The Website That Got Me Expelled

http://www.codeword.xyz/2015/09/05/the-website-that-got-me-expelled/

by Rudism • 11 years ago

639 264 11 years ago

Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants. I'm lucky I was not more harmed by the sadist VP that ran my middle school.

proveanegative• 11 years ago

I think it is only a matter of time until MOOCs start eating into high school and even middle school-level education. Considering that many adults do not remember their high school experience fondly it will be a welcome alternative.

pistle2• 11 years ago

Snake oil salespeople jumped into moocs and have pushed their ascendancy back by years. They, presently-generally work great for a specific set of people, but don't yield sufficiently effective results for broad groups. Check out the research thus far. It's not as engaging and lacks the habit-forming that drives people to complete and compete for high marks in areas which aren't in alignment with the interests of the student.

For mature learners focusing on a topic of interest, great. For young learners build a general foundation, not so much. Now, it's a different conversation to cover curriculum, but that's not of MOOC's concern.

And, to wit, "adults not recollecting fond experiences" is double-edged. There are few other times in people's lives where they are essentially forced to rub shoulders with such a cross-section of their culture. These experiences do afford experience in cross-pollination which have positive benefits as much as they cause angst for participants. If parents are able to shield their kids from "others" a certain solipsism is a consequence. During formative years, there is a value to broad cultural experience that should be balanced with providing a safe and nurturing environment for the primary task of learning.

prodmerc• 11 years ago

I gotta say that EdX and Coursera are amazing - so many things to learn (often for free, but even the paid courses are relatively cheap). Stuff that is better than what our best schools/colleges/unis provide. I'm really grateful for what they're doing.

masklinn2• 11 years ago

Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants.

If you think that's only public school you're deluding yourself. My secondary education was in private schools (in the US sense of the word) and I have no issue whatsoever seeing this scenario unroll there (I can even cast the parts).

Petty tyrants is what you get when petty people get access to any sort of power to lord over others, the exact nature of that power has little relevance. The concentration of petty tyrants is only a function of how easy it is to be granted power by the environment.

spacemanmatt3• 11 years ago

If I thought it was only public schools I would have said only public schools.

underpantsgnome• 11 years ago

Maybe spacemanmatt didn't want to disparage institutions he had no experience with.

tsotha2• 11 years ago

The difference with private schools is the parents have a lot more clout, since they're paying the bills.

weisser• 11 years ago

Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants

This American Life devoted an entire episode to covering one of them...

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/419/p...

gkop• 11 years ago

That guy was a major tyrant, I mean he got decades in prison for his behavior, after all.

iopuy• 11 years ago

I don't know if it was the dialogue coming from the teachers or glazing over the content of the newsletter, but I am highly skeptical of this article.

I've never heard teachers talk to students or each other how this is written. 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity, turns out Geocities has been around since 1994 but I can't recall a single instance of sites being shutdown for this sort of thing in or around 1997. In 1997 many people were still asking "What is the internet exactly?" Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity? Why did he even has this information? It is technically feasible for this to have happened, I'm just saying I have my doubts.

jjoonathan• 11 years ago

The dialogue from the teachers is precisely in line with what I experienced in gradeschool. I'm sure you can find dozens of others to corroborate: there's something about school administration that seems to attract (or create?) petty authoritarians who convince themselves that any slight against their person is an egregious crime in and of itself.

1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity

It wasn't.

Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity?

Could have been the teacher saw his reaction, overheard rumors, or asked/coerced the information from other students.

Terretta• 11 years ago

This happened all the time, all over the US.

Felt like authoritarian heavy handed red-faced response to early anonymous publishing of tracts and pamphlets, all over again.

Good read starting with the 1500s here:

  THE IDEA OF A FREE PRESS:  
  THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS UNRULY LEGACY

— http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/org.oclc.lac.ui.DialABo...

I was part of an early ISP (1993 - 1997). There was this kind of "insolent" free speech vs. fumbling authoritarian quashing all the time.

Our ISP policy: Don't like what you have to say, but will defend your right to say it. And we, not teens but in our twenties, thought this new power for the individual voices was indeed "hilarious" — and awesome.

I often miss the truly self-published pre-ad-driven ecosystem days of $19/month for a dial up modem and your own web site.

// As it happens, in addition to offering both web hosting and shell, I also invented dynamic DNS, with connection event driven mapping from Portmasters to a custom DNS host, to point your username.isp.com to your own dynamic dialup IP address so you could host whatever website you wanted on your own box, not ours.

nissehulth2• 11 years ago

I'm not in the US, but I used to have a hosting/redirect service in the 90s and got plenty of takedown requests. Most often just because someone didn't like the content.

petercooper3• 11 years ago

In 1997 many people were still asking "What is the internet exactly?"

People are still asking that now, to be fair. But the Web was certainly well into the public consciousness in North America by 1997.

jrochkind1• 11 years ago

Yep, definitely 1995-1996 was the tipping point for internet awareness in the U.S. At universities, and perhaps some well-connected high schools, a couple years earlier. I was a college freshman in 1993, and already knew about 'the internet' (long before most people because I was a nerd, finding public access dial-up gopher leading to public access unix systems, all over a 14kbps modem connection), but hadn't heard of the web before -- I distinctly recall someone showing me Mozilla in 1993 in a computer lab, a website for a museum of some kind, and I was like "Woah, you can do THAT on the internet now?!? This is going to be big." In 1995 I was hired by the college IT department as a student worker, to make an experimental prototype college website, the first website the college had. The rest is history. :)

(One thing I remember is that my website had a campus map easily accessible from the home page. Once the Communications department took over website responsibility from IT a year later, that disappeared not to return for many years, heh. https://xkcd.com/773/ )

dools3• 11 years ago

Also... What 16 year olds weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons in 1997? I mean, yeah when it came out and I was 9 in like 1989 maybe it was edgy... But 1997 it was prime time. South Park was a little edgy in 1997, but not The Simpsons.

brianwawok2• 11 years ago

I had friends who could not watch the Simpsons because they said "Damn"

gwilkes3• 11 years ago

I think this might have been more common than you would expect, particularly with devout Christian families. A good amount subscribed to newsletters that told them which media was Christian/family-friendly. Simpsons was definitely banned in our house along with MTV completely.

TheLoneWolfling13• 11 years ago

Some sites require JS because they do weird things like rendering stuff clientside.

This site "requires" JS because... The opacity of the article is set to 0? Everything's there, everything's rendered, but they have a CSS rule (".use-motion .post { opacity: 0; }"). Only thing I can think of is that they do a JS fade-in or something and missed the unintended consequences.

(Speaking of which... Doesn't Google penalize sites that have an excessive number of hidden keywords? I wonder if the entire article being hidden qualifies...)

johnchristopher• 11 years ago

When I alt tabbed to the site there was a slow fade-in on the menu.

TheLoneWolfling13• 11 years ago

Sidestepping the question of if that actually adds anything to the article - they couldn't be bothered to do the fade-in correctly?

RGamma• 11 years ago

I find a good way to unfuck those sites is to use something like uMatrix or Web Developer to disable CSS (in uMatrix's case it can't disable inline CSS and needs a page reload, but of course it does a ton of other things and this probably isn't an as important use-case). Also works well when text doesn't properly wrap when the browser window is narrow or when broken menus and bars obscure the content, etc.

TheLoneWolfling13• 11 years ago

I find it rather... ironic, shall I say, when CSS actively hurts the readability of a site.

This being one of those cases.

nissehulth2• 11 years ago

When I click a link and see no content, most often I close the tab and forget about it. Is it really that hard to display simple content without JS nowadays?

shadowmint2• 11 years ago

oh come on.

It's 2015, not 1999. If you don't have javascript enabled, do you honestly expect to be able to read half of the internet?

cm2187• 11 years ago

For privacy and security I do the same. Requiring javascript to just view a blog article is insane.

TheLoneWolfling13• 11 years ago

For me, the utility of reading some random blog post that requires JS is far less than the potential consequences of enabling JS for every random blog post, given that most browser exploits require JS.

As such, when the only reason that a site requires JS to be readable is sloppy coding, yes, I call them out on it.

I enable JS only for things that require it for a good reason, and where I am reasonably sure that they won't be exploited. Doing a fancy fade-in on load (which, by the way, can easily be done accessibly) is not a good reason, and I am not reasonably sure that some random blog won't be exploited.

dec0dedab0de• 11 years ago

It's 2015, not 1999. If you don't have javascript enabled, do you honestly expect to be able to read half of the internet?

Yes.

codedokode• 11 years ago

Disabling javascript makes Chromium eat less memory and makes pages load faster. Also all sort of annoying popups, effects, ads and social tracking buttons do not work without it while page content is usually readable. That's why I have JS enabled only for trusted websites like Youtube and disabled everywhere else. It just makes browsing the web more comfortable.

It's sad that Chromium doesn't have a way to disable CSS on a per-domain basis (and browser extensions are potential backdoors so I'm not going to install them).

smoe• 11 years ago

Even in 2015 I expect to be able to read text centric articles without javascript, on slow internet connections and or with low spec hardware. I don't have js disabled on my laptop, but i find it extremely annoying, that a large part of the “first world” internet is practically unusable if you don't own a current generation high end smart phone just because of unnecessary javascript shenanigans. I'm not referring to this site in particular, it works well after loading.

Retra• 11 years ago

It's 2015, not 1999

That gives you 16 years to learn how to make a simple, efficient, portable web page.

wtbob• 11 years ago

It's 2015, not 1999. If you don't have javascript enabled, do you honestly expect to be able to read half of the internet?

Yes, I expect to be able to read data without having to execute code.

And, FWIW, the Internet was pretty great in 1999. In many ways (but not all, of course) it was better than what we're stuck with now.

mirimir3• 11 years ago

I use NoScript, and allow only the scripts that I need to see what I want on sites. All trackers are blacklisted.

Fiahil• 11 years ago

Isn't the effect identically achievable using the `transform` css property?

Why would anyone use JS in this case?

userbinator3• 11 years ago

I saw this comment before reading the article completely, and thought it was about being expelled for using JS. I wouldn't be surprised if, to someone who knew only HTML, JS looked like "hacking".

TeMPOraL3• 11 years ago

Today's web is ridiculous. It looks like if developers and designers are increasingly becoming a bunch of kids with delusions of grandeur and IQ around 50, living in total denial about reasonableness of their work.

Just imagine you're going to the newsstand to buy a newspaper, and instead you get a package containing blank sheets of paper, a microfilm scanner and a roll of microfilm, with instructions telling you to go home, scan the film and print the content yourself. You'd be on fire. You'd write to the publisher, asking them what the fuck they're doing. Even ignoring the additional time and money you'll have to spend printing the newsppaper yourself, it surely must be cheaper to print it all with industrial machines than making an equal amounts of goddamn microfilm and scanners for it! Economies of scale and stuff.

And yet this is normal on the web. Prepping content for client-side JS generation takes similar amounts of time (if not more) to just rendering the page on server. And then they have to send a) the content, and b) JS to render it, which takes more space than a rendered page, and then every client has to render it on its own. They're wasting electricity on every goddamn step of the pipeline, from servers through the network to the client. It's like electricity is free so they can all show everyone a giant fuck you, because hey, if it's free then let's waste it all.

Ok, I got carried away. But my point still stands. Dear JS-first website maker - I'm not willing to view your ads until you start covering my electricity bills for all the coal that got wasted on your idiotic client-side-rendering contraptions.

adrusi3• 11 years ago

YES! There's no reason for websites that are just documents to not work with javascript disabled. For that matter there's no reason that they shouldn't work in text-based browsers (this one still might, since the opacity isn't going to matter in lynx). They work by default, and the only reason that they start not working is because people start adding too many gimmicks.

And with modern tools, there's no reason that anything — even a highly interactive app — couldn't be prerendered on the server.

lemiffe2• 11 years ago

When the percentage of users using IE6 was lower than a few percentile, we started to ignore those users and came to expect that the web would be somewhat broken for them. Likewise, the web is becoming somewhat broken for users that have JavaScript turned off.

The separation of back-end and front-end, via the exposure of APIs on the backend, has led us to a world where the front-end requires a bit more thought, on how to represent and transform the data to render the content and theme correctly.

Why? Modularisation & de-coupling = greater maintainability + rule of single-responsibility is better applied. This will become more and more the case with the widespread adoption of microservices.

In this specific case, we could argue against the few lines of JS that provide a nice effect upon entering the page, but you can't argue about de-coupling and breaking down the mammoth codebase.

solistice5• 11 years ago

On a related but no quite note, I've got a personal vendetta against sales pages that think buzzing and zipping jQuery is anywhere near to being a sensible idea.

<rantyrant> So from a personal standpoint, if I'm on your sales page, I want to know what you're offering, and why I should be intrested in what you are offering. I'd be fine with that being a plain html site with nothing but a few paragraphs and some bullet point lists. Maybe a table or two as well, and a link to somewhere I can give you money.

Now the last thing I need is for that part of the page to zoom in, wiggle around or do any other bogheaded things a designer with just enough jQuery to be dangerous could think of whilst they're being "creative" with it.

Now from a marketing perspective, this is incredibly stupid. A sales page is a machine for turning prospects into customers. There's a single design purpose if there is one. If someone come over and tried to paint flowers on the tip of my soldering iron, I would cut them. If someone decided to replace my PSU with a music box because the music box looks a lot better, I would not be pleased.

So why did it ever become a thing to do that to one of the most essential parts of your business? The part you point your advertising money at. The part that can very well be the difference between you going the way of the ipod or the way of the zune. Go nuts on your About page if you really have to keep your designer busy, have your faces zoom into it and spin and put the text into maquee tags and what have. But please, for the love of god, don't, don't ever do that to your sales page, because you're wasting my time and your money on that.

I blame marketing professionals with an IQ of 50 and designers with delusions of grandeur, CSS3 on the holster, jQuery in their hands, trigger happy on anything customer facing, spreading more $ signs through the site than the rap business.

</rant>

tripzilch4• 11 years ago

I agree entirely with your frustrations about today's web, but don't forget that yesterday's web was filled with ridiculous Flash-only navigation sites.

There seems to be a force that always pushes technology to crud up with bogus features until the brink of usability.

Probably caused by the fact that developers tend to develop on above-average machines, and therefore will always target slightly above-average requirements, dragging everything upwards.

Rudism5• 11 years ago

Author of the original article here.

I chose this template for my blog because I liked the clean, simple layout. I've been meaning to remove some of the JS functionality and fix some styling stuff for a while now. I didn't realize the fade-in thing rendered the site completely unviewable without JS. I'll be fixing it soon.

TheLoneWolfling13• 11 years ago

Thank you kindly!

And again, the fade-in (although I don't like said effects personally) isn't the problem. The problem is that said fade-in is done via JS with no fallback. (Note that you can generally do fade-ins via CSS, IIRC, or just add a noscript tag that overrides it to full opacity)

I suspect that there is other functionality that I'm missing without JS (No sidebar? Buttons to the side that do nothing?), but it's kind of hard to tell.

davidcollantes• 11 years ago

The template you have picked now is harder to read than the previous. With all the JS complains, etc., I never had a problem--and pretty much liked--the previous (NexT) theme.

lukeschlather• 11 years ago

I've become addicted to the reader mode button in Firefox. Allowed me to totally ignore it and keep JS disabled. There are quite a few sites I don't even try to view in Chrome anymore, I just drop them into Firefox and use the reader button.

JupiterMoon• 11 years ago

Whilst I totally agree with you in general about the javascript abuse issue and about websites vs webapps... Check out Firefox reader mode.

Ambroos• 11 years ago

I was almost suspended at school eight years ago for using `net send` from .bat files and because I had Everest portable on my network drive (a tool that lists system specs, I was curious what hardware the PC's had).

The guy that managed the network at the time was almost personally offended and accused me of 'hacking' the network with dangerous tools. He got the school board involved, my parents had to go talk to the headmaster. My parents and I had to sign a contract which said that any other 'unauthorised' use of the school network would get me suspended for 3 days.

If you have one bitter person working somewhere and nobody knows enough about something to stop them, you can get these power-mad types. Probably happens a lot at schools with just one network administrator.

verbin217• 11 years ago

The degree to which kids get fucked with before they're even allowed to enter society necessitates people like that exist. Working at a school isn't exactly esteemed. You were both smart enough to see through the situation and to... Not work at a school. We just keep putting the wrong people in the right place to exacerbate a negative feedback loop.

kall• 11 years ago

We had a lot of fun with net send at my all laptop school. IIRC there was even a shared address book file with everyone's hostname. It didn't bother the admins, but understandably the teachers.

petercooper3• 11 years ago

Haha, I did the same thing (with net send, which I'd forgotten all about till you said it) when our school got its first network - around 98 or so. I rigged up a QBasic program to use net send to create a school wide chatroom of sorts (I think I used it to sync a filename on a network share rather than send the actual chat though). Never got caught but they managed to disable the functionality and that was that. It's ridiculous how mad they all got about it though.

mondoshawan• 11 years ago

Chandler, perhaps? I attended a junior high school there which had this rickety chat system that functioned exactly like that. It was kinda functioning when I got there, but I took the app home and hacked it up considerably to be more stable, more colors for text, etc.

Ended up leaving the updated source on the machines one day before I left the school for high school. Quite fun days, indeed.

vkjv2• 11 years ago

I must have gone to a great high school. I actually hacked our systems a few times.

We used a piece of software to lock down the PCs, IIRC, called Fool Proof. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be ironic, because it didn't take long to figure out that it kept the clear text admin password in swap. The machines didn't have BIOS passwords, so it was pretty easy to boot into a hex editor and dig it out.

When my teacher found out I did this, he praised my ingenuity and even got me involved in vetting alternative options, despite the fact that I had been handing the password around to friends like candy.

ryukafalz• 11 years ago

Did you have a clue as to where in swap the data was stored? Looking through a swap partition in a hex editor sounds mind-numbing.

girvo• 11 years ago

I broke through our Novell's systems "defences" numerous times. Our IT coordinator hated me (somewhat rightly so), and came at me wanting blood... But luckily I was always a good student, and friendly with the vice principal (who had fielded questions about what I was doing on the PCs when I was in primary school, he was the principal then), so the last time I was banned from using computers on school grounds for year 12, and that was the end of it. My final sin? I gave Quake 1 with the Darkplaces engine to a friend, who promptly transferred it to every computer. The IT coord decided it was me who did it, even though I had no idea it was happening. Oh well, all worked out in the end :)

beerbajay• 11 years ago

I had a really similar experience when I was in high school, though I didn't get expelled. I made a website with photos of students (and their first names) giving the finger to the camera. People of course set this as the home page on library computers.

Unhappily, this was right after Columbine, so the administration was super paranoid and I was a little X-Files-obsessed black-trenchcoat-wearing weirdo... so I got a week's suspension.

acjohnson553• 11 years ago

As someone who is both a former student with authority issues and a former high school teacher, this story leaves me with a whole bunch of feelings. You would think that teachers have the maturity to be more or less immune to the impressions of teenagers, but it's actually quite a challenge to maintain face [1] as the instructional leader of dozens of humans. In my experience in Teach For America, it was a fashionable meme that it's the adults that make education hard, not the children. But I think that's not quite honest. While adults are ultimately responsible for everything that's wrong with education, on a day to day basis, you're put in very delicate and stressful situations with children, who are impulsive, emotional, and myopic. It's really, really hard to deal with adolescents at scale.

Yet, in this case, like so many others, it's very clear that at some point, some of the adults decided that it was appropriate to wage total war on the child who offended them. They allowed their hurt feelings to suspend their sense of empathy and proportionality. Even worse, as the role models for the school, they set a standard of absolutism and intolerance. I can identify with them, while also seeing how badly they failed to take the high road.

It's interesting how this same dynamic has played out in criminal justice as well. We struggle with the ability to treat the incarcerated in a humane manner, to hold police accountable for their excesses, to provide security without domestic militarization, and to fully rehabilitate and reintegrate ex-cons into society.

I guess it's probably an inherent tension in human society, when there is a boundary of authority. I just hope we can learn and progress.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%2...

microcolonel• 11 years ago

While adults are ultimately responsible for everything that's wrong with education, on a day to day basis, you're put in very delicate and stressful situations with children, who are impulsive, emotional, and myopic. It's really, really hard to deal with adolescents at scale.

I'm not sure that this can truly be qualified. The statement that their job entails a stressful situation, does not (inherently) excuse them from inviting it. This is the same argument used by or on behalf of police officers who abuse their post(i.e. He had a hell of a day, witnessed two murders, so it's understandable that he just shot a minor suspect for fleeing). One might forget that they don't need to be a police officer or school teacher, that they made a free and conscious decision to be one and feel no shame for failing at it.

The problem is that individual teachers do not, on their own, have as much ability to make the situation a good one; it takes an effort from the entire system(from other teachers to headteachers to parents to politicians) to change the day-to-day reality, and so it seems as though the situation is "out of our hands".

acjohnson553• 11 years ago

I hope it's clear from my original comment that I 100% agree. My point was that from moment to moment, teachers are human beings. They're going to have human feelings and make mistakes. I can empathize with the initial hurt feelings and perception of loss of control. But I'm not justifying their behaviors in response, by any means.

Shooting a human is a mistake orders of magnitude beyond what I'm talking about. And in this story, it's inexcusable that some of the teachers and the principle were able to de-empathize with the author so much, due to their bruised egos and sense of authority, that they put on a prolonged Draconian push to expel the author. Reminds me of MIT and Aaron Schwartz.

blazespin• 11 years ago

Oh come on, I dropped out of grade 12 (did not complete) and went on to be very successful in college and then university. Getting suspended in high school is really no big deal. This is hardly war.

jacquesm• 11 years ago

It says 'expelled', not suspended. Totally different outcome.

hluska2• 11 years ago

The author closed the article with:

That being said, I heartily do not recommend expulsion as a rite of passage for high school students. I’m fairly certain the extreme levels of stress and anxiety I experienced shaved a few years off my life.

I went to a Catholic school with a noted hockey program where I was required to recite Jesus' family tree from Abraham through his parents and, in biology, had to remember to mention that evolution was more likely than creation, but God still started evolution (to this day, the words 'alpha and omega' hurt). Personally, I would have welcomed expulsion as between the hockey love and the jesus love, I was not exactly enamoured with the state of my education.

Unfortunately, this didn't happen to you or me. It happened to someone who experienced a massive amount of stress as a result. And over what?? Some dipshit adults who decided to squander a learning opportunity in the name of showing how tough they were??

solistice5• 11 years ago

But then there's a difference in dropping out and being expelled, and as someone who was expelled from highschool, it can seem devastating at the time it happens, even if it has minor impact on your future life. Being ground through the wheels for school administration is a harrowing experience for any teenager.

Matter of fact, my little brother who also went through an expulsion has still not quite recovered. The school suspended him for months in middle school, and I think it has impaired his ability to function as a student. When we tried getting him into the German school system again, he failed his reentry exam out of anxiety (he most likely knew the answers, he just filled in nothing), and another year of schooling at a lower tiered school because he couldn't bring himself to fill in exams for the first half of the school year.

So I certainly would not discount the impact an expulsion can have on a student, and I think that school administrators should not use it lightly. It could work out just fine, or utterly demoralize a student that most likely is already marginalized.

patcheudor2• 11 years ago

It's a shame that this got down voted because there is a bit of truth to it. After my son had an issue similar to this in his sophomore year of high-school he choose to simply drop out and get his GED. He wasn't invested in school activities, was a bit of a geek, and too bright for his own good. He also didn't need a scholarship in order to go to college. He got a six month break from school, passed the GED with perfect scores in three sections, scored high on his ACTs & immediately applied to the local university where he was accepted and carried a 3.8 GPA. For me this was a wake up call. I'd never taken school as seriously as my parents, my mom being a school teacher, but I did buy into this myth that high-school graduation was a necessary evil. It turns out that it really can be very optional for some. Once you have a semester or two under your belt at university no employer really cares about a high-school diploma, and for many employers, a non-traditional route can be attractive.

slavik81• 11 years ago

How did you get in to college without finishing High School? I thought that was a pretty hard requirement for most programs.

code_sterling3• 11 years ago

It's interesting, I graduated from that school in '92, and I was surprised when I read it. The faculty I knew, most would have encouraged such a project. My drafting teacher let me do a 3point of a x-wing for my final project. The school let me take 3 years of art in one year. I got caught smoking in the stairwell, and was just told to go outside. I did nudes, a controversial art projects that my college would have raised an eye to. This wasn't a bad school, or at least it wasn't the 5 years before this story occurs. So while I'm sure this happened, my own experience makes me believe that were not getting the whole picture.

toyg• 11 years ago

The difference is that your experiences didn't directly challenge any member of staff. You might have challenged some abstract rule or social norm, but you likely did not personally and publicly attack a teacher. This guy named names and went personal, he crossed a much bigger line. His "crime" was not to lampoon the official magazine, but to personally attack school staff. I don't think any school, as good as it might be, would have tolerated that (although they could have handled it better, as he pointed out).

phaus• 11 years ago

Pretty much all of your post talks about art class. That's the way most art teachers are.

Rudism5• 11 years ago

I was really surprised by how it all went down as well. Up to that point, I had felt that the school, teachers, and administration were all very progressive and tolerant, which was a huge factor in my decision to go forward with the whole project and keep it going as long as I did.

As far as not getting the whole picture, I shared everything I could to the best of my recollection. I also had one of the friends who was involved go over it and it was his opinion that I have left nothing salient out as well. It did all happen close to 20 years ago, however, so it's entirely possible that we've forgotten something significant.

SagelyGuru• 11 years ago

What I missed both in the article and in the consensus that "you personally attacked and offended teachers", is drawing the important distinction between authoring those comments, and merely publishing them. Also, the issue of whether they were subjective but essentially honest, clearly humorous, or malicious fabrications.

In any case, I do not think that taking a personal offence is at all an appropriate reaction to someone merely facilitating an anonymous survey.

escape_goat• 11 years ago

Which Winston Churchill is this? There are two in Ontario alone. I was unable to tell from the article or from briefly researching the author.

jankins• 11 years ago

I wouldn't underestimate the pride and power-trip of those teachers and administrators. The same thing happened to me at a middle school in los angeles, and our newsletter didn't have anything remotely libelous, only criticisms of school policies, dress code, etc. The most poorly-written column compared the school to a concentration camp, which is of course an offensive statement, but not a personal attack. Four of us were suspended and had some other minor punishments. The dean was level-headed and reasonable but others were out for blood.

erikpukinskis• 11 years ago

I guess it's probably an inherent tension in human society, when there is a boundary of authority.

It's for that reason I think authority should be used as an organizational tool of last resort. Sadly it is the first thing many people reach for when they have a problem to solve.

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

Last resort implies it would mostly never be used. But do we have any reason to believe flat hierarchy could ever be effective in a 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 person organization?

I'd also direct you to some of the discussions of the subversive hierarchies that evolved under the surface of 2nd wave femenist, supposedly flat, groups.

rjknight• 11 years ago

I must be about the same age as the author. This certainly brings back memories!

Oh for the days when we could just uncomplicatedly assume that anyone who knew anything about technology was also an instinctive anti-authoritarian, too.

edw519• 11 years ago

Reminds my of the first program I ever wrote, in 10th grade, painstakingly assembled one IBM card at a time, output onto green bar paper.

I changed the school motto from "Gateway High School, Hats Off to Thee" to "Gateway High School, Pants Down to Thee" surrounded by an ascii generated toilet.

The principal took away half my card deck (which would have taken weeks to reproduce), promising to return them only when my father signed my output.

My father reproduced my output by hand with his signature and a label: "Functional Specifications".

The principal returned my cards and never said another word.

bru_5• 11 years ago

Dude you must have gone to an elite high school

hellofunk• 11 years ago

That sucks that your creative high-school gag was met with such hostility by the administration. I'm three years older than you and did something similar in high-school. A friend and I made a MS Word clone from scratch of the formatted template the school used for report cards. Then we filled it up with teachers' comments and grades for us, but in total sarcasm. It was hilarious. The teachers found out about it, and... they had a good laugh also. No harm done. I guess it just depends on your environment.

wsha• 11 years ago

Free speech is important but for some reason this story does not make me feel much sympathy for the author. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it seemed like the newsletter was posting borderline defamatory comments anonymously.

rev_bird6• 11 years ago

Says the person with the freedom to publicly disagree with the article behind an anonymous account on a website.

msie3• 11 years ago

Yes. It's sad how so many here romanticize being a dick in high school. No, not all teachers are saints but I have some sympathy for them too. If this guy created a revenge porn site or a gossip site where other students were being harassed, he wouldn't have had quite as nice a reception here.

gwilkes3• 11 years ago

Loved reading this, I have a very similar story. Same year, 1997, I made a Geocities site and had teacher report cards just like in this story. I put the site up on the library computers home page and then it spread around the school immediately, kids were talking about in the hallways, teachers mentioned in class that they would find who did did it.

I also critiqued the school itself, some of the hypocrisies I saw and notably since it was a Catholic school they had a school rule against pornography even when you were at home. So of course I put up a very soft core nude photo as a sort of fuck you.

However, unlike this story I actually was expelled, but it's not very difficult to get expelled from a Catholic school, it was a regular occurrence at our school. Knowing this I kept it very anonymous and didn't tell anyone.

I got an email from the school saying they would sue me for libel unless I came and turned myself in. That made me pretty nervous and pretty soon after that a student who I knew emailed me saying he loved the site and wanted to help. I then told him who I was and it turns out it was actually a teacher impersonating a student.

My brother and I were both expelled, my brother didn't do anything but contribute a few of the teacher reviews, so it sucked pretty bad for him. For me too of course but I was kicked out halfway through my senior year so I was mostly done with high school anyway. Plus I had already applied to colleges so it the expulsion didn't show up on any transcript the colleges received.

My brother wasn't so lucky since he was only a sophomore when this happened, when it came time to apply for college he got accepted to none of the colleges he applied for. He appealed hard and finally got into one.

azraomega2• 11 years ago

Did you ever find out how they targeted you at the first place?

gwilkes3• 11 years ago

Oh, I had an anonymous email account listed on the website so people could leave feedback or submit additional teacher reviews. So, they didn't know who I was but they could contact me.

I fucked up by outing myself to the teacher impersonating a student, but with a legal threat I guess it could have turned out even worse if I didn't out myself.

Huge drama at the time, my parents were pretty religious so they actually took the values of the school seriously and were so upset that they told me they wouldn't let me go to college.

That was a pretty easy fight to win though as there is no way they could have stopped me.

austenallred• 11 years ago

Similar story here, I still remember Mapleton.tk. I loved that the whole school was talking about it.

The killer feature was actually a forum where we could talk bad about teachers using pseudonyms. A lot of them deserved it too. Nothing made me happier than seeing how much everyone hated Mr. Peterson, the teacher somehow put in charge of the students who had skipped two years of math.

mcfunley• 11 years ago

Same here, I also did basically the same thing in 1997. I wasn't expelled but I was banned from my senior prom and served a lengthy in-school suspension stint.

The administration threatened to write to the colleges I'd already been accepted to and try to get those offers withdrawn, but as far as I know that was just a threat.

nadams• 11 years ago

Our plan was to surreptitiously allow our fellow students to grade and leave anonymous comments about their teachers, which we would collect and publish.

So... ratemyprofessors.com ?

calgoo2• 11 years ago

This reminds me of when i installed key-loggers on all the library computers at school :) Got a lot of interesting info during those weeks. Then my idiot-friend logs into a teachers email account using credentials we found and sends a recommendation to some university for himself... He got expelled, i explained exactly how the key loggers worked etc, and was tasked with 40hours of computer support as a "penance". I just skipped all my classes and completed the "penance" it in less then a week lol. Sometimes i miss those days :)

calgoo2• 11 years ago

Forgot to mention that i was the unofficial network and system admin for the school since i was about 14. I had access to everything except an old 286 with green/black screen that they used for grades. I still wonder if they kept it on that system because of me. I know they upgraded it 1.5 years after i graduated.

greggman• 11 years ago

my self and 4 of my friends got banned from using the computers at our school for ~5 weeks. We were the geeks in the computer class.

Showing my age, but the class had 12 Apple IIs and a networked Corvus hard drive connecting them all for storage. The system had accounts. Each student got some space on the shared hard drive to save their work and could not access each other's storage areas. The teacher of course could access everything and used it to read students' programs for grading.

One time the teacher had logged in and then stepped away to deal with something or a student. One of my friends took that opportunity to do a binary save of a large chunk of memory on that machine, the part where OS/state extra was. Turned out if you loaded that save back into memory you'd become the teacher. He gave us all copies of the file.

We never used it for any kind of mischief but a few days later the teacher noticed one of us doing something we shouldn't have been able to do. The teacher wrote our parents letters and said we were banned from using the computers till the end of the quarter.

IIRC only one set of parents were actually upset. I think the rest were actually kind of proud. It didn't affect our grades. We also liked the teacher. I just thought it was his way of appropriately punishing us to make it clear even though you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should.

sarreph• 11 years ago

Like many commenters, this post brings back memories of similar experiences...

My experience with being silly on school computers was mainly in middle school (age 14) where friends and I would find more inventive ways to wreak havoc on the network. One of the favourite tricks was to hack open the command line (using accessibility options in XP) and remote shutdown other student's machines towards the end of a lesson before they'd saved their work... rather cruel to think back to it now. Another more daring guy sent a string of offensive messages to the principal on a LAN-chat type application that caused pop-ups on the receiver's screen. Come to think of it, there were so many 3rd-party administrative 'tools' that could be run trivially without root access on XP, such as drive-encryptors (rendering machines essentially useless) that it was easy to perform a whole manner of tricks.

Personally, I was only called into the deputy's office once, regarding a server-wide DOOM game installation. They confiscated my memory stick due to it holding the DOOM installation files. However, I somehow managed to get it back the next day without them checking it; thankfully they didn't, because there were so many 3rd-party executables and 'network guides' on there it would've been far worse. I can relate to the stress the author felt in that sense, because going home that night knowing they had my memory stick was one of the most gut-wrenching feelings of my teenage years.

Thankfully, all that was required of me was a meeting with a sysadmin trying to explain why I had filled an obscure part of the server's shared area with DOOM and COD sprites...

donatj2• 11 years ago

Haha, this brings back memories. Starting in Jr. High some friends and I ran a website which started out as just some crudely drawn absurd comics, but later added a section called "Anarchist Times" where we would vent mostly about school in a news-article-esq manner, but also often politics which looking back we knew nothing about. We would let anyone who wanted to write and At its height we had something like 14 kids regularly providing content. A reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and acted like a prince. To my knowledge no one ever got in trouble, we did however get blocked by the schools IT department whom I went to and protested until it was resolved.

There was also some hijynx when we tried to enter the website for class president and were told a website wasn't eligible, so we ran a write in campaign and plastered the school in posters, which the school promptly took down.

This was how I learned PHP and MySQL, which has made me my living the last 10 years!

After high school it fell largely into disuse, but I have paid for the domain every year since then. I've ported it from host to host, and it still lives on my Nginx digital ocean server. Even done a few small upgrades like making the audio of our band "The Medium" playable through the site (html5). Lol, it's at the poorly chosen http://oasisband.net if anyone was curious.

A few people have asked me to change their names which I have obliged. People say some stupid things in highschool, I know I did.

eastWestMath2• 11 years ago

A reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and acted like a prince.

Err, cyber bullying?

bru_5• 11 years ago

It's not just regular bullying... cue ignorant middle aged schoolteacher gasp chorus IT'S CYBER BULLYING!!! cyborg bursts through the wall and grabs nerd by the collar

donatj2• 11 years ago

Meh, it was all in good fun. He was well aware of the site and gave us crap back. It was never mean spirited.

codingdave• 11 years ago

I'm sure the underlying story is true, and the author's core point of freedoms of speech and the poor handling of the situation are true... but this sounds like it was written at the time of the incidents, by the same teenager, and not by an adult reflecting back on it.

logicallee3• 11 years ago

What the hell is this guy doing as a coder - he should be running a media empire by now!

Everything he reported doing in high school is fantastic grassroots marketing and PR, and the content he created was great even back then. The teacher review is one of the best ideas, ever. He got everything down - content, distribution - even on slips of paper - the works.

This is exactly what you read in a media billionaire's bio: expelled from a prestigious high school for running an underground school newspaper, which printed students' uncensored teacher reviews. Oh yes.

More recently - even our HN title is clickbait! Yet his write-up is fantastic, 100% true and a great read! This guy knows how to press people's buttons.

And remember, he got free hosting because some guy thought his writing was so hilarious.

OP, get into media, stat.

Oh, and OP? You are hilarious. No rose-tinted glasses about it.

wolfgke2• 11 years ago

The author clearly writes:

"I was a pretty stereotypical “nerd” in high school. A debilitatingly shy and socially awkward computer club member who spent the vast majority of his time on the internet and listened exclusively to music by “Weird Al” Yankovic.".

logicallee3• 11 years ago

could you elaborate on what you meant by that?

coldcode• 11 years ago

I remember when I was on the school newspaper my junior year (long time ago, before the internet) we all decided to put a fake ad on the back cover of the newspaper just for fun. It was a picture of a girl in a bikini with a headline about her boyfriend loves her because she knows Calculus (or something I forget exactly). Students of course thought it was hilarious, the school did not, and actually fired the journalism teacher (who was female). The next year we were basically locked down and could do nothing without prescreening. Thankfully my family moved a few weeks into the year and I didn't have to deal with it much.

michaelmior• 11 years ago

My messing around in high school was comparably minor. Our network ran Novell NetWare and I managed to discover that there was an unsecured Website that had a number of interest. Most of them were read-only with pretty boring info. However, there was also a messaging function that allowed you to send messages to any machine on the network that would appear as a popup. A couple friends and I messed around a little and I promptly forgot about it.

Turns out someone else had found out about this and decided to make use of the much more dangerous broadcast functionality. I can't remember the message that was sent, but I believe it involved some profanities against our principal. Of course they didn't think such a message could be tracked but it was. I think this person was only suspended for a few days, but the admin learned his lesson and secured things after that.

edem• 11 years ago

I really liked your article and it made me remember that no matter what someone (an authority figure in your case) says, there is always a way.

ejk314• 11 years ago

Ah, the good old days. I remember in middle school when I'd set up my first webpage. I got my first and only in-school-suspension for going to that site during class. Just going to the website. I just wanted to see if it was up, since I had never accessed it from anywhere but home. My teacher's explanation was "It could have been anything! You can't go to websites I don't approve of!"

Now, this would normally have been something trivial I would have just shrugged off. But my computer partner also got in trouble for "not stopping me". What was he going to do, knock me out of my chair before I pressed enter? This kid was the stereotypical teacher's pet who always did his homework and was quiet in class, so I felt particularly bad for getting him in trouble. I even offered to serve two days of ISS instead of him getting in trouble - of course that request was denied.

To this day, I still cannot understand that woman's reasoning. How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment? What kind of person feels the need to punish a child who's showing enthusiasm for a subject they're teaching?

jimmaswell• 11 years ago

The kind of person who got that job simply to be able to enforce arbitrary rules on victims who can't fight back, to feel more powerful.

wyager3• 11 years ago

How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment?

Unfortunately, this kind of thing pops up in the real world a lot as well too. "You're riding a bicycle after drinking a few beers? You could have crashed into someone! DUI felony charge for you!"

enraged_camel• 11 years ago

Driving under the influence is categorically different. You are a real danger to others and can maim or kill them. How is that even remotely comparable to navigating to a personal website in class?

zer00eyz• 11 years ago

if you sit in a parked car with the engine on.. to lets say keep warm, its "intent to drive" even if you have no intent to do so.

http://illinoiscaselaw.com/dui-sleeping-in-car-illinois/ but you can find more. Whats unfortunate is people are TRYING to be responsible and still get in trouble.

loup-vaillant10• 11 years ago

Looks like the unreasoned fear of the technically inept. And I do mean visceral fear, like a sense of imminent danger.

I remember once in "technology" class where we were asked to compose a small document with Corel WordPerfect, with a clip art. Well, I mistook "graph" for clip art, and got a weird square where I should have had a pretty icon. And I didn't know how to remove the square (couldn't select it with the mouse, and I didn't think of trying backspace or undo at that time). So I asked for help.

The instant the teacher saw my document, she said "Ahh, he crashed my computer!", then promptly closed the document without saving it. (15 minutes of work, dammit!)

Simply put, she didn't have the slightest idea about what went wrong, and assumed the worst. I flipped the bozo bit at that point, and never trusted her again.

deanCommie• 11 years ago

A good story, I think a lot of us have at least one story like that of interactions with the technologically-inept.

But I wanted to ask you about your use of the term "flipping the bozo bit". I've seen others use that as a derisive way towards people they think less of, but curiously the source of this expression is prescribing precisely NOT doing this behaviour:

McCarthy's Rule #4 is "Don't Flip The Bozo Bit". McCarthy's advice was that everyone has something to contribute — it's easy and tempting, when someone ticks you off or is mistaken (or both), to simply disregard all their input in the future by setting the "bozo flag" to TRUE for that person. But by taking that lazy way out, you poison team interactions and cannot avail yourself of help from the "bozo" ever again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit

userbinator3• 11 years ago

How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment?

Well, most of society seems perfectly fine with owning and using restricted "jailed" devices, whose existence is justified by the same reasoning...

suspthrowaway• 11 years ago

Ah, school. I was suspended three times for various failure to comply with authority, got straight As anyway. College, high-paying tech job, no problems :).

superkuh• 11 years ago

Your website now doesn't render text unless javascript is enabled. This is bad design. Stop it.

atiti• 11 years ago

I also had a similar story. It was also early 2000s and our high school had a calendar system for each student so they could look up in which room they would have what class. So a friend of mine and I have setup a proxy server which would modify rooms randomly, or randomly cancel classes. In order to "test out" our code, we ARP+DNS spoofed the the whole school network, so anyone visiting the site internally would end up on our site. Most students thought it was super fun that their classes were "cancelled" but obviously teachers didn't approve :-)

It was also a couple of months away from our graduation, and we did get into pretty big trouble, where we got suspended, and had to write a letter of apology to the principal so they would allow us to graduate.

andy_ppp• 11 years ago

You have to say these sort of anonymous reviews should be formalised and teachers questioned if their class think they are bad at their jobs. Or hungover in class.

Of course, I also think teachers should be the highest paid people in society (when I'm king), so take what I say with a pinch of salt.

iolothebard• 11 years ago

Highest paid is fine, but accountability is equally important.

chuckgreenman• 11 years ago

It's funny to think that there is a website devoted to the report card feature of your newsletter. Rate My Professor, while kind of despised, its existence is tolerated.

learnstats22• 11 years ago

When Rate My Teachers first came out, teachers were annoyed by bad reviews and sometimes frightened of the consequences.

Now - it's tolerated, in my opinion, because students on there are a lot nicer than you might expect them to be.

I'd be curious to know what, if anything, has changed over that time.

comrh2• 11 years ago

I had a college professor specifically mention he would love if everyone went on and gave him honest reviews because he was able to get them immediately after the class ended (the feedback cards via the university were 2-3 months behind the semester).

xena• 11 years ago

I nearly got expelled for learning how to use their copy of Macromedia Flash 8 for making games.

autotune• 11 years ago

This reminds me of the time I attempted to use an article from The Onion as part of current events assignment back in high school. Of course it just resulted in a fail and was nowhere near taken out of proportion as OPs stunt but taught me that certain people just can't appreciate humor.

jbapple• 11 years ago

IANAL, but near as I can tell, it's still up in the air if (in the US) students have a constitutional right to be free of official retribution for off-campus speech.

There is some evidence that if the speech is truly off-campus and if it doesn't cause a substantial disruption to school functions (see Tinker v. Des Moines), students are protected. Even the famous Supreme Court "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" case was partially decided based on the speech being at a school-related event.

On the other hand, "disruption" is defined rather loosely sometimes, perhaps even lowering the bar to content that is viral, as long as it is also insulting. See, for instance, SJW v. Lee's Summit.

hellbanner• 11 years ago

Really interesting how lack of anonymous hosting prevented the student's public critique of their teachers.

Related: http://voidnull.sdf.org/ (unafilliated)

ambicapter• 11 years ago

I would hardly call it 'critique', it was just straight up gossip.

gayprogrammer• 11 years ago

My highschool brought me in to a meeting with the principal and police officer when I wrote the name of my boyfriend on my ticket to senior prom. They "convinced" me that I could not go to prom with a guy. End of story.

bru_5• 11 years ago

I love how the police officer was deemed necessary

gravypod• 11 years ago

I was taken to the principles office after they found out I had access to the camera systems of the schools.

I used it all the time to look for friends and check the lines for some bathrooms.

learnstats22• 11 years ago

The initial reaction of the head of English was what surprised me the most in this article.

Shouldn't the English department be happy that their students have understood satire and 1984, without taking a personal grudge? Glad it worked out well.

mikekchar2• 11 years ago

People are people. I worked for 20 years as a programmer and then, for a variety of reason, decided to move to Japan and teach English in a high school (originally for only one year, but loved it so much that I stayed for 5).

Several things surprised me. I think the biggest was that being a good teacher is much harder and requires more talent (and good judgement!!!) than programming. Sure, there is never a time as a teacher that you have to concentrate the way you do as a programmer. However, the decisions you have to make, under intense pressure, are very, very difficult. The consequences can also be severe if you get it wrong.

Students usually ("usually" is a vast understatement) do not see the big picture. Often they feel they are being picked on, or unfairly treated, when in actuality they are being lovingly treated by a teacher who is trying to help them.

Teachers take enormous abuse every day. It was a surprise for me to have students actually hate me (for years!!!) because I wouldn't let them rampage through the class, ruining things for other students. And like I said, you are doing your absolute best, but because the student can't differentiate between behaviour that works well for the group and behaviour that doesn't, they can resent your interference. And they convince all their friends to do so as well. One small discipline issue in a class can result in 10s of people literally hating you for years (or even for ever!)

And teachers make mistakes. The job is really, really, really difficult, so you are bound to make a ton of mistakes (especially when you first start out). I made a point of apologising for my mistakes (sometimes publicly), because I believe strongly that improvement starts with the ability to acknowledge failure and I wanted the students to gain the courage to admit failure. Some students respected this. Some students despised me for it.

One student in particular was so offended that I had given up the teacher-like air of infallibility that he completely lost all respect for me. I was stubborn and decided that the student was entitled to his opinions, so I took his (very unfair) criticism without comment. My colleagues were not so tolerant and took the student aside (for several hours) to explain the hurt he was causing. In the end, that discussion with the student helped him a lot and he did much better in school after that.

As a teacher, you are used to this kind of thing. It is an every day occurrence. Students irrationally (and occasionally rationally) flip between loving you and hating you. You make mistakes and have to just swallow the consequence that probably a group of students will hate you forever because of it. You just try to do better the next time (knowing that given the complexity of the decisions there is a good chance you are going to fuck it up again a few times before you get it right).

Occasionally students are cruel (whether knowingly or unknowingly). One of your jobs as a teacher is to help the student know that there are real people, with real feelings on the other end. It is a difficult lesson for both parties. If you fail to communicate this (as I did with that one student) they may go through life thinking that other people's feelings are not relevant to their own internal sense of justice. As a teacher you would be very irresponsible to allow that to happen.

It's a difficult job....

I'm back in the same area of Japan as I was when I was teaching. I'm doing contract programming now, though. One of the things that makes me very happy is meeting my former students on the street, or at a bar. They often call me over and chat with me. It reminds me why I loved that job.

Rudism5• 11 years ago

I was surprised, too. I thought my reference to animal farm (some animals are more equal than others) was particularly clever.

It's possible that the head English teacher was the one who wrote the original Winston's Way, however, and may have taken it more personally as a result. I'm not sure though.

nickysielicki• 11 years ago

In highschool I made a website (in like 50 lines of web.py, easily the best framework for small sites) with the twitter API that allowed students to post anonymously to an account I ran. It was before YikYak came out, and I'm not mature enough yet to not admit that it was a LOT of fun. ~400 followers (from a school of ~1100).

There was admittedly a lot of cyberbullying, but I got the feeling it was mostly friends making fun of friends and nothing was too nasty. It was more along the lines of teasing each other with embarrassing inside jokes than anything, and I made a strict rule that anyone would be banned if they used anyone's real name so none of this would ever come back and prevent someone from getting into school or getting a job.

It was like 4 months before graduation and my favorite teacher asked me to take it down, so obviously I did. Friends were upset with me, but ultimately we had our fun and I was happy to put it behind.

To relate this to the HN crowd, I have to say that I think YikYak sucks for an anonymous platform. YikYak is so dumb because it's college kids posting either unoriginal jokes or things about buildings on their campus.

The YikYak killer is the YikYak that is only somewhat anonymous. The YikYak where you interact with your friends anonymously, not anonymously with strangers nearby you and your city of 40k people.

msie3• 11 years ago

Ah, young people. You can't equate students rating teachers to teachers grading students. Unless teachers are allowed to say things about students like: "She was a total bitch".

goodcanadian• 11 years ago

I am sure they do say such things in the teacher's lounge. The difference, of course, is that they are not doing it in public.

msie3• 11 years ago

Exactly!

peterwwillis• 11 years ago

I got expelled from several schools for the crime of knowing more about computers than the teachers, having an interest in computer security, and having a website. I was also used as a scapegoat by a network admin who couldn't fix his networking issues. After the first school, every other school assumed i was some kind of dangerous delinquent. It's part of what prompted me to drop out.

imaginenore• 11 years ago

It's sad that the same organization is the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Even for the appeal process.

A shitty system.

Scea91• 11 years ago

I have to say that it was perfetly written. I was hooked.

loup-vaillant10• 11 years ago

Be sure to read the comment below about how another student got into similar trouble for messing up with the school's unsecured network, but was able to blackmail his way out. (The school had committed insurance fraud.)

Funny how people change their attitude the second they realise they do not have the upper hand after all.

kaonashi• 11 years ago

Could've been me if my HS administrators had a lick of savvy.

Kenji• 11 years ago

In junior high I invented my own currency–I printed an initial run of “Daddio-Dollars” on my computer which I handed out to kids at school, then sold candy and some of my brothers toys to them. Once I had fostered enough confidence in the purchasing power of my homemade money, I printed up a ton of it and used it to buy all kinds of sweet stuff from the other kids.

Wow, the man invented central banking independently.

codewithcheese• 11 years ago

Wow schools stray so far from actual education. To punish kids with the threat of lack of education for airing their opinion on their own education experience is so strange to me. It seems more like some sort of totalitarian experiment than education.

neonbat• 11 years ago

I find it immensely entertaining that Rudis created his own federal reserve inside his school and immediately abused the monetary system to "buy all kinds of sweet stuff." You should have gone into politics @Rudism. You would fit right in.

bru_5• 11 years ago

I can relate to this story. One of my funniest memories was when my 7th grade teacher reprimanded me for "putting a password" on my website. She was referring to the username and password fields in the sidebar. I told her everything on the site was visible without a user account, but I guess she didn't believe me, because she made one that night. Of course she didn't find anything. The best part was she filled out her whole profile, including a picture of herself, her interests "knitting, helping children", etc, just so she could have a chance at discovering an imaginary section of the site where everyone at my school was lambasting her.

Animats• 11 years ago

The most famous incident like this is "neverseconds".[1] This is the blog of a primary school girl in Scotland who, each day, took a picture of her school lunch and reviewed it. The school authorities threatened her and insisted she stop. That backfired on them, badly. Coverage on TechDirt. Coverage on the BBC. Worldwide press coverage. 10 million page views of blog. Complaints in Parliament. School authorities disciplined by national education minister. Public apology by town council. Girl wins several awards for fighting censorship.

Her blog is still active, three years later. She encourages other kids to send in pictures of their school lunches, and it's a great site for seeing what kids have for lunch around the world.

[1] http://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/06/goodbye.html

comrh2• 11 years ago

That's crazy. She's just documenting her reality. I'm glad she "won" in the end.

userbinator3• 11 years ago

My first thought was "school food is under NDA now"? That is indeed quite ridiculous.

ggreer• 11 years ago

I wish the post had gone into more detail about how the author was caught. Did another student rat him out? Was there some forensic evidence he didn't consider? I did much worse at my high school, but I was never caught. Chalk it up to trustworthy friends, knowledge of computer forensics, and a little luck. Even if I had been caught, I doubt there would have been any real consequences. A suspension? It's going on my Permanent Record? Pfft, who cares?

If there's one piece of advice I can impart to students, it's this: Don't worry about getting into trouble. Unless you're committing an actual crime, the consequences are entirely forgettable. Even in the author's case, a clear and disproportionate overreaction, he's glad to have had the experience. So don't be cowed. Have fun.

Rudism5• 11 years ago

I never really found out how they caught me. I suspect the guy in the states who started hosting the site after the initial shut-down told them my name when they contacted him, but who knows.

bru_5• 11 years ago

I am jelly of some of my friends who got really good at programming in high school. One dude managed to replace the keyboard drivers for every keyboard on the entire network with garbage, so that if they plugged in another keyboard, it still wouldn't work. He also gave his English teacher a "wacky mouse", where she would be presenting something and at some random time her cursor switched and behaved as if attached on the end of a spring. She would often inspect the underside of the mouse in response to this problem.

mud_dauber• 11 years ago

I can see the same exact story playing out on Glassdoor. It's going to happen.

geon3• 11 years ago

I have read several stories like this from the US. It baffles me how many Americans seems to think their country is the bastion of freedom of speech. Having it in your constitution apparently doesn't mean shit.

harmegido• 11 years ago

You don't get these freedoms as a student. Or at least, the school is free to discipline you (or kick you out) however they see fit for basically whatever reason. You'll notice that there was no mention of police in the article. Our freedoms exist only in respect to the law.

I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to.

sound_of_basker• 11 years ago

The USA identifies ISIS/ISIL as a terrorist group [0]. There is a good chance that you will at-least be detained for questioning if you carry out said activity.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/06/remar...

jqm2• 11 years ago

"I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to."

Oh, there will be repercussions. You just won't know about them right away. Repercussion #1. You will be on a list. Have fun flying or leaving the country any time soon. You might eventually do it, but it won't be fun.

Immediate repercussions are almost preferable.

geon3• 11 years ago

You don't get these freedoms as a student.

Exactly. As soon as money enters the picture, all civil liberties tends to be thrown out. Yet, students should IMHO be encouraged to exercise their freedom of speech and assembly. How do you teach a society democracy if not through activities like this?

And this is reflected in the low voter turnout.

I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to.

Using this as an example of "strong" freedom is so sad. Really. That should be a basic requirement for any civilized society. Yet, as another poster mentioned, it's probably not even true.

jqm2• 11 years ago

This particular story takes place in Canada though.

geon3• 11 years ago

The US stories plays out the same way, though.

dblock• 11 years ago

Awesome story!

In college we ran a website called "The No More Bzzz Bzzz Hun Hun" about the professors at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. It was hosted in Sweden with X-Force (mrsaint.net), a pirate group. Similar idea, but you could vote for the most boring teachers (bzzz bzzz is the noise that a fly makes in a boring classroom and hun hun is something to do with "fly f---ing", a term in French that means saying things that are boring and useless). You can see its remnants in http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz. They never found us, but I was definitely scared about getting expelled from college at some point. Unfortunately I no longer have the poll data :(

http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html is priceless.

elwell2• 11 years ago

In high school, I made a WScript that prompted user "Network timed out on line #6. Please re-enter password:" and would surreptitiously record it. I put this on a floppy, popped it in when someone in the library went to the printer, waited, came back and said, "sorry forgot my floppy; can i get it, excuse me". Didn't use it maliciously; usually would just modify the folder settings on their home drive on the network to have repeating images of Pokemon as a background image. I suppose this all sounds quite devious in writing.

elwell2• 11 years ago

I almost got suspended in high school for making a "virus" (just an .html page with some js to open itself recursively in a new window).

roflchoppa2• 11 years ago

one of the only times i got in trouble at school was talking openly about potassium nitrate in my math class, and how to make explosives out of it. I completely understand why i was sent to the VP's office. Oh and that other time i was burning leaves with a mag. glass.

fspacef• 11 years ago

Kudos to that Dad for not over reacting during all of the drama and supporting his kid

smrtinsert2• 11 years ago

This is another good example of the complete and pervasive misunderstanding of what free speech is. Unfortunately law, ethics and morality cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker.

Churchill high school kids come from one of the richest school districts in the country practically defining the term 'privileged'. He undoubtedly could have found a more productive and healthier hobby.

The Website That Got Me Expelled

Related Stories