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WCSC reported that a South Carolina High School student was arrested and suspended after writing about killing a dinosaur using a gun in a class assignment. Attorney David Aylor, who is representing 16-year-old Alex Stone, said his client's arrest over a creative writing assignment was "completely absurd," and is seeking to appeal the suspension. "Students were asked to write about themselves and a creative Facebook status update – just days into the new school year – and my client was arrested and suspended after a school assignment."
Stone said he and his classmates were told in class to write a few sentences about themselves, and a "status" as if it was a Facebook page. Stone said in his "status" he wrote a fictional story that involved the words "gun" and "take care of business."
"I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur, and, then, in the next status I said I bought the gun to take care of the business"
“I could understand if they made him rewrite it because he did have ‘gun’ in it. But a pet dinosaur?” said his mother Karen Gray. “I mean first of all, we don’t have dinosaurs anymore. Second of all, he’s not even old enough to buy a gun.”
Additional coverage here.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday August 29 2014, @01:18PM
The kid for writing about killing extinct species?
The teacher for reporting an obvious threat to an imaginary prehistoric animal?
The cops for detaining this kid for disturbing a school with a death threat to a dinosaur?
Why didn't they send him to the counsilor if they were that worried about it? If the councilor thought there was a problem, then they should call the cops. No other students should have known anything about this. What, did the cops kick in the classroom door and start drilling him about the death threats to Dino with a knee jammed down on the back of the kids neck?
Maybe the teacher and the cops were fanatical paleontologists.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rivenaleem on Friday August 29 2014, @01:21PM
The answer is simple, the person who abused their authority the most.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Friday August 29 2014, @03:04PM
Obviously, it was the kid who abused his authority the most. He abused his authority of free speech and must be punished accordingly.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday August 29 2014, @03:31PM
> "told in class to write a few sentences about themselves, and a "status" as if it was a Facebook page"
The teacher who gives absurdly shitty assignments to 16 year-olds.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @04:17PM
This seems like a perfectly valid "update" of the ever-popular "what I did this summer" writing exercise: dumbed down from a couple of pages to a couple hundred words; grammar optional; pictures welcome.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by bob_super on Friday August 29 2014, @05:13PM
For elementary school kids maybe!
I'm pretty sure that when I was 16, my teachers were trying to fill our brains with Ensembles, Logs, Limits, rotational momentum, XXth-century history, two foreign languages (optional extra dead one), tech drawing and automation, obscure literature, and even formal philosophy...
No time for "what I did this summer" BS!
Now get off my lawn before I start ranting about US education rankings...
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday August 29 2014, @09:52PM
I detested those writing assignments when I was in school. Not only because they were inane, boring assignments, with very little freedom to do something interesting; but also because I resented having my personal, school-free time turned into a school assignment. Even worse was when the teacher made everyone read them in class: no matter what school, there was always a small group of students that used that as an opportunity to remind you of how rich or well-connected their families were.
Occasionally a teacher would fail to define it as a factual, non-fiction writing assignment and I got to have a bit of fun, at least. Not that any of that would fly these days; some of the fanciful stuff I wrote in those cases would have landed me in a cop car or on a shrink's couch. The teachers always started being more cautious about explicitly setting assignment parameters afterward, but no cops ever got involved, and I usually got an A grade after a brief interrogation about motive. "Why did you make stuff up? I didn't say to do that" "You didn't say I couldn't, either. Fiction counts!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @04:26PM
The parents for raising an ignorant ignoid.