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So, should we consider this event a net negative because this poor teenager got perp walked by a bunch of people who were quite likely racist and apparently too

So, should we consider this event a net negative because this poor teenager got perp walked by a bunch of people who were quite likely racist and apparently too dumb to tell a circuit board from a bomb? Or should we consider this event a net positive because he's almost certainly going to end up at a much better high school after getting to meet the president and Mark Zuckerberg? On the one hand, no one should have to go through what he did. On the other hand, the fourteen-year-old version of me would've happily put himself in handcuffs for a chance at getting out of my cow-town high school.

dragonwriter 11y ago
Its a negative situation (and almost certainly symptomatic of a system and culture which produces other, less noted, negative situations), but one which -- because of the notice is has attracted -- is likely to be net-positive for the person who was the direct victim of the initial negative consequences, and might (one hopes) raise some attention that might be directed toward dealing with the underlying problems. Its not a simple positive or negative -- it depends on what people do because of it, only some of which is now known.
erikpukinskis 11y ago
The public intervened, and I think it is a net positive. Bad that it happened, sad similar things happen and don't get reported on. Would do us well to try to find similar, more pernicious failures, (kinda like the FAA does when there is an accident). Glad it is getting reported on in this instance.
jkestner 11y ago
It depends on how this school and others change in reaction.
wutbrodo 11y ago
As usual, the results are positive only if your story happens to have whatever peculiar mix of characteristics make it get picked up by the media. Especially with the advent of crowdfunding, a person who's been wronged and whose story goes viral very often ends up "net positive" (e.g. the old lady chaperoning a bus who was verbally abused by her students and ended up having strangers send her almost half a million dollars. The far more important subtext (and the reason that most of these stories take off) is that they are often indicative of larger phenomena. Most kids facing racism or having their creativity stifled by their schools _don't_ have their stories blow up and so their stories are nothing but "net negative".
rayiner 11y ago
The more I think about it, the more I'm skeptical that the teachers were too dumb to tell a circuit board apart from a bomb. He could have gotten in trouble for making something that looked like a bomb even if nobody that it was one. Just as in most schools kids get in trouble for making (or even drawing) things intended to look like guns even when it's totally clear to everyone that it isn't an actual gun. That's a stupid policy too, but a different kind of stupid.
- gyardley 11y ago
  Yep, you're probably right - this is on par with that six-year-old who nibbled his way to a semiautomatic PopTart. Zero percent tolerance, one hundred percent stupidity.
- pvg 11y ago
  The first teacher who saw the clock told him not to show it around. They definitely knew it wasn't a bomb. It's not even that hard to have some sympathy for the teachers or even school administrators who are subject to all sorts of stupid policies. The insane thing seems to be that in the entire chain of escalation from teacher to principal to police nobody appears to have thought of some better way to resolve the situation than handcuffing a 14 year old at school and carting him off to juvie.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
In the ideal world, the school administrator would be reprimanded and a note put into their personnel file. The best punishment for a lifelong bureaucrat is to put them in fear for their job. They however will just say they were following the rules. The rules put student safety high on the list, and events like Columbine and others only make the risk/fear higher. Schools are limited in what they can do to/for problem students. What that means in practice is that to limit the threat from a problem student they suppress the privledges of all students. This avoids the stigma of "singling out" someone for special rules. In a more functional system the rules would allow for things like electronics projects and pocket knives and what not, and when a student did some damage that student would be pulled from the school and moved elsewhere. Unfortunately that puts students with an unstable home life more at risk of being expelled than students with a stable home life, and if, through suspension, you end up segregating the school along student problem lines, it often correlates with other student traits which you can specifically not discriminate against. You can take on the burden of defending a bunch of lawsuits from suspended students, or you can just strip all the students of the opportunities. And this leads to zero tolerance policies for non-obvious reasons. What we haven't internalized as a society yet is that this is much more damaging to the societies eventual stability than the whole segregating thing would be. We have yet to learn how to run a system where people can readily move back and forth from the 'offender' side of the street to the 'cooperates' side of the street. Thus a trip to the offender's side leaves a stain that gets harder and harder to erase, regardless of maturity, later. It can be really hard to listen to people who have been imprisoned for life because of a mistake they made in their teens, which now prevents them from ever reaching their potential.

dragonwriter 11y ago

Its a negative situation (and almost certainly symptomatic of a system and culture which produces other, less noted, negative situations), but one which -- because of the notice is has attracted -- is likely to be net-positive for the person who was the direct victim of the initial negative consequences, and might (one hopes) raise some attention that might be directed toward dealing with the underlying problems. Its not a simple positive or negative -- it depends on what people do because of it, only some of which is now known.

erikpukinskis 11y ago

The public intervened, and I think it is a net positive. Bad that it happened, sad similar things happen and don't get reported on. Would do us well to try to find similar, more pernicious failures, (kinda like the FAA does when there is an accident). Glad it is getting reported on in this instance.

jkestner 11y ago

It depends on how this school and others change in reaction.

wutbrodo 11y ago

As usual, the results are positive only if your story happens to have whatever peculiar mix of characteristics make it get picked up by the media. Especially with the advent of crowdfunding, a person who's been wronged and whose story goes viral very often ends up "net positive" (e.g. the old lady chaperoning a bus who was verbally abused by her students and ended up having strangers send her almost half a million dollars. The far more important subtext (and the reason that most of these stories take off) is that they are often indicative of larger phenomena. Most kids facing racism or having their creativity stifled by their schools _don't_ have their stories blow up and so their stories are nothing but "net negative".

rayiner 11y ago

The more I think about it, the more I'm skeptical that the teachers were too dumb to tell a circuit board apart from a bomb. He could have gotten in trouble for making something that looked like a bomb even if nobody that it was one. Just as in most schools kids get in trouble for making (or even drawing) things intended to look like guns even when it's totally clear to everyone that it isn't an actual gun. That's a stupid policy too, but a different kind of stupid.

gyardley 11y ago
Yep, you're probably right - this is on par with that six-year-old who nibbled his way to a semiautomatic PopTart. Zero percent tolerance, one hundred percent stupidity.
pvg 11y ago
The first teacher who saw the clock told him not to show it around. They definitely knew it wasn't a bomb. It's not even that hard to have some sympathy for the teachers or even school administrators who are subject to all sorts of stupid policies. The insane thing seems to be that in the entire chain of escalation from teacher to principal to police nobody appears to have thought of some better way to resolve the situation than handcuffing a 14 year old at school and carting him off to juvie.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

In the ideal world, the school administrator would be reprimanded and a note put into their personnel file. The best punishment for a lifelong bureaucrat is to put them in fear for their job. They however will just say they were following the rules. The rules put student safety high on the list, and events like Columbine and others only make the risk/fear higher. Schools are limited in what they can do to/for problem students. What that means in practice is that to limit the threat from a problem student they suppress the privledges of all students. This avoids the stigma of "singling out" someone for special rules. In a more functional system the rules would allow for things like electronics projects and pocket knives and what not, and when a student did some damage that student would be pulled from the school and moved elsewhere. Unfortunately that puts students with an unstable home life more at risk of being expelled than students with a stable home life, and if, through suspension, you end up segregating the school along student problem lines, it often correlates with other student traits which you can specifically not discriminate against. You can take on the burden of defending a bunch of lawsuits from suspended students, or you can just strip all the students of the opportunities. And this leads to zero tolerance policies for non-obvious reasons. What we haven't internalized as a society yet is that this is much more damaging to the societies eventual stability than the whole segregating thing would be. We have yet to learn how to run a system where people can readily move back and forth from the 'offender' side of the street to the 'cooperates' side of the street. Thus a trip to the offender's side leaves a stain that gets harder and harder to erase, regardless of maturity, later. It can be really hard to listen to people who have been imprisoned for life because of a mistake they made in their teens, which now prevents them from ever reaching their potential.