Student Given Detention For Using Firefox [UPDATED] 818
An anonymous reader writes "Several sites are reporting that a student has been given detention for using Firefox to do his classwork. No, really. The student was in class, working on an assignment that necessitated using a browser. The teacher instructed him to stop using Firefox and to do his classwork, to which the student responded that he was doing his classwork using a 'better' browser (it is unclear whether the computer was the student's own computer or not). The clueless teacher (who called the rogue program 'Firefox.exe') ordered him to detention." Update: 12/17 20:09 by SM One of the school officials was nice enough to contact us and let us know this is a hoax. If you are planning on calling the school please refrain from doing so, I'm sure they have had enough excitement for one day.
Am I the only one surprised... (Score:4, Interesting)
I do wonder what version of windows was being used that the teacher noticed it called "firefox.exe" (and then subsequently changed it to "foxfire.exe" in the write-up).
How about the possibility.. (Score:2, Interesting)
If not, I'm sure the teacher could get in trouble for not making the kid use IE.
Not saying its right, just saying its a possibility.
Re:detention for disobedience (Score:2, Interesting)
these are all possibilities, but since none of these are mentioned in the teacher's letter [wordpress.com] linked to in TFA then we can dismiss them.
If the kid had a history of infractions then the teacher should have mentioned it in the letter. Likewise if the kid was being a smart-arse in his explanation the teacher should have (and would have) mentioned it. And the same applies to the other 3 points you made.
However the teacher made none of these points in his letter - judging by the teacher's side of the argument (given in the letter) the teacher just didn't know what he was talking about.
This actually happened to me... (Score:2, Interesting)
So there I was, Fall 2001, my senior year in high school. As one of my classes, my friends and I were the tech support for the entire school, and we had administrator priviliges on everything but the county network and the gradebooks. We reformatted computers, did network stuff, set up teacher accounts, and so on. We also got away with playing Rainbow Six over the network.
At the time of my incident, the school's computers were all running an old version of Netscape, which hadn't been updated in some time. I believe most of the computers had IE 5, which even though it was IE, was far superior to the Netscape version the school was running.
Anyways, I was in one of the English department's writing labs, working on an assignment using IE instead of the school-sanctioned Netscape. The lab administrator flipped out, wrote me up, unplugged the computer, and sent me to see the assistant principal. (Now, this woman running the labs was a complete idiot... if anything out of the ordinary happened, even "please insert disk into drive a," she'd flip out and unplug the computer, then put in a work request... by the time we got there, she'd tried to turn it back on, and wondered why it wouldn't start up...) And to make it even better, I had just been in that morning reformatting one of her computers. Go figure.
So I get to the principal's office, and explain what was going on. She laughed, explained that the school was basically getting some kind of kickback to use Netscape, and told me not to worry about it. She later had words with the lab administrator.
Re:Ignorant Teachers = Problems (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Am I the only one surprised... (Score:4, Interesting)
Chances are also good that the teacher never saw the screen of the kid in question.
And, if the kid installed Firefox, he could have also uninstalled it, deleting all history. Any kid savvy enough to install Firefox is also probably savvy enough to have a good reason to avoid admin lockdowns in IE that prevent one from deleting your browsing history.
Worse? If the program running really *was* Foxfire.exe, not Firefox. I see no one has entertained the possibility that the kid was running malware. Also simple enough to rename utorrent.exe to foxfire.exe.
However, all of the above aside, aren't kids *supposed* to be supervised while on the net?
Essentially by running Firefox, the kid could've gotten around blocked sites, bypassed proxies, and been browsing pr0n with no accountability.
And as a sysadmin having dealt with too many users having installed things on work computers they shouldn't have (did the kid install the Google desktop with FF?), I'm completely on the teacher's side.
Re:OSS is evil. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:UPDATE! Cory Doctorow just reported... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Some things never change (Score:3, Interesting)
To convert my Comp Sci degree, it would have required 2.5 years of education. So the result is that most public school computer teachers have no real computer experience other than maybe using Word / Excel. Technically-minded people who want to teach computers don't want to put 4 years into a business degree (or add 2+ years to their CS degree), and people who got a degree to teach business don't tend to want to teach computers, or else don't tend to be very good at it.
Re:authority figure is a moron (Score:2, Interesting)
Bureaucratic stupidity (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it funny that while in theory schools exist to help students learn about the nature and the society they are growing in, detention [wikipedia.org] punishes students by making them stay in the school more, therefore implying that school is probably a bad place to spend one's time.
Here we have a great example of a brainless bureaucracy punishing one of its subjects for being smarter than the crowd. This student may have done something wrong (installed software on someone else's PC without permission) BUT I hope we all can see here that this student was smart enough to understand the deficiencies of mainstream browser(s), find a better browser, and install it. One would assume that society and schools should encourage children to take initiative, fix mistakes when they see them, and take decisions that make their life and the life of everyone better. This student discovered that the big bureaucracy they were subjected in was using a stone age browser, and he took a bold decision to fix the problem immediately without bureaucratic inefficiencies (the only problem being that he should have asked for some kind of permission first because the computer was probably not their property, but we can overlook this because we can't expect from young kids to observe complex society rules, so we should have used this as an opportunity to teach them, but detention really doesn't help a pupil to understand the concept of property at all, it only makes them feel alienated from society and think that they live in a dangerous place).
This is exactly how self-organised societies can function (by the way my academic research is related to self-organised non-hierarchical business companies and swarm intelligence algorithms), self-organisation is a good thing, and yet big bureaucracies like this school kill every spark of self-organisation at first opportunity. One has to wonder whether discipline and hierarchical control has become the new religion and it causes us to live in greatly inefficient bureaucratic McDonaldised iron cages (ironically McDonaldisation implies efficiency but in reality the associated bureaucracies create inefficiencies in many ways). Really, how much time have you lost trying to persuade your boss (if you work in a traditionally hierarchical company, which I thankfully managed to avoid as an independent) that your next project should be done in a serious language such as Python or Lisp instead of .NET? Or that Firefox and Thunderbird should be allowed on your work PC?
Also, why should schools be designed with teachers being superior to students? All humans are students, after all, and some students may know more in one subject than the teachers. For example, in this case probably the teacher knew more in some academic subject (let's say history) and the kid knew more in technology. I see this as a good opportunity to learn: The teacher could invite the student to speak publicly to the class about why this mysterious program "firefox.exe" is a better browser, and they could ask the student to write an academic essay analysing their position on browser choice and argue for or against allowing students to install whatever they want on school PCs. The teacher could offer guidance to the student, explaining that while some students may know better and install good software (firefox), other students may put the school in risk by installing malicious software (viruses), and for this reason some sort of efficient supervision needs to exist. The student then would be required to search online for examples of arguments supporting each view and come up with their own position on the matter, etc... All this could be a great academic exercise, and it would also offer the teacher the opportunity to *learn* from the student, specifically to learn why "firefox.exe" is a better browser. This is what I mean that everyone is a student... Even PhD holders and well-known researchers are nothing more than students, they d
This has happened to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, incredible as it may seem, this has happened to me.
Let me repeat that:
this HAS happened to me.
Schools (K-12 at least) seem to be under the impression that students should be locked down hard from the Internet - a policy I may not agree with, but see good reason for. However, this attitude has gotten me into trouble a number of times.
For instance, one day we had some assignment to look something or another up on the Internet. Since I had my laptop there, I decided that I would use it instead (it has a Dvorak keyboard, which I like better than QWERTY). I pulled out my laptop, hooked it up to an unused RJ45 jack with a cat5e cable that I had brought from home, and did the assignment. At the end of the hour, as we were all packing up, our "sysadmin" (I use the term loosely, as I could do a better job than him while in a coma) walked in and saw my laptop. He walked over, asked my name, and then asked me to try to access a blocked webpage (myspace, if I remember correctly). I typed in the URL, and lo and behold the site came up. The sysadmin looked puzzled, thanked me, and walked away, polite as can be. The next day I found my computer account suspended and a fresh new detention slip waiting for me for circumventing school security, even though I had never done so until he asked me to visit the blocked website.
The first detention was something that I could see a faint glimmer of rationality in, but the second one I got took the cake. This one occurred a few days later, while my computer account was still suspended. I was in the lab again, using the teacher's account (we needed the internet again, and my laptop had suddenly and mysteriously been banned from connecting to the internet at school) when the sysadmin walked into the room and saw me on the computer. He talked to me teacher for a while, and I could see her trying to explain why I needed her account and his insistence that I was breaking every school rule known. Eventually, he walked over to me and asked whose account I was on, etc. and told me to get off immediately. I complied, but before he walked away I asked why my laptop could no longer connect to the network. I asked as polite as you please, no anger in my voice, no threatening actions, etc. He simply looked at me with an odd expression on his face for a few seconds and then walked off. Next day I get a slip with not one, not two, not three, but FOUR detentions for "using another person's account" and for "insubordination."
All this hyperbole brings me back to my initial point: at a different point in time, I got a detention for using a version of portable firefox from my thumbdrive.
Firefox in school (Score:2, Interesting)
Similar thing happened to me (Score:0, Interesting)
Lo and behold, we were kicked out of the library for playing games, despite the fact we were writing it. Not one to pass up an opportunity, we popped out to mcdonalds for the rest of the period
Re:OSS is evil. (Score:3, Interesting)
They freak out easily, think that a broken off USB port on the back of a computer is easily fixed by going to radio-shack and cant understand why you refuse to give them administrator rights after they hosed the entire fleet of 45 classroom Pc's by loading a new program purchased without your input that freaks out when it sees multiple copies running on the network and is not a network version. (they saved money and bought 45 copies of the single user version and not 1 copy and 45 licenses of the network version.)
The teachers you need to keep FAR, FAR away from computers and teaching computers is typically the Computer class teacher.
Even if it were not a hoax, detention is appropria (Score:3, Interesting)
This isnt about politics of OSS, but rather simple control of hardware on their network and making sure it is consistently running.
Guess what can happen in the real world if you do that type of stuff? anywhere from nothing to finding a new job.
Re:authority figure is a moron (Score:3, Interesting)
Say the kid was stopped by the police for something he didn't do. He knows he didn't do it, the cop is convinced he did. The cop tells him that he is being detained, and goes to handcuff the kid. Should the kid fight the cop to prevent being handcuffed for suspicion of something he didn't do? No, and if he did, the Tazing, Macing, or ass kicking he would get as a result, not to mention the then VERY VALID charge of resisting arrest, would be entirely justified.
In the described situation in the classroom, you teach the kid to comply with the teacher, and then seek to talk to the teacher in a private discussion and explain what he was doing, to prevent future misunderstandings. The teacher can then check it out with the school's IT staff or others who are entrusted to make those decisions, and if the student is still not happy, then he should continue to comply with the request not to run firefox in class while he goes throughs channels to see if the policy can be changed. That is the responsible way to teach our kids to handle their problems. To teach them that they do not have to obey someone in a position of authority just because they know they are in the right is to teach them the entirely wrong way of resolving things in the real world.
Re:OSS is evil. (Score:3, Interesting)