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| Overreaction.... | | Date Created: Aug 11, 2005, 11:58 AM |
(I used to teach high school, so stories about schools, and students, and teachers grab my attention. Feel free to skip this post if memories of high school give you hives, the willies, the heebee jeebees, or just crabs.)
What is it about school administrators that makes them such ... well ... squares. (For lack of a better word?) Yes, there are a few decent school principals and superintendents out there but mostly they're just the exceptions that prove the rule.
If there are ever exceptions to rules, the typical school administrator has one reaction: overreaction. I'm pretty sure it's genetic. Either that, or there's a class in Administrator School on how to blow things out of all reasonable proportion while sounding like a nerdier version of Ned Flanders and Principal Skinner's love child.
What brought this on? Well, suppose you're a student at a high school, and the high school gives you a laptop computer. (First of all, they're obviously complete dopes for doing any such thing.) And the laptop has software that prevents you from doing much of anything useful such as downloading internet porn and chatting with your friends and buying Viagra on eBay. At the same time, the laptop allows school administrators to spy on your actions. Your reaction, like mine, would probably be to say, "Frak this! You can keep your laptop." But the district makes it mandatory that you use the laptop for school work.
So now what do you do? I think the answer is obvious. If you're a teenager, you figure out how to crack the system. Because that's what teenagers do. (It's what I'd do too.) It's their job, and they do it well. And after 10,000 years of homo sapiens history, if adults haven't figured it out by now, the poor saps deserve whatever happens. I always figured that any time one of my students could outwit me, I pretty much deserved what was coming. (It rarely happened, and I earned a great deal of respect from the little ankle biters for being even more sneaky and conniving than they were.)
Now imagine that the school administrators actually taped the administrator's password onto the back of each computer. Aren't you almost required to start playing around?
So, now let's say that the bumbling Keystone-Kops in the school district's I.T. department actually figure out what's going on. (And here I can completely attest to the fact that I.T. people in the public schools are total loads. Anyone who actually knew anything about computers would find a job that paid significantly more than the 20K that school districts pay their I.T. people with crappy benefits.)
So...what do you suppose the administration does? Now remember, the point is to overreact as much as possible. Suspension? Expulsion? Nah... come on... that's for amateurs.
Obviously you charge the students with a felony.
Yes, yes, yes ... the students should indeed be punished, no question. And the I.T. staff should probably be sacked, too. But what would be a reasonable punishment for the kids? Come on, smart reader, you're way ahead of me on this already aren't you? |
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