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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: 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!"