http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/09/inventing-while-muslim/405586/
Okay, so you weren’t sure what it was…now that you know how about reversing that suspension?
Poor kid.
Or should this have been entitled “How to Radicalize Youth 101”?
So stupid! Hope some engineering college sees the potential in this kid.
It’s Texas. Why am I not surprised?
Awful, awful, awful situation. I feel so sorry for the young man. I sincerely do not believe that the school would have reacted similarly if the student had not been Muslim.
I totally agree that the suspension should be reversed and besides the whole thing should have been squashed once it was confirmed to be a clock. OTH, every ninth grader should be encouraged to NOT take homemade devices to school that’s not part of an assignment.
Wow- this made it to my facebook page before I saw it on cc. Thats a first!
I wonder how his classmates are going to treat him…
Hmm. I’d like a few more details before I make a judgment in this case.
We’ll take him up here in Seattle burbs when he gets tired of being harassed in Texas. There are two Muslim boys on my son’s robotics team.
He was wearing a NASA shirt when he got taken in.
Ahmed wasn’t arrested because of a few teachers or a few cops. We need to do better to encourage our youth.
http://theodysseyonline.com/stanford/black-women-in-tech/128310
I do have one question: if this kid is so smart, why did the alarm go off in the middle of English class?
One of my best friends sent this to me this morning along with a sobbing rant. She is Muslim, getting her PhD and her brother is getting his PhD in engineering. It hit too close to home for her.
I hope one of the technological greats sees this story and takes him under their wings while giving a big F U to the school.
I guess I’m being devil’s advocate here. This is a high school, so presumably the kid has a locker. The first teacher he showed it to advised him not to show it to any other teachers. It’s obvious to me that this first teacher thought the other teachers would find it to be a suspicious device. But instead of putting it in his locker, he takes it to his other classes, lets the alarm go off, and then shows it to another teacher, just as the first teacher advised him not to do. What was he trying to accomplish at this point? (Also, we don’t know anything about this kid’s history at the school, if any.)
I can sort of understand the initial concern, because a homemade alarm clock is going to look like a bomb. A bomb is a timing device and an explosive, and an alarm clock is a timing device.
But as soon as they discovered that the alarm clock was a clock, they should have made embarrassed explanations to the kid, congratulated him for his inventiveness, explained that his clever device resembled a bomb, and sent him off to a science teacher who would encourage him. What are they suspending him for? Is it illegal to bring clocks to school?
Hunt: It went off because he wanted the opportunity to show what he’d done, but didn’t want to directly violate the advice of his science instructor. That’s my conjecture. If so, it was a mistake not to follow the first teacher’s advice.
Schools and teachers are hyper vigilant and often constrained by ridiculous rules put in place since Columbine. Remember kid who was suspended because she turned over to school authorities the plastic knife her mother accidentally put in her lunch bag? The plastic knife violated a ‘no weapons’ policy.
I don’t know the specifics of this particular case. But I do know that in our litigious society, and with both schools and teachers being held responsible to spot potential violence, incidents such as this one will happen. Teachers and schools will have to suspend common sense reactions because they have to, by law and to avoid lawsuits.
The kiddo being a Muslim may be a completely moot point in this instance.
Maybe he had no time to go to his locker between classes to put it away.
It went off because he is a 14-yr-old kid. He was carrying it around because he is a 14-yr-old kid. He showed it to the 2nd teacher because he was proud of it and didn’t want her to think he was the kind of kid who would bring an alarm clock from home and set it to go off in her class.
Since hindsight is 20/20, the first teacher probably should have said, “Why don’t you leave it here with me and pick it up after school” but didn’t think of it at the time. I bet s/he wishes s/he had now.
Lots of schools are set up so that a kid cannot conveniently visit their locker during the day. Mine was. Besides which, if someone had seen him putting this device in his locker I bet there would have been hell to pay!
“Making” a clock is trivial.
Did this thing look like it could be a bomb? If it did, the authorities, even after determining that it was not a bomb, had to consider whether it was a fake bomb, and why he brought it. He says it was to show what he could do, but when did he first say this? (And I find that to be an ambiguous statement in the first place.) Did he show it to other students? What else did he say about it, and to whom? What exactly did the first teacher say? Since we’re all speculating, what if he said, "You know, some people might think that thing is a bomb. You’d better not show it to anybody else–in fact, you should go put it in your locker right now.?