will just resonate or "dissonate" with each other. Maybe one of the most effective things a person can develop, beyond their fundamental knowledge and technical acumen, is the ability to empathize with other people; to be able to bridge those personality divides. That brings me back to how there are few better environments, potentially, to get hands-on experience in navigating personality and culture difference than well-integrated schools.
  - prodmerc 11y ago
    I gotta say that EdX and Coursera are amazing - so many things to learn (often for free, but even the paid courses are relatively cheap). Stuff that is better than what our best schools/colleges/unis provide. I'm really grateful for what they're doing.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants. If you think that's only public school you're deluding yourself. My secondary education was in private schools (in the US sense of the word) and I have no issue whatsoever seeing this scenario unroll there (I can even cast the parts). Petty tyrants is what you get when petty people get access to any sort of power to lord over others, the exact nature of that power has little relevance. The concentration of petty tyrants is only a function of how easy it is to be granted power by the environment.
  - spacemanmatt 11y ago
    If I thought it was only public schools I would have said only public schools.
    - cma 11y ago
      When you add artificial specificity, people assume you did so for a reason. Like if you say "women are [X descriptive property]" people will assume, rightfully, an implied "women, as opposed to men, are ..." And of course when I say "when you add artificial specitivity," there is an implied "when you, or anyone else, adds artificial specitivity," totally contradicting the rule. This is English, not Aristotelian logic.
      - spacemanmatt 11y ago
        picky, picky
  - underpantsgnome 11y ago
    Maybe spacemanmatt didn't want to disparage institutions he had no experience with.
  - tsotha 11y ago
    The difference with private schools is the parents have a lot more clout, since they're paying the bills.
- weisser 11y ago
  > Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants This American Life devoted an entire episode to covering one of them... http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/419/petty-tyrant http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/419/p...
  - gkop 11y ago
    That guy was a major tyrant, I mean he got decades in prison for his behavior, after all.
iopuy 11y ago
I don't know if it was the dialogue coming from the teachers or glazing over the content of the newsletter, but I am highly skeptical of this article. I've never heard teachers talk to students or each other how this is written. 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity, turns out Geocities has been around since 1994 but I can't recall a single instance of sites being shutdown for this sort of thing in or around 1997. In 1997 many people were still asking "What is the internet exactly?" Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity? Why did he even has this information? It is technically feasible for this to have happened, I'm just saying I have my doubts.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  The dialogue from the teachers is precisely in line with what I experienced in gradeschool. I'm sure you can find dozens of others to corroborate: there's something about school administration that seems to attract (or create?) petty authoritarians who convince themselves that any slight against their person is an egregious crime in and of itself. > 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity It wasn't. > Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity? Could have been the teacher saw his reaction, overheard rumors, or asked/coerced the information from other students.
- Terretta 11y ago
  This happened all the time, all over the US. Felt like authoritarian heavy handed red-faced response to early anonymous publishing of tracts and pamphlets, all over again. Good read starting with the 1500s here: THE IDEA OF A FREE PRESS: THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS UNRULY LEGACY — http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/org.oclc.lac.ui.DialABookServlet?oclcnum=63277699 http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/org.oclc.lac.ui.DialABo... I was part of an early ISP (1993 - 1997). There was this kind of "insolent" free speech vs. fumbling authoritarian quashing all the time. Our ISP policy: Don't like what you have to say, but will defend your right to say it. And we, not teens but in our twenties, thought this new power for the individual voices was indeed "hilarious" — and awesome. I often miss the truly self-published pre-ad-driven ecosystem days of $19/month for a dial up modem and your own web site. // As it happens, in addition to offering both web hosting and shell, I also invented dynamic DNS, with connection event driven mapping from Portmasters to a custom DNS host, to point your username.isp.com to your own dynamic dialup IP address so you could host whatever website you wanted on your own box, not ours.
rjknight 11y ago
I must be about the same age as the author. This certainly brings back memories! Oh for the days when we could just uncomplicatedly assume that anyone who knew anything about technology was also an instinctive anti-authoritarian, too.
TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
Some sites require JS because they do weird things like rendering stuff clientside. This site "requires" JS because... The opacity of the article is set to 0? Everything's there, everything's rendered, but they have a CSS rule (".use-motion .post { opacity: 0; }"). Only thing I can think of is that they do a JS fade-in or something and missed the unintended consequences. (Speaking of which... Doesn't Google penalize sites that have an excessive number of hidden keywords? I wonder if the entire article being hidden qualifies...)
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  When I alt tabbed to the site there was a slow fade-in on the menu.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    Sidestepping the question of if that actually adds anything to the article - they couldn't be bothered to do the fade-in correctly?
- RGamma 11y ago
  I find a good way to unfuck those sites is to use something like uMatrix or Web Developer to disable CSS (in uMatrix's case it can't disable inline CSS and needs a page reload, but of course it does a ton of other things and this probably isn't an as important use-case). Also works well when text doesn't properly wrap when the browser window is narrow or when broken menus and bars obscure the content, etc.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    I find it rather... ironic, shall I say, when CSS actively hurts the readability of a site. This being one of those cases.
    - lemiffe 11y ago
      In what way? I find this website perfectly readable, and the font size and line height were appropriate enough.
Ambroos 11y ago
I was almost suspended at school eight years ago for using `net send` from .bat files and because I had Everest portable on my network drive (a tool that lists system specs, I was curious what hardware the PC's had). The guy that managed the network at the time was almost personally offended and accused me of 'hacking' the network with dangerous tools. He got the school board involved, my parents had to go talk to the headmaster. My parents and I had to sign a contract which said that any other 'unauthorised' use of the school network would get me suspended for 3 days. If you have one bitter person working somewhere and nobody knows enough about something to stop them, you can get these power-mad types. Probably happens a lot at schools with just one network administrator.
- verbin217 11y ago
  The degree to which kids get fucked with before they're even allowed to enter society necessitates people like that exist. Working at a school isn't exactly esteemed. You were both smart enough to see through the situation and to... Not work at a school. We just keep putting the wrong people in the right place to exacerbate a negative feedback loop.
- kall 11y ago
  We had a lot of fun with net send at my all laptop school. IIRC there was even a shared address book file with everyone's hostname. It didn't bother the admins, but understandably the teachers.
- petercooper 11y ago
  Haha, I did the same thing (with net send, which I'd forgotten all about till you said it) when our school got its first network - around 98 or so. I rigged up a QBasic program to use net send to create a school wide chatroom of sorts (I think I used it to sync a filename on a network share rather than send the actual chat though). Never got caught but they managed to disable the functionality and that was that. It's ridiculous how mad they all got about it though.
  - mondoshawan 11y ago
    Chandler, perhaps? I attended a junior high school there which had this rickety chat system that functioned exactly like that. It was kinda functioning when I got there, but I took the app home and hacked it up considerably to be more stable, more colors for text, etc. Ended up leaving the updated source on the machines one day before I left the school for high school. Quite fun days, indeed.
beerbajay 11y ago
I had a really similar experience when I was in high school, though I didn't get expelled. I made a website with photos of students (and their first names) giving the finger to the camera. People of course set this as the home page on library computers. Unhappily, this was right after Columbine, so the administration was super paranoid and I was a little X-Files-obsessed black-trenchcoat-wearing weirdo... so I got a week's suspension.
acjohnson55 11y ago
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%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%2...
- microcolonel 11y ago
  >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".
edw519 11y ago
Reminds my of the first program I ever wrote, in 10th grade, painstakingly assembled one IBM card at a time, output onto green bar paper. I changed the school motto from "Gateway High School, Hats Off to Thee" to "Gateway High School, Pants Down to Thee" surrounded by an ascii generated toilet. The principal took away half my card deck (which would have taken weeks to reproduce), promising to return them only when my father signed my output. My father reproduced my output by hand with his signature and a label: "Functional Specifications". The principal returned my cards and never said another word.
- bru_ 11y ago
  Dude you must have gone to an elite high school
hellofunk 11y ago
That sucks that your creative high-school gag was met with such hostility by the administration. I'm three years older than you and did something similar in high-school. A friend and I made a MS Word clone from scratch of the formatted template the school used for report cards. Then we filled it up with teachers' comments and grades for us, but in total sarcasm. It was hilarious. The teachers found out about it, and... they had a good laugh also. No harm done. I guess it just depends on your environment.
wsha 11y ago
Free speech is important but for some reason this story does not make me feel much sympathy for the author. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it seemed like the newsletter was posting borderline defamatory comments anonymously.
- rev_bird 11y ago
  Says the person with the freedom to publicly disagree with the article behind an anonymous account on a website.
- msie 11y ago
  Yes. It's sad how so many here romanticize being a dick in high school. No, not all teachers are saints but I have some sympathy for them too. If this guy created a revenge porn site or a gossip site where other students were being harassed, he wouldn't have had quite as nice a reception here.
gwilkes 11y ago
Loved reading this, I have a very similar story. Same year, 1997, I made a Geocities site and had teacher report cards just like in this story. I put the site up on the library computers home page and then it spread around the school immediately, kids were talking about in the hallways, teachers mentioned in class that they would find who did did it. I also critiqued the school itself, some of the hypocrisies I saw and notably since it was a Catholic school they had a school rule against pornography even when you were at home. So of course I put up a very soft core nude photo as a sort of fuck you. However, unlike this story I actually was expelled, but it's not very difficult to get expelled from a Catholic school, it was a regular occurrence at our school. Knowing this I kept it very anonymous and didn't tell anyone. I got an email from the school saying they would sue me for libel unless I came and turned myself in. That made me pretty nervous and pretty soon after that a student who I knew emailed me saying he loved the site and wanted to help. I then told him who I was and it turns out it was actually a teacher impersonating a student. My brother and I were both expelled, my brother didn't do anything but contribute a few of the teacher reviews, so it sucked pretty bad for him. For me too of course but I was kicked out halfway through my senior year so I was mostly done with high school anyway. Plus I had already applied to colleges so it the expulsion didn't show up on any transcript the colleges received. My brother wasn't so lucky since he was only a sophomore when this happened, when it came time to apply for college he got accepted to none of the colleges he applied for. He appealed hard and finally got into one.
- azraomega 11y ago
  Did you ever find out how they targeted you at the first place?
  - gwilkes 11y ago
    Oh, I had an anonymous email account listed on the website so people could leave feedback or submit additional teacher reviews. So, they didn't know who I was but they could contact me. I fucked up by outing myself to the teacher impersonating a student, but with a legal threat I guess it could have turned out even worse if I didn't out myself. Huge drama at the time, my parents were pretty religious so they actually took the values of the school seriously and were so upset that they told me they wouldn't let me go to college. That was a pretty easy fight to win though as there is no way they could have stopped me.
nadams 11y ago
> Our plan was to surreptitiously allow our fellow students to grade and leave anonymous comments about their teachers, which we would collect and publish. So... ratemyprofessors.com ?
calgoo 11y ago
This reminds me of when i installed key-loggers on all the library computers at school :) Got a lot of interesting info during those weeks. Then my idiot-friend logs into a teachers email account using credentials we found and sends a recommendation to some university for himself... He got expelled, i explained exactly how the key loggers worked etc, and was tasked with 40hours of computer support as a "penance". I just skipped all my classes and completed the "penance" it in less then a week lol. Sometimes i miss those days :)
- calgoo 11y ago
  Forgot to mention that i was the unofficial network and system admin for the school since i was about 14. I had access to everything except an old 286 with green/black screen that they used for grades. I still wonder if they kept it on that system because of me. I know they upgraded it 1.5 years after i graduated.
greggman 11y ago
my self and 4 of my friends got banned from using the computers at our school for ~5 weeks. We were the geeks in the computer class. Showing my age, but the class had 12 Apple IIs and a networked Corvus hard drive connecting them all for storage. The system had accounts. Each student got some space on the shared hard drive to save their work and could not access each other's storage areas. The teacher of course could access everything and used it to read students' programs for grading. One time the teacher had logged in and then stepped away to deal with something or a student. One of my friends took that opportunity to do a binary save of a large chunk of memory on that machine, the part where OS/state extra was. Turned out if you loaded that save back into memory you'd become the teacher. He gave us all copies of the file. We never used it for any kind of mischief but a few days later the teacher noticed one of us doing something we shouldn't have been able to do. The teacher wrote our parents letters and said we were banned from using the computers till the end of the quarter. IIRC only one set of parents were actually upset. I think the rest were actually kind of proud. It didn't affect our grades. We also liked the teacher. I just thought it was his way of appropriately punishing us to make it clear even though you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should.
sarreph 11y ago
Like many commenters, this post brings back memories of similar experiences... My experience with being silly on school computers was mainly in middle school (age 14) where friends and I would find more inventive ways to wreak havoc on the network. One of the favourite tricks was to hack open the command line (using accessibility options in XP) and remote shutdown other student's machines towards the end of a lesson before they'd saved their work... rather cruel to think back to it now. Another more daring guy sent a string of offensive messages to the principal on a LAN-chat type application that caused pop-ups on the receiver's screen. Come to think of it, there were so many 3rd-party administrative 'tools' that could be run trivially without root access on XP, such as drive-encryptors (rendering machines essentially useless) that it was easy to perform a whole manner of tricks. Personally, I was only called into the deputy's office once, regarding a server-wide DOOM game installation. They confiscated my memory stick due to it holding the DOOM installation files. However, I somehow managed to get it back the next day without them checking it; thankfully they didn't, because there were so many 3rd-party executables and 'network guides' on there it would've been far worse. I can relate to the stress the author felt in that sense, because going home that night knowing they had my memory stick was one of the most gut-wrenching feelings of my teenage years. Thankfully, all that was required of me was a meeting with a sysadmin trying to explain why I had filled an obscure part of the server's shared area with DOOM and COD sprites...
donatj 11y ago
Haha, this brings back memories. Starting in Jr. High some friends and I ran a website which started out as just some crudely drawn absurd comics, but later added a section called "Anarchist Times" where we would vent mostly about school in a news-article-esq manner, but also often politics which looking back we knew nothing about. We would let anyone who wanted to write and At its height we had something like 14 kids regularly providing content. A reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and acted like a prince. To my knowledge no one ever got in trouble, we did however get blocked by the schools IT department whom I went to and protested until it was resolved. There was also some hijynx when we tried to enter the website for class president and were told a website wasn't eligible, so we ran a write in campaign and plastered the school in posters, which the school promptly took down. This was how I learned PHP and MySQL, which has made me my living the last 10 years! After high school it fell largely into disuse, but I have paid for the domain every year since then. I've ported it from host to host, and it still lives on my Nginx digital ocean server. Even done a few small upgrades like making the audio of our band "The Medium" playable through the site (html5). Lol, it's at the poorly chosen http://oasisband.net http://oasisband.net if anyone was curious. A few people have asked me to change their names which I have obliged. People say some stupid things in highschool, I know I did.
- eastWestMath 11y ago
  >A reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and acted like a prince. Err, cyber bullying?
  - bru_ 11y ago
    It's not just regular bullying... cue ignorant middle aged schoolteacher gasp chorus IT'S CYBER BULLYING!!! cyborg bursts through the wall and grabs nerd by the collar
    - dang 11y ago
      Please don't do this here.
  - 11y ago
codingdave 11y ago
I'm sure the underlying story is true, and the author's core point of freedoms of speech and the poor handling of the situation are true... but this sounds like it was written at the time of the incidents, by the same teenager, and not by an adult reflecting back on it.
logicallee 11y ago
What the hell is this guy doing as a coder - he should be running a media empire by now! Everything he reported doing in high school is fantastic grassroots marketing and PR, and the content he created was great even back then. The teacher review is one of the best ideas, ever. He got everything down - content, distribution - even on slips of paper - the works. This is exactly what you read in a media billionaire's bio: expelled from a prestigious high school for running an underground school newspaper, which printed students' uncensored teacher reviews. Oh yes. More recently - even our HN title is clickbait! Yet his write-up is fantastic, 100% true and a great read! This guy knows how to press people's buttons. And remember, he got free hosting because some guy thought his writing was so hilarious. OP, get into media, stat. Oh, and OP? You are hilarious. No rose-tinted glasses about it.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  The author clearly writes: "I was a pretty stereotypical “nerd” in high school. A debilitatingly shy and socially awkward computer club member who spent the vast majority of his time on the internet and listened exclusively to music by “Weird Al” Yankovic.".
  - logicallee 11y ago
    could you elaborate on what you meant by that?
    - wolfgke 11y ago
      I can imagine several scenarios: * Being very introverted he hates doing the "people stuff" that is necessary to run a media empire * While he is good at PR, he loves computer programming more * He did PR in a way that worked quite well at a high school, but doing it professionally requires different/additional skills (say, people skills) * While he has all the necessary competencies to run a media empire in principle, our society has some strong expectations how such people have to be (say, more extroverted, less nerdy). * He has a very anarchistic way to run PR, which succeeded in its own way at the high school (see article), but does not work in a professional environment, where a different style is excepted, where he's not good at.
coldcode 11y ago
I remember when I was on the school newspaper my junior year (long time ago, before the internet) we all decided to put a fake ad on the back cover of the newspaper just for fun. It was a picture of a girl in a bikini with a headline about her boyfriend loves her because she knows Calculus (or something I forget exactly). Students of course thought it was hilarious, the school did not, and actually fired the journalism teacher (who was female). The next year we were basically locked down and could do nothing without prescreening. Thankfully my family moved a few weeks into the year and I didn't have to deal with it much.
J_Darnley 11y ago
JS;DR Why does this POS website have an "opacity: 0:" style? What an idiotic feature.
- dang 11y ago
  This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please (re-)read them and follow them when posting to this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - J_Darnley 11y ago
    > Be civil. ... Avoid gratuitous negativity. Fair enough. I will avoid the gratuitous negativity.
    - dang 11y ago
      Thank you.
michaelmior 11y ago
My messing around in high school was comparably minor. Our network ran Novell NetWare and I managed to discover that there was an unsecured Website that had a number of interest. Most of them were read-only with pretty boring info. However, there was also a messaging function that allowed you to send messages to any machine on the network that would appear as a popup. A couple friends and I messed around a little and I promptly forgot about it. Turns out someone else had found out about this and decided to make use of the much more dangerous broadcast functionality. I can't remember the message that was sent, but I believe it involved some profanities against our principal. Of course they didn't think such a message could be tracked but it was. I think this person was only suspended for a few days, but the admin learned his lesson and secured things after that.
edem 11y ago
I really liked your article and it made me remember that no matter what someone (an authority figure in your case) says, there is always a way.
ejk314 11y ago
Ah, the good old days. I remember in middle school when I'd set up my first webpage. I got my first and only in-school-suspension for going to that site during class. Just going to the website. I just wanted to see if it was up, since I had never accessed it from anywhere but home. My teacher's explanation was "It could have been anything! You can't go to websites I don't approve of!" Now, this would normally have been something trivial I would have just shrugged off. But my computer partner also got in trouble for "not stopping me". What was he going to do, knock me out of my chair before I pressed enter? This kid was the stereotypical teacher's pet who always did his homework and was quiet in class, so I felt particularly bad for getting him in trouble. I even offered to serve two days of ISS instead of him getting in trouble - of course that request was denied. To this day, I still cannot understand that woman's reasoning. How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment? What kind of person feels the need to punish a child who's showing enthusiasm for a subject they're teaching?
- jimmaswell 11y ago
  The kind of person who got that job simply to be able to enforce arbitrary rules on victims who can't fight back, to feel more powerful.
- wyager 11y ago
  >How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment? Unfortunately, this kind of thing pops up in the real world a lot as well too. "You're riding a bicycle after drinking a few beers? You could have crashed into someone! DUI felony charge for you!"
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    Driving under the influence is categorically different. You are a real danger to others and can maim or kill them. How is that even remotely comparable to navigating to a personal website in class?
    - lmartel 11y ago
suspthrowaway 11y ago
Ah, school. I was suspended three times for various failure to comply with authority, got straight As anyway. College, high-paying tech job, no problems :).
superkuh 11y ago
Your website now doesn't render text unless javascript is enabled. This is bad design. Stop it.
atiti 11y ago
I also had a similar story. It was also early 2000s and our high school had a calendar system for each student so they could look up in which room they would have what class. So a friend of mine and I have setup a proxy server which would modify rooms randomly, or randomly cancel classes. In order to "test out" our code, we ARP+DNS spoofed the the whole school network, so anyone visiting the site internally would end up on our site. Most students thought it was super fun that their classes were "cancelled" but obviously teachers didn't approve :-) It was also a couple of months away from our graduation, and we did get into pretty big trouble, where we got suspended, and had to write a letter of apology to the principal so they would allow us to graduate.
andy_ppp 11y ago
You have to say these sort of anonymous reviews should be formalised and teachers questioned if their class think they are bad at their jobs. Or hungover in class. Of course, I also think teachers should be the highest paid people in society (when I'm king), so take what I say with a pinch of salt.
- iolothebard 11y ago
  Highest paid is fine, but accountability is equally important.
chuckgreenman 11y ago
It's funny to think that there is a website devoted to the report card feature of your newsletter. Rate My Professor, while kind of despised, its existence is tolerated.
- learnstats2 11y ago
  When Rate My Teachers first came out, teachers were annoyed by bad reviews and sometimes frightened of the consequences. Now - it's tolerated, in my opinion, because students on there are a lot nicer than you might expect them to be. I'd be curious to know what, if anything, has changed over that time.
  - comrh 11y ago
    I had a college professor specifically mention he would love if everyone went on and gave him honest reviews because he was able to get them immediately after the class ended (the feedback cards via the university were 2-3 months behind the semester).
    - mikekchar 11y ago
      In my high school classes, I used to always give a handout (I have killed so many trees... :-P) I often included a short survey that the students could fill out in a minute or two at the end of class. It was a checkbox affair to keep things as anonymous as possible (although some students occasionally wrote comments which I appreciated). I found it unbelievably useful in improving the classes. Of course, it's hard to get information on how the students are personally relating to you. I also would have welcomed a way to get feedback without invoking a confrontation. Elsewhere in this thread I describe how it is inevitable that some students will come to hate you (either by mistakes on your part, or because of problems that the student is having personally). You have to accept that it is part of the job, but I would have welcomed some way to see if there are any common threads that I could work on. Of course, just like any profession, some teachers can't deal with criticism. Just look at programmers. Tell Joe Blow that his design could use improvement and instantly they turn off. Some will take it as a cue that they need to submarine you politically so that you aren't a threat to their job. :-P
xena 11y ago
I nearly got expelled for learning how to use their copy of Macromedia Flash 8 for making games.
autotune 11y ago
This reminds me of the time I attempted to use an article from The Onion as part of current events assignment back in high school. Of course it just resulted in a fail and was nowhere near taken out of proportion as OPs stunt but taught me that certain people just can't appreciate humor.
jbapple 11y ago
IANAL, but near as I can tell, it's still up in the air if (in the US) students have a constitutional right to be free of official retribution for off-campus speech. There is some evidence that if the speech is truly off-campus and if it doesn't cause a substantial disruption to school functions (see Tinker v. Des Moines), students are protected. Even the famous Supreme Court "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" case was partially decided based on the speech being at a school-related event. On the other hand, "disruption" is defined rather loosely sometimes, perhaps even lowering the bar to content that is viral, as long as it is also insulting. See, for instance, SJW v. Lee's Summit.
hellbanner 11y ago
Really interesting how lack of anonymous hosting prevented the student's public critique of their teachers. Related: http://voidnull.sdf.org/ http://voidnull.sdf.org/ (unafilliated)
- ambicapter 11y ago
  I would hardly call it 'critique', it was just straight up gossip.
gayprogrammer 11y ago
My highschool brought me in to a meeting with the principal and police officer when I wrote the name of my boyfriend on my ticket to senior prom. They "convinced" me that I could not go to prom with a guy. End of story.
- bru_ 11y ago
  I love how the police officer was deemed necessary
gayprogrammer 11y ago
My highschool brought me in to a meeting with the principal and police officer when I wrote the name of my boyfriend on my ticket to senior prom. They "convinced" me that I could not go to prom with a guy. End of story.
gayprogrammer 11y ago
My highschool brought me in to a meeting with the principal and police officer when I wrote the name of my boyfriend on my ticket to senior prom. They "convinced" me that I could not go to prom with a guy. End of story.
gayprogrammer 11y ago
My highschool brought me in to a meeting with the principal and police officer when I wrote the name of my boyfriend on my ticket to senior prom. They "convinced" me that I could not go to prom with a guy. End of story.
gravypod 11y ago
I was taken to the principles office after they found out I had access to the camera systems of the schools. I used it all the time to look for friends and check the lines for some bathrooms.
learnstats2 11y ago
The initial reaction of the head of English was what surprised me the most in this article. Shouldn't the English department be happy that their students have understood satire and 1984, without taking a personal grudge? Glad it worked out well.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  People are people. I worked for 20 years as a programmer and then, for a variety of reason, decided to move to Japan and teach English in a high school (originally for only one year, but loved it so much that I stayed for 5). Several things surprised me. I think the biggest was that being a good teacher is much harder and requires more talent (and good judgement!!!) than programming. Sure, there is never a time as a teacher that you have to concentrate the way you do as a programmer. However, the decisions you have to make, under intense pressure, are very, very difficult. The consequences can also be severe if you get it wrong. Students usually ("usually" is a vast understatement) do not see the big picture. Often they feel they are being picked on, or unfairly treated, when in actuality they are being lovingly treated by a teacher who is trying to help them. Teachers take enormous abuse every day. It was a surprise for me to have students actually hate me (for years!!!) because I wouldn't let them rampage through the class, ruining things for other students. And like I said, you are doing your absolute best, but because the student can't differentiate between behaviour that works well for the group and behaviour that doesn't, they can resent your interference. And they convince all their friends to do so as well. One small discipline issue in a class can result in 10s of people literally hating you for years (or even for ever!) And teachers make mistakes. The job is really, really, really difficult, so you are bound to make a ton of mistakes (especially when you first start out). I made a point of apologising for my mistakes (sometimes publicly), because I believe strongly that improvement starts with the ability to acknowledge failure and I wanted the students to gain the courage to admit failure. Some students respected this. Some students despised me for it. One student in particular was so offended that I had given up the teacher-like air of infallibility that he completely lost all respect for me. I was stubborn and decided that the student was entitled to his opinions, so I took his (very unfair) criticism without comment. My colleagues were not so tolerant and took the student aside (for several hours) to explain the hurt he was causing. In the end, that discussion with the student helped him a lot and he did much better in school after that. As a teacher, you are used to this kind of thing. It is an every day occurrence. Students irrationally (and occasionally rationally) flip between loving you and hating you. You make mistakes and have to just swallow the consequence that probably a group of students will hate you forever because of it. You just try to do better the next time (knowing that given the complexity of the decisions there is a good chance you are going to fuck it up again a few times before you get it right). Occasionally students are cruel (whether knowingly or unknowingly). One of your jobs as a teacher is to help the student know that there are real people, with real feelings on the other end. It is a difficult lesson for both parties. If you fail to communicate this (as I did with that one student) they may go through life thinking that other people's feelings are not relevant to their own internal sense of justice. As a teacher you would be very irresponsible to allow that to happen. It's a difficult job.... I'm back in the same area of Japan as I was when I was teaching. I'm doing contract programming now, though. One of the things that makes me very happy is meeting my former students on the street, or at a bar. They often call me over and chat with me. It reminds me why I loved that job.
nickysielicki 11y ago
In highschool I made a website (in like 50 lines of web.py, easily the best framework for small sites) with the twitter API that allowed students to post anonymously to an account I ran. It was before YikYak came out, and I'm not mature enough yet to not admit that it was a LOT of fun. ~400 followers (from a school of ~1100). There was admittedly a lot of cyberbullying, but I got the feeling it was mostly friends making fun of friends and nothing was too nasty. It was more along the lines of teasing each other with embarrassing inside jokes than anything, and I made a strict rule that anyone would be banned if they used anyone's real name so none of this would ever come back and prevent someone from getting into school or getting a job. It was like 4 months before graduation and my favorite teacher asked me to take it down, so obviously I did. Friends were upset with me, but ultimately we had our fun and I was happy to put it behind. To relate this to the HN crowd, I have to say that I think YikYak sucks for an anonymous platform. YikYak is so dumb because it's college kids posting either unoriginal jokes or things about buildings on their campus. The YikYak killer is the YikYak that is only somewhat anonymous. The YikYak where you interact with your friends anonymously, not anonymously with strangers nearby you and your city of 40k people.
msie 11y ago
Ah, young people. You can't equate students rating teachers to teachers grading students. Unless teachers are allowed to say things about students like: "She was a total bitch".
- goodcanadian 11y ago
  I am sure they do say such things in the teacher's lounge. The difference, of course, is that they are not doing it in public.
  - msie 11y ago
    Exactly!
peterwwillis 11y ago
I got expelled from several schools for the crime of knowing more about computers than the teachers, having an interest in computer security, and having a website. I was also used as a scapegoat by a network admin who couldn't fix his networking issues. After the first school, every other school assumed i was some kind of dangerous delinquent. It's part of what prompted me to drop out.
imaginenore 11y ago
It's sad that the same organization is the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Even for the appeal process. A shitty system.
Scea91 11y ago
I have to say that it was perfetly written. I was hooked.
loup-vaillant 11y ago
Be sure to read the comment below about how another student got into similar trouble for messing up with the school's unsecured network, but was able to blackmail his way out. (The school had committed insurance fraud.) Funny how people change their attitude the second they realise they do not have the upper hand after all.
kaonashi 11y ago
Could've been me if my HS administrators had a lick of savvy.
Kenji 11y ago
In junior high I invented my own currency–I printed an initial run of “Daddio-Dollars” on my computer which I handed out to kids at school, then sold candy and some of my brothers toys to them. Once I had fostered enough confidence in the purchasing power of my homemade money, I printed up a ton of it and used it to buy all kinds of sweet stuff from the other kids. Wow, the man invented central banking independently.
codewithcheese 11y ago
Wow schools stray so far from actual education. To punish kids with the threat of lack of education for airing their opinion on their own education experience is so strange to me. It seems more like some sort of totalitarian experiment than education.
neonbat 11y ago
I find it immensely entertaining that Rudis created his own federal reserve inside his school and immediately abused the monetary system to "buy all kinds of sweet stuff." You should have gone into politics @Rudism. You would fit right in.
bru_ 11y ago
I can relate to this story. One of my funniest memories was when my 7th grade teacher reprimanded me for "putting a password" on my website. She was referring to the username and password fields in the sidebar. I told her everything on the site was visible without a user account, but I guess she didn't believe me, because she made one that night. Of course she didn't find anything. The best part was she filled out her whole profile, including a picture of herself, her interests "knitting, helping children", etc, just so she could have a chance at discovering an imaginary section of the site where everyone at my school was lambasting her.
Animats 11y ago
The most famous incident like this is "neverseconds".[1] This is the blog of a primary school girl in Scotland who, each day, took a picture of her school lunch and reviewed it. The school authorities threatened her and insisted she stop. That backfired on them, badly. Coverage on TechDirt. Coverage on the BBC. Worldwide press coverage. 10 million page views of blog. Complaints in Parliament. School authorities disciplined by national education minister. Public apology by town council. Girl wins several awards for fighting censorship. Her blog is still active, three years later. She encourages other kids to send in pictures of their school lunches, and it's a great site for seeing what kids have for lunch around the world. [1] http://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/06/goodbye.html http://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/06/goodbye.html
- comrh 11y ago
  That's crazy. She's just documenting her reality. I'm glad she "won" in the end.
- userbinator 11y ago
  My first thought was "school food is under NDA now"? That is indeed quite ridiculous.
ggreer 11y ago
I wish the post had gone into more detail about how the author was caught. Did another student rat him out? Was there some forensic evidence he didn't consider? I did much worse at my high school, but I was never caught. Chalk it up to trustworthy friends, knowledge of computer forensics, and a little luck. Even if I had been caught, I doubt there would have been any real consequences. A suspension? It's going on my Permanent Record? Pfft, who cares? If there's one piece of advice I can impart to students, it's this: Don't worry about getting into trouble. Unless you're committing an actual crime, the consequences are entirely forgettable. Even in the author's case, a clear and disproportionate overreaction, he's glad to have had the experience. So don't be cowed. Have fun.
- Rudism 11y ago
  I never really found out how they caught me. I suspect the guy in the states who started hosting the site after the initial shut-down told them my name when they contacted him, but who knows.
bru_ 11y ago
I am jelly of some of my friends who got really good at programming in high school. One dude managed to replace the keyboard drivers for every keyboard on the entire network with garbage, so that if they plugged in another keyboard, it still wouldn't work. He also gave his English teacher a "wacky mouse", where she would be presenting something and at some random time her cursor switched and behaved as if attached on the end of a spring. She would often inspect the underside of the mouse in response to this problem.
deleted 11y ago
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mud_dauber 11y ago
I can see the same exact story playing out on Glassdoor. It's going to happen.
geon 11y ago
I have read several stories like this from the US. It baffles me how many Americans seems to think their country is the bastion of freedom of speech. Having it in your constitution apparently doesn't mean shit.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- harmegido 11y ago
  You don't get these freedoms as a student. Or at least, the school is free to discipline you (or kick you out) however they see fit for basically whatever reason. You'll notice that there was no mention of police in the article. Our freedoms exist only in respect to the law. I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to.
  - sound_of_basker 11y ago
    The USA identifies ISIS/ISIL as a terrorist group [0]. There is a good chance that you will at-least be detained for questioning if you carry out said activity. [0] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/06/remarks-president-progress-fight-against-isil https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/06/remar...
  - jqm 11y ago
    "I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to." Oh, there will be repercussions. You just won't know about them right away. Repercussion #1. You will be on a list. Have fun flying or leaving the country any time soon. You might eventually do it, but it won't be fun. Immediate repercussions are almost preferable.
  - geon 11y ago
    > You don't get these freedoms as a student. Exactly. As soon as money enters the picture, all civil liberties tends to be thrown out. Yet, students should IMHO be encouraged to exercise their freedom of speech and assembly. How do you teach a society democracy if not through activities like this? And this is reflected in the low voter turnout. > I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to. Using this as an example of "strong" freedom is so sad. Really. That should be a basic requirement for any civilized society. Yet, as another poster mentioned, it's probably not even true.
dblock 11y ago
Awesome story! In college we ran a website called "The No More Bzzz Bzzz Hun Hun" about the professors at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. It was hosted in Sweden with X-Force (mrsaint.net), a pirate group. Similar idea, but you could vote for the most boring teachers (bzzz bzzz is the noise that a fly makes in a boring classroom and hun hun is something to do with "fly f---ing", a term in French that means saying things that are boring and useless). You can see its remnants in http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz. They never found us, but I was definitely scared about getting expelled from college at some point. Unfortunately I no longer have the poll data :( http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html is priceless.
elwell 11y ago
In high school, I made a WScript that prompted user "Network timed out on line #6. Please re-enter password:" and would surreptitiously record it. I put this on a floppy, popped it in when someone in the library went to the printer, waited, came back and said, "sorry forgot my floppy; can i get it, excuse me". Didn't use it maliciously; usually would just modify the folder settings on their home drive on the network to have repeating images of Pokemon as a background image. I suppose this all sounds quite devious in writing.
elwell 11y ago
I almost got suspended in high school for making a "virus" (just an .html page with some js to open itself recursively in a new window).
roflchoppa 11y ago
one of the only times i got in trouble at school was talking openly about potassium nitrate in my math class, and how to make explosives out of it. I completely understand why i was sent to the VP's office. Oh and that other time i was burning leaves with a mag. glass.
fspacef 11y ago
Kudos to that Dad for not over reacting during all of the drama and supporting his kid
deleted 11y ago
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smrtinsert 11y ago
This is another good example of the complete and pervasive misunderstanding of what free speech is. Unfortunately law, ethics and morality cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker. Churchill high school kids come from one of the richest school districts in the country practically defining the term 'privileged'. He undoubtedly could have found a more productive and healthier hobby.

639 points by Rudism 11y ago

Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants. I'm lucky I was not more harmed by the sadist VP that ran my middle school.

proveanegative 11y ago
I think it is only a matter of time until MOOCs start eating into high school and even middle school-level education. Considering that many adults do not remember their high school experience fondly it will be a welcome alternative.
- pistle 11y ago
  Snake oil salespeople jumped into moocs and have pushed their ascendancy back by years. They, presently-generally work great for a specific set of people, but don't yield sufficiently effective results for broad groups. Check out the research thus far. It's not as engaging and lacks the habit-forming that drives people to complete and compete for high marks in areas which aren't in alignment with the interests of the student. For mature learners focusing on a topic of interest, great. For young learners build a general foundation, not so much. Now, it's a different conversation to cover curriculum, but that's not of MOOC's concern. And, to wit, "adults not recollecting fond experiences" is double-edged. There are few other times in people's lives where they are essentially forced to rub shoulders with such a cross-section of their culture. These experiences do afford experience in cross-pollination which have positive benefits as much as they cause angst for participants. If parents are able to shield their kids from "others" a certain solipsism is a consequence. During formative years, there is a value to broad cultural experience that should be balanced with providing a safe and nurturing environment for the primary task of learning.
  - firebones 11y ago
    How would one go about designing a "how to learn mooc"? I'm serious. If you think about it, a lot of why employers require college degrees is that it vets many life skills around being organized and having it together enough to earn a degree. Factor that out and you have MOOCs for the knowledge * the life skills. So the life skills themselves (such as meeting deadlines, working in groups, showing up on time regularly, learning how to learn, etc.) would have to become some hybrid of MOOC for study habits and a long-running college-experience LARP for the social interaction.
    - pistle 11y ago
      Good point on personal management being something employers value generically by someone completing a degree. Then again, I also know enough people who don't have all that together even with a degree. If the question is more along the lines of how can a MOOC be part of the effective development of a desirable, hire-able person, then this is a big discussion. There are all sorts of areas needing review. What's a cost-optimized way to get to a balanced personal portfolio that looks good on paper (resume)? Do resumes matter when performance can speak volumes (your github repo, your stack-exchange + hacker news profile, your start-up you did in high school? Beyond that, are those things true indicators of appeal for hiring HR/recruiters, managers, peers during interviews? Is all of this actually helpful in estimating the likelihood of positive performance? It's all very hazy. Each thing bodes well, in ways, for the total, but most people are flawed, to some degree, if measured by other people. Myers-Briggs type personality profiling is rough pigeon-holing, but there is an underlying truth somewhere that different people will just resonate or "dissonate" with each other. Maybe one of the most effective things a person can develop, beyond their fundamental knowledge and technical acumen, is the ability to empathize with other people; to be able to bridge those personality divides. That brings me back to how there are few better environments, potentially, to get hands-on experience in navigating personality and culture difference than well-integrated schools.
- prodmerc 11y ago
  I gotta say that EdX and Coursera are amazing - so many things to learn (often for free, but even the paid courses are relatively cheap). Stuff that is better than what our best schools/colleges/unis provide. I'm really grateful for what they're doing.
masklinn 11y ago
> Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants. If you think that's only public school you're deluding yourself. My secondary education was in private schools (in the US sense of the word) and I have no issue whatsoever seeing this scenario unroll there (I can even cast the parts). Petty tyrants is what you get when petty people get access to any sort of power to lord over others, the exact nature of that power has little relevance. The concentration of petty tyrants is only a function of how easy it is to be granted power by the environment.
- spacemanmatt 11y ago
  If I thought it was only public schools I would have said only public schools.
  - cma 11y ago
    When you add artificial specificity, people assume you did so for a reason. Like if you say "women are [X descriptive property]" people will assume, rightfully, an implied "women, as opposed to men, are ..." And of course when I say "when you add artificial specitivity," there is an implied "when you, or anyone else, adds artificial specitivity," totally contradicting the rule. This is English, not Aristotelian logic.
    - spacemanmatt 11y ago
      picky, picky
- underpantsgnome 11y ago
  Maybe spacemanmatt didn't want to disparage institutions he had no experience with.
- tsotha 11y ago
  The difference with private schools is the parents have a lot more clout, since they're paying the bills.
weisser 11y ago
> Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants This American Life devoted an entire episode to covering one of them... http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/419/petty-tyrant http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/419/p...
- gkop 11y ago
  That guy was a major tyrant, I mean he got decades in prison for his behavior, after all.

iopuy 11y ago

I don't know if it was the dialogue coming from the teachers or glazing over the content of the newsletter, but I am highly skeptical of this article. I've never heard teachers talk to students or each other how this is written. 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity, turns out Geocities has been around since 1994 but I can't recall a single instance of sites being shutdown for this sort of thing in or around 1997. In 1997 many people were still asking "What is the internet exactly?" Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity? Why did he even has this information? It is technically feasible for this to have happened, I'm just saying I have my doubts.

jjoonathan 11y ago
The dialogue from the teachers is precisely in line with what I experienced in gradeschool. I'm sure you can find dozens of others to corroborate: there's something about school administration that seems to attract (or create?) petty authoritarians who convince themselves that any slight against their person is an egregious crime in and of itself. > 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity It wasn't. > Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity? Could have been the teacher saw his reaction, overheard rumors, or asked/coerced the information from other students.
Terretta 11y ago
This happened all the time, all over the US. Felt like authoritarian heavy handed red-faced response to early anonymous publishing of tracts and pamphlets, all over again. Good read starting with the 1500s here: THE IDEA OF A FREE PRESS: THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS UNRULY LEGACY — http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/org.oclc.lac.ui.DialABookServlet?oclcnum=63277699 http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/org.oclc.lac.ui.DialABo... I was part of an early ISP (1993 - 1997). There was this kind of "insolent" free speech vs. fumbling authoritarian quashing all the time. Our ISP policy: Don't like what you have to say, but will defend your right to say it. And we, not teens but in our twenties, thought this new power for the individual voices was indeed "hilarious" — and awesome. I often miss the truly self-published pre-ad-driven ecosystem days of $19/month for a dial up modem and your own web site. // As it happens, in addition to offering both web hosting and shell, I also invented dynamic DNS, with connection event driven mapping from Portmasters to a custom DNS host, to point your username.isp.com to your own dynamic dialup IP address so you could host whatever website you wanted on your own box, not ours.

rjknight 11y ago

I must be about the same age as the author. This certainly brings back memories! Oh for the days when we could just uncomplicatedly assume that anyone who knew anything about technology was also an instinctive anti-authoritarian, too.

TheLoneWolfling 11y ago

Some sites require JS because they do weird things like rendering stuff clientside. This site "requires" JS because... The opacity of the article is set to 0? Everything's there, everything's rendered, but they have a CSS rule (".use-motion .post { opacity: 0; }"). Only thing I can think of is that they do a JS fade-in or something and missed the unintended consequences. (Speaking of which... Doesn't Google penalize sites that have an excessive number of hidden keywords? I wonder if the entire article being hidden qualifies...)

johnchristopher 11y ago
When I alt tabbed to the site there was a slow fade-in on the menu.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  Sidestepping the question of if that actually adds anything to the article - they couldn't be bothered to do the fade-in correctly?
RGamma 11y ago
I find a good way to unfuck those sites is to use something like uMatrix or Web Developer to disable CSS (in uMatrix's case it can't disable inline CSS and needs a page reload, but of course it does a ton of other things and this probably isn't an as important use-case). Also works well when text doesn't properly wrap when the browser window is narrow or when broken menus and bars obscure the content, etc.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  I find it rather... ironic, shall I say, when CSS actively hurts the readability of a site. This being one of those cases.
  - lemiffe 11y ago
    In what way? I find this website perfectly readable, and the font size and line height were appropriate enough.

Ambroos 11y ago

I was almost suspended at school eight years ago for using `net send` from .bat files and because I had Everest portable on my network drive (a tool that lists system specs, I was curious what hardware the PC's had). The guy that managed the network at the time was almost personally offended and accused me of 'hacking' the network with dangerous tools. He got the school board involved, my parents had to go talk to the headmaster. My parents and I had to sign a contract which said that any other 'unauthorised' use of the school network would get me suspended for 3 days. If you have one bitter person working somewhere and nobody knows enough about something to stop them, you can get these power-mad types. Probably happens a lot at schools with just one network administrator.

verbin217 11y ago
The degree to which kids get fucked with before they're even allowed to enter society necessitates people like that exist. Working at a school isn't exactly esteemed. You were both smart enough to see through the situation and to... Not work at a school. We just keep putting the wrong people in the right place to exacerbate a negative feedback loop.
kall 11y ago
We had a lot of fun with net send at my all laptop school. IIRC there was even a shared address book file with everyone's hostname. It didn't bother the admins, but understandably the teachers.
petercooper 11y ago
Haha, I did the same thing (with net send, which I'd forgotten all about till you said it) when our school got its first network - around 98 or so. I rigged up a QBasic program to use net send to create a school wide chatroom of sorts (I think I used it to sync a filename on a network share rather than send the actual chat though). Never got caught but they managed to disable the functionality and that was that. It's ridiculous how mad they all got about it though.
- mondoshawan 11y ago
  Chandler, perhaps? I attended a junior high school there which had this rickety chat system that functioned exactly like that. It was kinda functioning when I got there, but I took the app home and hacked it up considerably to be more stable, more colors for text, etc. Ended up leaving the updated source on the machines one day before I left the school for high school. Quite fun days, indeed.

beerbajay 11y ago

I had a really similar experience when I was in high school, though I didn't get expelled. I made a website with photos of students (and their first names) giving the finger to the camera. People of course set this as the home page on library computers. Unhappily, this was right after Columbine, so the administration was super paranoid and I was a little X-Files-obsessed black-trenchcoat-wearing weirdo... so I got a week's suspension.

acjohnson55 11y ago

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%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%2...

microcolonel 11y ago
>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".

edw519 11y ago

Reminds my of the first program I ever wrote, in 10th grade, painstakingly assembled one IBM card at a time, output onto green bar paper. I changed the school motto from "Gateway High School, Hats Off to Thee" to "Gateway High School, Pants Down to Thee" surrounded by an ascii generated toilet. The principal took away half my card deck (which would have taken weeks to reproduce), promising to return them only when my father signed my output. My father reproduced my output by hand with his signature and a label: "Functional Specifications". The principal returned my cards and never said another word.

bru_ 11y ago
Dude you must have gone to an elite high school

hellofunk 11y ago

That sucks that your creative high-school gag was met with such hostility by the administration. I'm three years older than you and did something similar in high-school. A friend and I made a MS Word clone from scratch of the formatted template the school used for report cards. Then we filled it up with teachers' comments and grades for us, but in total sarcasm. It was hilarious. The teachers found out about it, and... they had a good laugh also. No harm done. I guess it just depends on your environment.

wsha 11y ago

Free speech is important but for some reason this story does not make me feel much sympathy for the author. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it seemed like the newsletter was posting borderline defamatory comments anonymously.

rev_bird 11y ago
Says the person with the freedom to publicly disagree with the article behind an anonymous account on a website.
msie 11y ago
Yes. It's sad how so many here romanticize being a dick in high school. No, not all teachers are saints but I have some sympathy for them too. If this guy created a revenge porn site or a gossip site where other students were being harassed, he wouldn't have had quite as nice a reception here.

gwilkes 11y ago

Loved reading this, I have a very similar story. Same year, 1997, I made a Geocities site and had teacher report cards just like in this story. I put the site up on the library computers home page and then it spread around the school immediately, kids were talking about in the hallways, teachers mentioned in class that they would find who did did it. I also critiqued the school itself, some of the hypocrisies I saw and notably since it was a Catholic school they had a school rule against pornography even when you were at home. So of course I put up a very soft core nude photo as a sort of fuck you. However, unlike this story I actually was expelled, but it's not very difficult to get expelled from a Catholic school, it was a regular occurrence at our school. Knowing this I kept it very anonymous and didn't tell anyone. I got an email from the school saying they would sue me for libel unless I came and turned myself in. That made me pretty nervous and pretty soon after that a student who I knew emailed me saying he loved the site and wanted to help. I then told him who I was and it turns out it was actually a teacher impersonating a student. My brother and I were both expelled, my brother didn't do anything but contribute a few of the teacher reviews, so it sucked pretty bad for him. For me too of course but I was kicked out halfway through my senior year so I was mostly done with high school anyway. Plus I had already applied to colleges so it the expulsion didn't show up on any transcript the colleges received. My brother wasn't so lucky since he was only a sophomore when this happened, when it came time to apply for college he got accepted to none of the colleges he applied for. He appealed hard and finally got into one.

azraomega 11y ago
Did you ever find out how they targeted you at the first place?
- gwilkes 11y ago
  Oh, I had an anonymous email account listed on the website so people could leave feedback or submit additional teacher reviews. So, they didn't know who I was but they could contact me. I fucked up by outing myself to the teacher impersonating a student, but with a legal threat I guess it could have turned out even worse if I didn't out myself. Huge drama at the time, my parents were pretty religious so they actually took the values of the school seriously and were so upset that they told me they wouldn't let me go to college. That was a pretty easy fight to win though as there is no way they could have stopped me.

nadams 11y ago

> Our plan was to surreptitiously allow our fellow students to grade and leave anonymous comments about their teachers, which we would collect and publish. So... ratemyprofessors.com ?

calgoo 11y ago

This reminds me of when i installed key-loggers on all the library computers at school :) Got a lot of interesting info during those weeks. Then my idiot-friend logs into a teachers email account using credentials we found and sends a recommendation to some university for himself... He got expelled, i explained exactly how the key loggers worked etc, and was tasked with 40hours of computer support as a "penance". I just skipped all my classes and completed the "penance" it in less then a week lol. Sometimes i miss those days :)

calgoo 11y ago
Forgot to mention that i was the unofficial network and system admin for the school since i was about 14. I had access to everything except an old 286 with green/black screen that they used for grades. I still wonder if they kept it on that system because of me. I know they upgraded it 1.5 years after i graduated.

greggman 11y ago

my self and 4 of my friends got banned from using the computers at our school for ~5 weeks. We were the geeks in the computer class. Showing my age, but the class had 12 Apple IIs and a networked Corvus hard drive connecting them all for storage. The system had accounts. Each student got some space on the shared hard drive to save their work and could not access each other's storage areas. The teacher of course could access everything and used it to read students' programs for grading. One time the teacher had logged in and then stepped away to deal with something or a student. One of my friends took that opportunity to do a binary save of a large chunk of memory on that machine, the part where OS/state extra was. Turned out if you loaded that save back into memory you'd become the teacher. He gave us all copies of the file. We never used it for any kind of mischief but a few days later the teacher noticed one of us doing something we shouldn't have been able to do. The teacher wrote our parents letters and said we were banned from using the computers till the end of the quarter. IIRC only one set of parents were actually upset. I think the rest were actually kind of proud. It didn't affect our grades. We also liked the teacher. I just thought it was his way of appropriately punishing us to make it clear even though you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should.

sarreph 11y ago

Like many commenters, this post brings back memories of similar experiences... My experience with being silly on school computers was mainly in middle school (age 14) where friends and I would find more inventive ways to wreak havoc on the network. One of the favourite tricks was to hack open the command line (using accessibility options in XP) and remote shutdown other student's machines towards the end of a lesson before they'd saved their work... rather cruel to think back to it now. Another more daring guy sent a string of offensive messages to the principal on a LAN-chat type application that caused pop-ups on the receiver's screen. Come to think of it, there were so many 3rd-party administrative 'tools' that could be run trivially without root access on XP, such as drive-encryptors (rendering machines essentially useless) that it was easy to perform a whole manner of tricks. Personally, I was only called into the deputy's office once, regarding a server-wide DOOM game installation. They confiscated my memory stick due to it holding the DOOM installation files. However, I somehow managed to get it back the next day without them checking it; thankfully they didn't, because there were so many 3rd-party executables and 'network guides' on there it would've been far worse. I can relate to the stress the author felt in that sense, because going home that night knowing they had my memory stick was one of the most gut-wrenching feelings of my teenage years. Thankfully, all that was required of me was a meeting with a sysadmin trying to explain why I had filled an obscure part of the server's shared area with DOOM and COD sprites...

donatj 11y ago

Haha, this brings back memories. Starting in Jr. High some friends and I ran a website which started out as just some crudely drawn absurd comics, but later added a section called "Anarchist Times" where we would vent mostly about school in a news-article-esq manner, but also often politics which looking back we knew nothing about. We would let anyone who wanted to write and At its height we had something like 14 kids regularly providing content. A reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and acted like a prince. To my knowledge no one ever got in trouble, we did however get blocked by the schools IT department whom I went to and protested until it was resolved. There was also some hijynx when we tried to enter the website for class president and were told a website wasn't eligible, so we ran a write in campaign and plastered the school in posters, which the school promptly took down. This was how I learned PHP and MySQL, which has made me my living the last 10 years! After high school it fell largely into disuse, but I have paid for the domain every year since then. I've ported it from host to host, and it still lives on my Nginx digital ocean server. Even done a few small upgrades like making the audio of our band "The Medium" playable through the site (html5). Lol, it's at the poorly chosen http://oasisband.net http://oasisband.net if anyone was curious. A few people have asked me to change their names which I have obliged. People say some stupid things in highschool, I know I did.

eastWestMath 11y ago
>A reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and acted like a prince. Err, cyber bullying?
- bru_ 11y ago
  It's not just regular bullying... cue ignorant middle aged schoolteacher gasp chorus IT'S CYBER BULLYING!!! cyborg bursts through the wall and grabs nerd by the collar
  - dang 11y ago
    Please don't do this here.
- 11y ago

codingdave 11y ago

I'm sure the underlying story is true, and the author's core point of freedoms of speech and the poor handling of the situation are true... but this sounds like it was written at the time of the incidents, by the same teenager, and not by an adult reflecting back on it.

logicallee 11y ago

What the hell is this guy doing as a coder - he should be running a media empire by now! Everything he reported doing in high school is fantastic grassroots marketing and PR, and the content he created was great even back then. The teacher review is one of the best ideas, ever. He got everything down - content, distribution - even on slips of paper - the works. This is exactly what you read in a media billionaire's bio: expelled from a prestigious high school for running an underground school newspaper, which printed students' uncensored teacher reviews. Oh yes. More recently - even our HN title is clickbait! Yet his write-up is fantastic, 100% true and a great read! This guy knows how to press people's buttons. And remember, he got free hosting because some guy thought his writing was so hilarious. OP, get into media, stat. Oh, and OP? You are hilarious. No rose-tinted glasses about it.

wolfgke 11y ago
The author clearly writes: "I was a pretty stereotypical “nerd” in high school. A debilitatingly shy and socially awkward computer club member who spent the vast majority of his time on the internet and listened exclusively to music by “Weird Al” Yankovic.".
- logicallee 11y ago
  could you elaborate on what you meant by that?
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    I can imagine several scenarios: * Being very introverted he hates doing the "people stuff" that is necessary to run a media empire * While he is good at PR, he loves computer programming more * He did PR in a way that worked quite well at a high school, but doing it professionally requires different/additional skills (say, people skills) * While he has all the necessary competencies to run a media empire in principle, our society has some strong expectations how such people have to be (say, more extroverted, less nerdy). * He has a very anarchistic way to run PR, which succeeded in its own way at the high school (see article), but does not work in a professional environment, where a different style is excepted, where he's not good at.

coldcode 11y ago

I remember when I was on the school newspaper my junior year (long time ago, before the internet) we all decided to put a fake ad on the back cover of the newspaper just for fun. It was a picture of a girl in a bikini with a headline about her boyfriend loves her because she knows Calculus (or something I forget exactly). Students of course thought it was hilarious, the school did not, and actually fired the journalism teacher (who was female). The next year we were basically locked down and could do nothing without prescreening. Thankfully my family moved a few weeks into the year and I didn't have to deal with it much.

J_Darnley 11y ago

JS;DR Why does this POS website have an "opacity: 0:" style? What an idiotic feature.

dang 11y ago
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please (re-)read them and follow them when posting to this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  > Be civil. ... Avoid gratuitous negativity. Fair enough. I will avoid the gratuitous negativity.
  - dang 11y ago
    Thank you.

michaelmior 11y ago

My messing around in high school was comparably minor. Our network ran Novell NetWare and I managed to discover that there was an unsecured Website that had a number of interest. Most of them were read-only with pretty boring info. However, there was also a messaging function that allowed you to send messages to any machine on the network that would appear as a popup. A couple friends and I messed around a little and I promptly forgot about it. Turns out someone else had found out about this and decided to make use of the much more dangerous broadcast functionality. I can't remember the message that was sent, but I believe it involved some profanities against our principal. Of course they didn't think such a message could be tracked but it was. I think this person was only suspended for a few days, but the admin learned his lesson and secured things after that.

edem 11y ago

I really liked your article and it made me remember that no matter what someone (an authority figure in your case) says, there is always a way.

ejk314 11y ago

Ah, the good old days. I remember in middle school when I'd set up my first webpage. I got my first and only in-school-suspension for going to that site during class. Just going to the website. I just wanted to see if it was up, since I had never accessed it from anywhere but home. My teacher's explanation was "It could have been anything! You can't go to websites I don't approve of!" Now, this would normally have been something trivial I would have just shrugged off. But my computer partner also got in trouble for "not stopping me". What was he going to do, knock me out of my chair before I pressed enter? This kid was the stereotypical teacher's pet who always did his homework and was quiet in class, so I felt particularly bad for getting him in trouble. I even offered to serve two days of ISS instead of him getting in trouble - of course that request was denied. To this day, I still cannot understand that woman's reasoning. How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment? What kind of person feels the need to punish a child who's showing enthusiasm for a subject they're teaching?

jimmaswell 11y ago
The kind of person who got that job simply to be able to enforce arbitrary rules on victims who can't fight back, to feel more powerful.
wyager 11y ago
>How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment? Unfortunately, this kind of thing pops up in the real world a lot as well too. "You're riding a bicycle after drinking a few beers? You could have crashed into someone! DUI felony charge for you!"
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  Driving under the influence is categorically different. You are a real danger to others and can maim or kill them. How is that even remotely comparable to navigating to a personal website in class?
  - lmartel 11y ago

suspthrowaway 11y ago

Ah, school. I was suspended three times for various failure to comply with authority, got straight As anyway. College, high-paying tech job, no problems :).

superkuh 11y ago

Your website now doesn't render text unless javascript is enabled. This is bad design. Stop it.

atiti 11y ago

I also had a similar story. It was also early 2000s and our high school had a calendar system for each student so they could look up in which room they would have what class. So a friend of mine and I have setup a proxy server which would modify rooms randomly, or randomly cancel classes. In order to "test out" our code, we ARP+DNS spoofed the the whole school network, so anyone visiting the site internally would end up on our site. Most students thought it was super fun that their classes were "cancelled" but obviously teachers didn't approve :-) It was also a couple of months away from our graduation, and we did get into pretty big trouble, where we got suspended, and had to write a letter of apology to the principal so they would allow us to graduate.

andy_ppp 11y ago

You have to say these sort of anonymous reviews should be formalised and teachers questioned if their class think they are bad at their jobs. Or hungover in class. Of course, I also think teachers should be the highest paid people in society (when I'm king), so take what I say with a pinch of salt.

iolothebard 11y ago
Highest paid is fine, but accountability is equally important.

chuckgreenman 11y ago

It's funny to think that there is a website devoted to the report card feature of your newsletter. Rate My Professor, while kind of despised, its existence is tolerated.

learnstats2 11y ago
When Rate My Teachers first came out, teachers were annoyed by bad reviews and sometimes frightened of the consequences. Now - it's tolerated, in my opinion, because students on there are a lot nicer than you might expect them to be. I'd be curious to know what, if anything, has changed over that time.
- comrh 11y ago
  I had a college professor specifically mention he would love if everyone went on and gave him honest reviews because he was able to get them immediately after the class ended (the feedback cards via the university were 2-3 months behind the semester).
  - mikekchar 11y ago
    In my high school classes, I used to always give a handout (I have killed so many trees... :-P) I often included a short survey that the students could fill out in a minute or two at the end of class. It was a checkbox affair to keep things as anonymous as possible (although some students occasionally wrote comments which I appreciated). I found it unbelievably useful in improving the classes. Of course, it's hard to get information on how the students are personally relating to you. I also would have welcomed a way to get feedback without invoking a confrontation. Elsewhere in this thread I describe how it is inevitable that some students will come to hate you (either by mistakes on your part, or because of problems that the student is having personally). You have to accept that it is part of the job, but I would have welcomed some way to see if there are any common threads that I could work on. Of course, just like any profession, some teachers can't deal with criticism. Just look at programmers. Tell Joe Blow that his design could use improvement and instantly they turn off. Some will take it as a cue that they need to submarine you politically so that you aren't a threat to their job. :-P

xena 11y ago

I nearly got expelled for learning how to use their copy of Macromedia Flash 8 for making games.

autotune 11y ago

This reminds me of the time I attempted to use an article from The Onion as part of current events assignment back in high school. Of course it just resulted in a fail and was nowhere near taken out of proportion as OPs stunt but taught me that certain people just can't appreciate humor.

jbapple 11y ago

IANAL, but near as I can tell, it's still up in the air if (in the US) students have a constitutional right to be free of official retribution for off-campus speech. There is some evidence that if the speech is truly off-campus and if it doesn't cause a substantial disruption to school functions (see Tinker v. Des Moines), students are protected. Even the famous Supreme Court "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" case was partially decided based on the speech being at a school-related event. On the other hand, "disruption" is defined rather loosely sometimes, perhaps even lowering the bar to content that is viral, as long as it is also insulting. See, for instance, SJW v. Lee's Summit.

hellbanner 11y ago

Really interesting how lack of anonymous hosting prevented the student's public critique of their teachers. Related: http://voidnull.sdf.org/ http://voidnull.sdf.org/ (unafilliated)

ambicapter 11y ago
I would hardly call it 'critique', it was just straight up gossip.

gayprogrammer 11y ago

My highschool brought me in to a meeting with the principal and police officer when I wrote the name of my boyfriend on my ticket to senior prom. They "convinced" me that I could not go to prom with a guy. End of story.

bru_ 11y ago
I love how the police officer was deemed necessary

gayprogrammer 11y ago

gravypod 11y ago

I was taken to the principles office after they found out I had access to the camera systems of the schools. I used it all the time to look for friends and check the lines for some bathrooms.

learnstats2 11y ago

The initial reaction of the head of English was what surprised me the most in this article. Shouldn't the English department be happy that their students have understood satire and 1984, without taking a personal grudge? Glad it worked out well.

mikekchar 11y ago
People are people. I worked for 20 years as a programmer and then, for a variety of reason, decided to move to Japan and teach English in a high school (originally for only one year, but loved it so much that I stayed for 5). Several things surprised me. I think the biggest was that being a good teacher is much harder and requires more talent (and good judgement!!!) than programming. Sure, there is never a time as a teacher that you have to concentrate the way you do as a programmer. However, the decisions you have to make, under intense pressure, are very, very difficult. The consequences can also be severe if you get it wrong. Students usually ("usually" is a vast understatement) do not see the big picture. Often they feel they are being picked on, or unfairly treated, when in actuality they are being lovingly treated by a teacher who is trying to help them. Teachers take enormous abuse every day. It was a surprise for me to have students actually hate me (for years!!!) because I wouldn't let them rampage through the class, ruining things for other students. And like I said, you are doing your absolute best, but because the student can't differentiate between behaviour that works well for the group and behaviour that doesn't, they can resent your interference. And they convince all their friends to do so as well. One small discipline issue in a class can result in 10s of people literally hating you for years (or even for ever!) And teachers make mistakes. The job is really, really, really difficult, so you are bound to make a ton of mistakes (especially when you first start out). I made a point of apologising for my mistakes (sometimes publicly), because I believe strongly that improvement starts with the ability to acknowledge failure and I wanted the students to gain the courage to admit failure. Some students respected this. Some students despised me for it. One student in particular was so offended that I had given up the teacher-like air of infallibility that he completely lost all respect for me. I was stubborn and decided that the student was entitled to his opinions, so I took his (very unfair) criticism without comment. My colleagues were not so tolerant and took the student aside (for several hours) to explain the hurt he was causing. In the end, that discussion with the student helped him a lot and he did much better in school after that. As a teacher, you are used to this kind of thing. It is an every day occurrence. Students irrationally (and occasionally rationally) flip between loving you and hating you. You make mistakes and have to just swallow the consequence that probably a group of students will hate you forever because of it. You just try to do better the next time (knowing that given the complexity of the decisions there is a good chance you are going to fuck it up again a few times before you get it right). Occasionally students are cruel (whether knowingly or unknowingly). One of your jobs as a teacher is to help the student know that there are real people, with real feelings on the other end. It is a difficult lesson for both parties. If you fail to communicate this (as I did with that one student) they may go through life thinking that other people's feelings are not relevant to their own internal sense of justice. As a teacher you would be very irresponsible to allow that to happen. It's a difficult job.... I'm back in the same area of Japan as I was when I was teaching. I'm doing contract programming now, though. One of the things that makes me very happy is meeting my former students on the street, or at a bar. They often call me over and chat with me. It reminds me why I loved that job.

nickysielicki 11y ago

In highschool I made a website (in like 50 lines of web.py, easily the best framework for small sites) with the twitter API that allowed students to post anonymously to an account I ran. It was before YikYak came out, and I'm not mature enough yet to not admit that it was a LOT of fun. ~400 followers (from a school of ~1100). There was admittedly a lot of cyberbullying, but I got the feeling it was mostly friends making fun of friends and nothing was too nasty. It was more along the lines of teasing each other with embarrassing inside jokes than anything, and I made a strict rule that anyone would be banned if they used anyone's real name so none of this would ever come back and prevent someone from getting into school or getting a job. It was like 4 months before graduation and my favorite teacher asked me to take it down, so obviously I did. Friends were upset with me, but ultimately we had our fun and I was happy to put it behind. To relate this to the HN crowd, I have to say that I think YikYak sucks for an anonymous platform. YikYak is so dumb because it's college kids posting either unoriginal jokes or things about buildings on their campus. The YikYak killer is the YikYak that is only somewhat anonymous. The YikYak where you interact with your friends anonymously, not anonymously with strangers nearby you and your city of 40k people.

msie 11y ago

Ah, young people. You can't equate students rating teachers to teachers grading students. Unless teachers are allowed to say things about students like: "She was a total bitch".

goodcanadian 11y ago
I am sure they do say such things in the teacher's lounge. The difference, of course, is that they are not doing it in public.
- msie 11y ago
  Exactly!

peterwwillis 11y ago

I got expelled from several schools for the crime of knowing more about computers than the teachers, having an interest in computer security, and having a website. I was also used as a scapegoat by a network admin who couldn't fix his networking issues. After the first school, every other school assumed i was some kind of dangerous delinquent. It's part of what prompted me to drop out.

imaginenore 11y ago

It's sad that the same organization is the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Even for the appeal process. A shitty system.

Scea91 11y ago

I have to say that it was perfetly written. I was hooked.

loup-vaillant 11y ago

Be sure to read the comment below about how another student got into similar trouble for messing up with the school's unsecured network, but was able to blackmail his way out. (The school had committed insurance fraud.) Funny how people change their attitude the second they realise they do not have the upper hand after all.

kaonashi 11y ago

Could've been me if my HS administrators had a lick of savvy.

Kenji 11y ago

In junior high I invented my own currency–I printed an initial run of “Daddio-Dollars” on my computer which I handed out to kids at school, then sold candy and some of my brothers toys to them. Once I had fostered enough confidence in the purchasing power of my homemade money, I printed up a ton of it and used it to buy all kinds of sweet stuff from the other kids. Wow, the man invented central banking independently.

codewithcheese 11y ago

Wow schools stray so far from actual education. To punish kids with the threat of lack of education for airing their opinion on their own education experience is so strange to me. It seems more like some sort of totalitarian experiment than education.

neonbat 11y ago

I find it immensely entertaining that Rudis created his own federal reserve inside his school and immediately abused the monetary system to "buy all kinds of sweet stuff." You should have gone into politics @Rudism. You would fit right in.

bru_ 11y ago

I can relate to this story. One of my funniest memories was when my 7th grade teacher reprimanded me for "putting a password" on my website. She was referring to the username and password fields in the sidebar. I told her everything on the site was visible without a user account, but I guess she didn't believe me, because she made one that night. Of course she didn't find anything. The best part was she filled out her whole profile, including a picture of herself, her interests "knitting, helping children", etc, just so she could have a chance at discovering an imaginary section of the site where everyone at my school was lambasting her.

Animats 11y ago

The most famous incident like this is "neverseconds".[1] This is the blog of a primary school girl in Scotland who, each day, took a picture of her school lunch and reviewed it. The school authorities threatened her and insisted she stop. That backfired on them, badly. Coverage on TechDirt. Coverage on the BBC. Worldwide press coverage. 10 million page views of blog. Complaints in Parliament. School authorities disciplined by national education minister. Public apology by town council. Girl wins several awards for fighting censorship. Her blog is still active, three years later. She encourages other kids to send in pictures of their school lunches, and it's a great site for seeing what kids have for lunch around the world. [1] http://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/06/goodbye.html http://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/06/goodbye.html

comrh 11y ago
That's crazy. She's just documenting her reality. I'm glad she "won" in the end.
userbinator 11y ago
My first thought was "school food is under NDA now"? That is indeed quite ridiculous.

ggreer 11y ago

I wish the post had gone into more detail about how the author was caught. Did another student rat him out? Was there some forensic evidence he didn't consider? I did much worse at my high school, but I was never caught. Chalk it up to trustworthy friends, knowledge of computer forensics, and a little luck. Even if I had been caught, I doubt there would have been any real consequences. A suspension? It's going on my Permanent Record? Pfft, who cares? If there's one piece of advice I can impart to students, it's this: Don't worry about getting into trouble. Unless you're committing an actual crime, the consequences are entirely forgettable. Even in the author's case, a clear and disproportionate overreaction, he's glad to have had the experience. So don't be cowed. Have fun.

Rudism 11y ago
I never really found out how they caught me. I suspect the guy in the states who started hosting the site after the initial shut-down told them my name when they contacted him, but who knows.

bru_ 11y ago

I am jelly of some of my friends who got really good at programming in high school. One dude managed to replace the keyboard drivers for every keyboard on the entire network with garbage, so that if they plugged in another keyboard, it still wouldn't work. He also gave his English teacher a "wacky mouse", where she would be presenting something and at some random time her cursor switched and behaved as if attached on the end of a spring. She would often inspect the underside of the mouse in response to this problem.

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mud_dauber 11y ago

I can see the same exact story playing out on Glassdoor. It's going to happen.

geon 11y ago

I have read several stories like this from the US. It baffles me how many Americans seems to think their country is the bastion of freedom of speech. Having it in your constitution apparently doesn't mean shit.

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harmegido 11y ago
You don't get these freedoms as a student. Or at least, the school is free to discipline you (or kick you out) however they see fit for basically whatever reason. You'll notice that there was no mention of police in the article. Our freedoms exist only in respect to the law. I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to.
- sound_of_basker 11y ago
  The USA identifies ISIS/ISIL as a terrorist group [0]. There is a good chance that you will at-least be detained for questioning if you carry out said activity. [0] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/06/remarks-president-progress-fight-against-isil https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/06/remar...
- jqm 11y ago
  "I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to." Oh, there will be repercussions. You just won't know about them right away. Repercussion #1. You will be on a list. Have fun flying or leaving the country any time soon. You might eventually do it, but it won't be fun. Immediate repercussions are almost preferable.
- geon 11y ago
  > You don't get these freedoms as a student. Exactly. As soon as money enters the picture, all civil liberties tends to be thrown out. Yet, students should IMHO be encouraged to exercise their freedom of speech and assembly. How do you teach a society democracy if not through activities like this? And this is reflected in the low voter turnout. > I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to. Using this as an example of "strong" freedom is so sad. Really. That should be a basic requirement for any civilized society. Yet, as another poster mentioned, it's probably not even true.

dblock 11y ago

Awesome story! In college we ran a website called "The No More Bzzz Bzzz Hun Hun" about the professors at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. It was hosted in Sweden with X-Force (mrsaint.net), a pirate group. Similar idea, but you could vote for the most boring teachers (bzzz bzzz is the noise that a fly makes in a boring classroom and hun hun is something to do with "fly f---ing", a term in French that means saying things that are boring and useless). You can see its remnants in http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz. They never found us, but I was definitely scared about getting expelled from college at some point. Unfortunately I no longer have the poll data :( http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html is priceless.

elwell 11y ago

In high school, I made a WScript that prompted user "Network timed out on line #6. Please re-enter password:" and would surreptitiously record it. I put this on a floppy, popped it in when someone in the library went to the printer, waited, came back and said, "sorry forgot my floppy; can i get it, excuse me". Didn't use it maliciously; usually would just modify the folder settings on their home drive on the network to have repeating images of Pokemon as a background image. I suppose this all sounds quite devious in writing.

elwell 11y ago

I almost got suspended in high school for making a "virus" (just an .html page with some js to open itself recursively in a new window).

roflchoppa 11y ago

one of the only times i got in trouble at school was talking openly about potassium nitrate in my math class, and how to make explosives out of it. I completely understand why i was sent to the VP's office. Oh and that other time i was burning leaves with a mag. glass.

fspacef 11y ago

Kudos to that Dad for not over reacting during all of the drama and supporting his kid

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smrtinsert 11y ago

This is another good example of the complete and pervasive misunderstanding of what free speech is. Unfortunately law, ethics and morality cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker. Churchill high school kids come from one of the richest school districts in the country practically defining the term 'privileged'. He undoubtedly could have found a more productive and healthier hobby.