11th Grader knows more than the teacher, gets punished for it

By on Dec 17, 2007 at 1:01 PM
News December 17, 2007

We don’t feel bad or look down upon people who aren’t as tech-savvy as the folks who read this site. We actually feel bad for people who, because of their ignorance, actually take it out on those that are savvy. The latest case-in-point is a teacher who gave a student detention for using Firefox instead of the usual Internet Explorer in class. In spite of trying to explain to the teacher that he was doing nothing wrong, the teacher punished him anyway. Make the jump to see the letter that went home to his parents…


Read

67 Comments

Related Articles

  • Mr. B

    I absolutely agree. The student deserved detention for using a mostly glitchy browser, and for being insubordinate towards his teacher. As a teacher if I ask you to do something three times and it’s not done, then it’s straight to detention, no questions asked.

  • Roman411

    If we all listened to all of our teachers over time we’d all be robots and have no opinions of our own. Bla bla…listen to your teacher. That s**t is so over rated.

  • John

    Reminds me of my son getting detention for installing Linux on his lap computer because he was so tired of the BSOD. This was when he was in 3rd grade. During the parent/teacher meeting, the teacher asked what I was going to do to my son and I told her I was taking him to get a new paintball gun as a reward.

    Now before anyone blows a gasket over this, the schools IT department couldn’t stop laughing, there was nothing in the form that the parents or teachers had to sign saying that he couldn’t install linux on it. The only restrictions was IM clients.

  • Nic D in Big D!

    How this even a question . . .

    kids need to Obey, Submit, Acquiesce.

    Hey kid, Shut up and do what you’re told. Make great grades, have excellent behavior, take over the world and make your own rules.

    You could be right all day, but being right and expressing it the wrong way is WRONG. The classroom environment is not a democracy. The teacher is the president, emperor, the king. AND sometimes a Drill Sargent.

    Prepare them for the real world. If someone did this at my company “Please pick up your check on next Friday.”

  • JayR

    Wow, hard call here. I am a teacher and I would have listened to his story. I realize it may have been a hoax but it brings up a real issue in the classroom today. We have some bright kids out there. Sometimes their knowledge approaches that of the teacher. As a teacher we have to remember we are there to facilitate learning not force students to bend to our will. At the same time we need to have some type of discipline.

    I know when I was in high school I was a smarta@@. A thing like that would have gotten me sent to the office because of my “reputation”. Maybe this kid had a reputation of being the same.

  • pathbeyondthought

    I agree, Bill F. is a moron. Shut up Bill. Pay attention to a real argument like the one posted by Chris Cronin.

    To Chris:
    I couldn’t have argued it better myself; Firefox also has better security and is regularly updated as opposed to IE.

  • http://pheer6224.googlepages.com/home pheer6224

    I hate the morons like that. My principal seems to think Linux is a malicious program.

  • James

    lol he could serve it on saturday 8-11am…. He could be another member of the Breakfast club! Then there would be 6 of them!

    Emilio Estevez, Anthony Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy and this kid!

  • Ryan S

    I like independent thinkers… and feel that anyone can do anything so long as they can rationally justify it and it is not harming anyone else. I prefer IE, but encourage intellectual debates. :)

  • McHale

    He deserved to be punished because he didn’t do as he was told. His “better” browser opinion doesn’t matter to anyone but him. Besides, everybody knows that IE is better than Firefox.

    I’m betting he was an Apple snob. They’re all that way – thinking they are better than everyone else.

    -Mc

  • Jeff B.

    McHale,
    Really? IE better than FireFox, WTF ARE YOU SMOKING????? IE has so many holes I’ve gotten hella shit from it and FireFox is the shit. I use XP SP2 every friggin’ day and I will always use FireFox over IE. IE just sucks balls. In fact, Netscape before IE, shit I’d even use Opera before IE…maybe…

  • cliff
  • david

    our school’s computers all have IE 7 and firefox..

    but we arent really allowed to use firefox, as i asked my teacher yesterday.

    i asked why and she said that the tracking plug-ins aren’t working in firefox…yet….sooo when we get the plug-ins we’ll be able to use both

  • david

    thats immature.

    macs are 50 thousand times more reliable, and they just work.

    windows computers?!? wow.

    we have windows xp and when our server goes out, like every month at least twice we have no computers

  • sarah

    something like this happened to my friend last year, except he wasn’t told to stop and was block out of the whole school network instead.

  • Bob L

    You have to be kidding, “he was doing something wrong”- when did school become about following dumb arbitrary rules instead of about teaching and learning? If the teacher was open and respected the student he or she would have learned something new.

  • whoster69

    Teachers need to remember to listen to their students and find out why they broke a rule instead of just punishing indiscriminately.

    I’m a teacher. I don’t want mindless obedience. I want to help students learn to think for themselves.

1 2 3
blog comments powered by Disqus