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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: 2) by bucc5062 on Friday April 11 2014, @11:21AM
I can connect with this view, but I would propose this tought, that what we see and read about today may have occurred throughout the ages. The differences now is we do not have the filter of time or distance. It happened in CA in some small section of a large state, but the world hears about within hours. Roll time back and we get a different experience ranging from a slight mention within a few hundred miles to nothing known at all or to a story told days if not months later*.
Consider how our Civil War or for that matter WWI(I) would have been reported in today's instant access world. A kid knifes 20 people today and we all know within minutes which is more shocking then hearing about it through newspaper reports weeks old.
My point is that if there was a general pattern I'd be more concerned, but not every school board is locking up science teachers. Even this story has not played out completely and we may discover the teacher gets re-instated and told to continue.
*MH370 is a great example of bad instant reporting. Its here, no here, not we hear it there, not now, no over here. All because we now demand immediate answers, not complete stories.
The more things change, the more they look the same