This topic really hits home for me. I went to a 'magnet' middle school on the other side of the river from TJ. I don't know that a more nerdy group of 300 stude

This topic really hits home for me. I went to a 'magnet' middle school on the other side of the river from TJ. I don't know that a more nerdy group of 300 students existed anywhere - or that any other group of people aged 11-14 had such a high portion of having submitted patches to open source software. It was, frankly, the only place in the world where I was ever told it was ok to be nerdy, where geeky obsession with learning about technology was praised rather than mocked. The anecdotes are amazing in themselves - I taught myself the difference between assembly and BASIC so I could write faster games on my TI83; the 8th graders built a mesh network in 2005; most of us had websites written in php or perl; we wrote guides on reverse engineering instant messenger protocols. It was truly a phenomenal place and the forcing of these brilliant and motivated students back into an environment where they will be mocked for their intellectual interests is a great loss.