5 ms·

I can tell you right now (as someone that actually went to the mentioned Brazosport school) that if they had more stricter rules and monitoring "in my day", I p

by esaym 7y ago

I can tell you right now (as someone that actually went to the mentioned Brazosport school) that if they had more stricter rules and monitoring "in my day", I probably wouldn't be here right now (as in being part of the HN community). I'd probably be in prison or working a minimum wage job. I was not interested in going to high school. Perhaps because there were no classes that interested me (another issue). I cut class a lot (missed more than 20% of days), hung with the wrong crowd, ran from the school cop on several instances. And plenty of other unmentionables. If there was more surveillance, I would have just gotten kicked out more or would have been pushed to just drop out. The only reason I graduated was due to the lack of surveillance. So if "surveillance" is meant to help those that are impoverished or disenfranchised, and by my own account would have lead to a worse end in my life, then what are we helping?

panzagl 7y ago
Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education. You fell through the cracks, that's hardly an optimal outcome.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >and led to more positive interventions in your education You mean actions that are arguably beneficial on paper but in practice amount to the school telling the at-risk student to <cartman>respect my authority</cartman>? That stuff never works in practice when the party the at-risk person doesn't respect/care about is the same party or has sufficient/control or incentive alignment with the party doing the intervention.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - panzagl 7y ago
    So you're saying you were beyond all influence so they just should have left you alone? At that point they should have expelled you- did you ever think of the damage you were doing to the rest of the school population by your actions? edit- did not realize you were not parent poster, though I think this holds true.
    - esaym 7y ago
      >At that point they should have expelled you- That is an interesting point. "Get rid of the bad so the good can flourish". Which is opposite of the "equity" doctrine so popular over the last year. I don't know what 'expelled' means in your definition. I was kicked out of the normal high school and sent to an 'alternative placement center' full of troubled youth several times. That was part of the reason I never failed a grade in high school. The alternative center had very few teachers and had students from 6th grade through 12th. In the math and english classes, they were combined with students from high school and middle school. So when I'd get sent there, I'd have failing grades in math and english, but then in the alternative center, I was given 6th grade level work which I got all A's on and saved me for the year. If you got kicked out of the alternative center, there was some kind of bootcamp type place you'd go to. Most of the kids I know that got sent there just ended up dropping out of school completely. But all this is a contradiction. Many here are against homeschooling, yet when push comes to shove, no one wants trouble makers in the public school. But if homeschooling is bad and they can't go to public school, then what is left?
      - panzagl 7y ago
        Oh yeah, nobody who is an educator would ever say such a thing. But as the spouse of one you can only hear so many stories of behavior before you start asking what the other students were learning while one kid goes on a 15 minute meltdown. But it's really dangerous where that thinking leads- so much of school performance/behavior is tied to family situations that it can go to some dark places if you replace the compassion most teachers have with simple pragmatism. Homeschooling gets a bad rap here because of it's association with the right, but unfortunately for society as a whole it's a step in the wrong direction. It makes the quality of your education wholly dependent on your parents, which pretty much just accelerates the cycle. Overall I think most towns have to accept it takes more resources to educate a kid on average than the public has been willing to allocate- it really is an 80-20 or 95-5 situation. But schools get decreasing budgets and increasing responsibilities, and react by cutting 'extraneous' activities that caught some of the marginal kids in the past (shop, art, etc) or by restricting things to a certain grade average (sports, activities), further disassociating those on the edges. The main thing I've notice at my kid's high school that is different from 30 years ago is the total lack of community- kids are told they need to excel and excel fast, which leads to a every man for himself kind of mentality. If you haven't found your niche by 14 you may as well pack it in, and that niche better be computers, nursing, or football or you're just wasting everyone's time. But I can guarantee that most teachers/ administrators/ districts would rather do almost anything than deal with social media monitoring crap they barely understand- unfortunately the only thing worse than helping set up the police state is to have to explain to a news crew how you missed so many warning signs while EMTs are wheeling out bodies in the background.
- esaym 7y ago
  >Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education. I've honestly thought about that a lot. You know, "what if someone took me under their wing and showed me how to truly fit in with society and be a great person". I doubt that would have worked. I saw most adults as idiots at the time and was not inclined to listen to anyone. For one, the advice I did get never helped or lined up with reality. My parents told me to graduate high school, even though they hadn't. The counselors told me not to do drugs, even though the grapevine told me they themselves had (doesn't matter if that was true or not, as a teenager you make up your own "facts"). And my brain told me I had it all figured out and was part of the elite, and the rap music I blared that spoke of killing cops, beating women, and "making millions" justified my own thoughts. I was beyond help. It was only through basically getting kicked of my parents house and going all the way to the bottom did I then realized that I knew nothing. Of course, perhaps if there was some counselor or authority that I could have repected at school, maybe then I would have listened. But finding someone to mesh with my mentality would have been difficult and would have required a lot of thought, care, and time on their part. And in my general experience, most counselors seem to get pretty burned out after 5+ years of dealing with unruly children and they then revert to not trying much and just occupying a desk chair. Most of my high school's faculty was like that. Most had had the same position for the last 20 years.
prepend 7y ago
It’s funny, in 1994 the most popular Usenet channel for me was alt.destroy.the.earth (second was alt.food.tacobell). People just theorizing about blowing stuff up as thought experiments. I was a minor so what is the appropriate action from the school if they had some tool like this back then? It’s hard to tell what’s dangerous speech vs kids exploring the world and stretching their brains. The gifted class loves the anarchist cookbook because it was weird stuff. We need to figure out what sensitivity and specificity we want for these types of surveillance. I think there are some who think knocking on 1000 doors to prevent one shooting is acceptable.

by esaym 7y ago

panzagl 7y ago

Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education. You fell through the cracks, that's hardly an optimal outcome.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>and led to more positive interventions in your education You mean actions that are arguably beneficial on paper but in practice amount to the school telling the at-risk student to <cartman>respect my authority</cartman>? That stuff never works in practice when the party the at-risk person doesn't respect/care about is the same party or has sufficient/control or incentive alignment with the party doing the intervention.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- panzagl 7y ago
  So you're saying you were beyond all influence so they just should have left you alone? At that point they should have expelled you- did you ever think of the damage you were doing to the rest of the school population by your actions? edit- did not realize you were not parent poster, though I think this holds true.
  - esaym 7y ago
    >At that point they should have expelled you- That is an interesting point. "Get rid of the bad so the good can flourish". Which is opposite of the "equity" doctrine so popular over the last year. I don't know what 'expelled' means in your definition. I was kicked out of the normal high school and sent to an 'alternative placement center' full of troubled youth several times. That was part of the reason I never failed a grade in high school. The alternative center had very few teachers and had students from 6th grade through 12th. In the math and english classes, they were combined with students from high school and middle school. So when I'd get sent there, I'd have failing grades in math and english, but then in the alternative center, I was given 6th grade level work which I got all A's on and saved me for the year. If you got kicked out of the alternative center, there was some kind of bootcamp type place you'd go to. Most of the kids I know that got sent there just ended up dropping out of school completely. But all this is a contradiction. Many here are against homeschooling, yet when push comes to shove, no one wants trouble makers in the public school. But if homeschooling is bad and they can't go to public school, then what is left?
    - panzagl 7y ago
      Oh yeah, nobody who is an educator would ever say such a thing. But as the spouse of one you can only hear so many stories of behavior before you start asking what the other students were learning while one kid goes on a 15 minute meltdown. But it's really dangerous where that thinking leads- so much of school performance/behavior is tied to family situations that it can go to some dark places if you replace the compassion most teachers have with simple pragmatism. Homeschooling gets a bad rap here because of it's association with the right, but unfortunately for society as a whole it's a step in the wrong direction. It makes the quality of your education wholly dependent on your parents, which pretty much just accelerates the cycle. Overall I think most towns have to accept it takes more resources to educate a kid on average than the public has been willing to allocate- it really is an 80-20 or 95-5 situation. But schools get decreasing budgets and increasing responsibilities, and react by cutting 'extraneous' activities that caught some of the marginal kids in the past (shop, art, etc) or by restricting things to a certain grade average (sports, activities), further disassociating those on the edges. The main thing I've notice at my kid's high school that is different from 30 years ago is the total lack of community- kids are told they need to excel and excel fast, which leads to a every man for himself kind of mentality. If you haven't found your niche by 14 you may as well pack it in, and that niche better be computers, nursing, or football or you're just wasting everyone's time. But I can guarantee that most teachers/ administrators/ districts would rather do almost anything than deal with social media monitoring crap they barely understand- unfortunately the only thing worse than helping set up the police state is to have to explain to a news crew how you missed so many warning signs while EMTs are wheeling out bodies in the background.
esaym 7y ago
>Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education. I've honestly thought about that a lot. You know, "what if someone took me under their wing and showed me how to truly fit in with society and be a great person". I doubt that would have worked. I saw most adults as idiots at the time and was not inclined to listen to anyone. For one, the advice I did get never helped or lined up with reality. My parents told me to graduate high school, even though they hadn't. The counselors told me not to do drugs, even though the grapevine told me they themselves had (doesn't matter if that was true or not, as a teenager you make up your own "facts"). And my brain told me I had it all figured out and was part of the elite, and the rap music I blared that spoke of killing cops, beating women, and "making millions" justified my own thoughts. I was beyond help. It was only through basically getting kicked of my parents house and going all the way to the bottom did I then realized that I knew nothing. Of course, perhaps if there was some counselor or authority that I could have repected at school, maybe then I would have listened. But finding someone to mesh with my mentality would have been difficult and would have required a lot of thought, care, and time on their part. And in my general experience, most counselors seem to get pretty burned out after 5+ years of dealing with unruly children and they then revert to not trying much and just occupying a desk chair. Most of my high school's faculty was like that. Most had had the same position for the last 20 years.

prepend 7y ago

It’s funny, in 1994 the most popular Usenet channel for me was alt.destroy.the.earth (second was alt.food.tacobell). People just theorizing about blowing stuff up as thought experiments. I was a minor so what is the appropriate action from the school if they had some tool like this back then? It’s hard to tell what’s dangerous speech vs kids exploring the world and stretching their brains. The gifted class loves the anarchist cookbook because it was weird stuff. We need to figure out what sensitivity and specificity we want for these types of surveillance. I think there are some who think knocking on 1000 doors to prevent one shooting is acceptable.