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from the the-scientists-of-tomorrow-are-thwarted dept.
According to a petition at change.org
At first glance, Greg Schiller looks like a mad scientist taken straight out of a Hollywood film. His infamous moustache has more fans and followers than the dodgers on a good day. He coaches fencing and occasionally appears in school talent shows. Heck! Mr. Schiller is in fact anything but ordinary. He is teacher, role model and friend.
He is also suspended from teaching, coaching, and acting as union rep for his school.
Schiller was ordered to report daily to a district administrative office pending an investigation after two students turned in science-fair projects that were designed to shoot small projectiles.
One project used compressed air to propel a small object but it was not connected to a source of air pressure, so it could not have been fired. (In 2012, President Obama tried out a more powerful air-pressure device at a White House Science Fair that could launch a marshmallow 175 feet.)
Another project used the power from an AA battery to charge a tube surrounded by a coil. When the ninth-grader proposed it, Schiller told him to be more scientific, to construct and test different coils and to draw graphs and conduct additional analysis, said his parents, who also are Los Angeles teachers.
A school employee saw the air-pressure project and raised concerns about what looked to her like a weapon, according to the teachers union and supporters.
Shooting objects through tubes has a long tradition, and the idea of moving things with coils has been around a long time (I dimly recall articles about coast-to-coast coil trains from old mouldy Popular Science mags).
If you support freedom of scientific thought in our schools you might want to stop by change.org and sign the petition.
(Score: 1) by FakeBeldin on Friday April 11 2014, @09:05AM
I'm not from the US, and I don't live there. Where I have lived, I have never seen this tradition of "science fair". I have seen clubs where children go to to build stuff (maker-alike clubs, if you like) in various incarnations. I also seem to recall a rocket club (in my old high school, if memory serves).
I've never personally encountered an "oh my god weapons - fire everyone involved" response that stories like this seem to be based on. Of course, my high school days were in the time terrorists were lone individuals living in cabins in the woods, not well-funded networks of cells trained to fight a war.
So I'm wondering: can anyone who has some experience with science fairs outside the US comment on the sort of response you'd expect (for potentially "weaponizable" - god I hate that word - projects made by children)?
(Score: 1) by francois.barbier on Friday April 11 2014, @09:16AM
Yeah, on one hand you have people defending for their right to bear arms, and on the other hand you have this.
(Score: 3, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday April 11 2014, @09:34AM
> were in the time terrorists were lone individuals living in cabins in the woods, not well-funded networks of cells trained to fight a war.
I'll let you into a secret - not that much has changed. Terrorists - even your "Al-Qaeda" - are still almost exclusively lonely nut jobs working in near-isolation on shoestring budgets. The image of AQ as a shadowy James-Bond-Villain super-army with a secret missile base in a hollowed-out volcano is a myth perpetuated by the media and the government, because they both like to scare people.
(Score: 2) by khallow on Friday April 11 2014, @05:08PM
Terrorists - even your "Al-Qaeda" - are still almost exclusively lonely nut jobs working in near-isolation on shoestring budgets.
Al Qaeda does have an identifiable organization to it. It's not SPECTRE, but it is a collection of groups that actually do the occasional bit of team-based terrorism, have some funding, and a decent propaganda setup.
(Score: 2) by geb on Friday April 11 2014, @10:38AM
I can't speak about schools here in the UK, but some of my old university friends used to be very keen on building potato cannons. These were physics and engineering students, so they weren't going to build a little low powered toy. It was a very substantial steel tube with electronic ignition/trigger systems. I once saw it fire an orange hard enough to dislodge bricks in a wall.
They told me about some of the earlier tests, when they were looking for a good outdoor place to fire it, and (rather foolishly) chose a spot a few miles down the flightpath from a large city airport. It was not a quiet device so they were heard, and the police turned up very quickly to find out what was happening.
They got a verbal warning about finding a more appropriate firing range, and after the officer had checked their cannon to be sure they wouldn't blow themselves up, an off the record congratulation for building the cannon so well.
(Score: 1) by FakeBeldin on Sunday April 13 2014, @05:13PM
"They got a verbal warning about finding a more appropriate firing range, and after the officer had checked their cannon to be sure they wouldn't blow themselves up, an off the record congratulation for building the cannon so well."
+1, sudden outbreak of common sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 11 2014, @02:50PM
Disclaimer: I haven't been involved directly with school operations in a couple years, so I could be slightly out of date here.
A science fair is an event where students display their own research or engineering projects. They're very common in the US in every school district I've been to, particularly for the more challenging science classes (college prep and AP courses). These sorts of bonkers science teachers are usually the best from the students' perspectives but terrify the parents...
When I was a student I was required to participate in at least one for each year I was in high school. One year I made a little game based on a circuit; I had a weak electrical charge running through a looped wire and you needed to get a hoop over the wire without touching and completing the circuit. Another year I did research on microbes, raised cultures, and such, which I turned out to be terrible at (probably would get me in trouble for "biological danger" or something these days, but it was only boring stuff, like samples from door handles).
My most favorite teacher ever, who inspired both of the above projects that I actually enjoyed doing, eventually committed suicide though. He was under a lot of pressure from various groups I learned (parents, the district, his college professor parents, and apparently even some students). He was a goofball like the teacher in the story here. I didn't understand it at the time; I was absolutely crushed. I eventually learned part of the problem they had with him was not only was he silly and irreverent as well as very enthusiastic about science and teaching, he was also gay, and a conspiracy of people to drive him out of town had torched his car nearly every year he lived there, in addition to threats from all sides.
I really wish I'd understood these things at the time. I was so confused and frustrated... If I had been wiser maybe I could have stood up to them, at least in some small way, show them he had value. I don't know if it would have made a difference but I regret not having even tried. Well, I'll always remember him fondly, and if I encounter something like that again, I have ideas...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 12 2014, @12:05AM
If you look at who wins the big science fairs each year, you'll notice that NONE of the winners are doing technology.
Every winner is doing SCIENCE and accomplishing something that has never been done before and is answering a question that begins with WHY? [wikipedia.org]
-- gewg_