Purely out of curiosity...

[Steven Koteff]

You sum it up, Ish: "a rare act of....welll not courage, but decency."

I think everything you say is right, and I agree with your focus on the
decency, though I think in a lot of these cases there is courage involved,
too. How many teachers and administrators have been blamed, accused,
formally or not, when a student actually does do something horrible, and
there is some event in the student's past that in retrospect should've made
it obvious, or when, in retrospect, there is some obvious measure that an
authority figure should've taken that would've prevented the whole thing...

Being afraid, having to worry so much about protecting your own ass, is a
real demotivator in terms of helping other people.

One q: you say that "school is the safest place in the world for students."
I would like to believe that is true, and I'm guessing it is. But is there
some hard evidence backing that up?

It reminds me of this thing I heard in a psych class in college about how,
statistically, in terms of just behavior and impulses, babies and young
children are the most violent people on the planet, violent even toward
their immediate family, only they don't quite have the... gumption(?) they
need to make much of it.

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 9:13 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Was the clock a school project? In other words, did a teacher, a club
> adviser, any adult in the school assign a project, and did the clock fit
> the assignment? Or did the young man make a clock and bring it to school?
>
> As far as I can tell the young man did not build a clock or make a
> project, or in any way bring something to school that was part of an
> assignment from any adult in the building. It was not a project. It was not
> show and tell. It seems the student took apart a clock, re-fashioned it and
> put in in a box and brought it to school.
>
> Why did he do this? What was his motivation?
>
> Whatever his intentions, if he re-assembled clock parts in a box and took
> them to school, he broke the law. While 14 year old boys, and sometimes 14
> year old girls, are instructed that bringing a clock in a box, a plastic
> gun, a plastic sword, a paper bomb or dynamite  etc..., even on Halloween
> is dangerous and against the law, young people do make these kinds of
> mistakes, from time to time. Best if they make them in school as school is
> the safest place in the world for students. Obviously, doing so in the
> street may get one killed by a police officer or even a gun toting citizen.
> In a school the child, age 14, will be interrogated, handcuffed, probably,
> and asked to write a statement explaining his or her intentions and the
> police will contact the guardians and book the kid. This is the law. It
> matters not the race or religion of the child.
>
> From time to time, a  brave administrator, more likely an experienced
> teacher will protect the child with a slap on the wrist, but the current
> mood in the country and in schools is making this a rare act of....welll
> not courage, but decency.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 9:02 AM, The Jonathon Hunt Experience <
> newtalkingwall at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Is there any evidence that the kid "only" took apart a store bought clock
>> and put it back together, beyond people online pointing out that doing so
>> is a thing that people can do? Beyond that, if the child acted as
>> maliciously as Richard Dawkins and others would like to believe, this means
>> his whole plan hinged on the knowledge that his teachers and police would
>> confuse a circuit board and some wires with something that can explode. If
>> our teachers and police are this stupid (which seems to be the case, here),
>> then we are lucky in getting off with a $15 million dollar fine.
>>
>
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