Let's Talk: Kids, Science, and Punishments

Every now and again, I like to take a moment to discuss something that directly affects me.  It might be a post a friend makes on Facebook, it might be a comment I hear on the street, it might be something in the news.

Today, I read something in the news that, I don't know why, but it just really, really bothered me.  Here's the news story that triggered it.  My opinions follow after the cut.




I realize it's a different world from when I was in high school.  I graduated one year before Columbine, three years before 9/11, and I'll admit, the 90s were a different time in many ways.  But some things were already changing.

I went to high school at Centreville High School in Clifton, Virginia.  If I remember correctly, my graduating class was near quadruple digits, and the freshman class was well past it.  No, I don't know why they named the school after the neighboring town instead of the one it was in, but I didn't really get a vote in the matter.  Our track was actually condemned one year. 

Our class mascot was the Brass Monkeys.  Those funky monkeys.  True story.

Here's a few things I remember about "security" at my school:

• My school hired former Washington Redskin players (not good ones, based on how nobody had ever heard of them) to be security guards at my school.  They'd wander the halls, drive around in a golf cart, and generally just pick up people getting in trouble and carry them off.
• They hired a woman who was bigger than any of the male guards.  Everybody was terrified of her and called her "The Ogre."  I hit my growth spurt in high school, and this woman was a head taller than me, and about twice as wide.
• Despite all this security, you couldn't walk up a single flight of stairs or go into a bathroom without finding cigarettes, burned out or unlit, scattered across the floor or stuffed in sinks.
• If you wore a hat for more than five minutes, however, an adult would walk past, take it, and keep walking without saying a word.

Now, I want to say that I was also a good kid.  I was only ever in two fights in my time in high school; one was someone picking a fight with me because I'm pretty sure his home life was terrible and he needed to feel superior to someone, and the other...well, it's complicated.  In both of them, I didn't really get in any trouble because everyone in the administration liked me.  I actually started the latter of the fights (it's a great story, I'll tell it another time), and the other kid got in more trouble than I did.

But here's the other thing I remember:  punishments were fair.  If there wasn't any intended malice, the school didn't go out of its way to make an example of you.

In the news story I referenced above, the girl mentioned put aluminum foil and drain cleaner into a small plastic bottle.  The resulting chemical reaction created enough gas that it popped the cap off the bottle and created a little bit of smoke.  There wasn't an explosion, nobody was hurt, the girl didn't immediately run away or put it where it would cause a scare.  She was curious what would happen.  She was performing a science experiment.

And for that, she got expelled and is being charged with two adult felony charges.

Let me tell you about some of the things I did (or was present for) in school that nobody ever got in trouble for:

• I almost lit my fifth grade classroom on fire doing an experiment where I proved that fire needs oxygen to live.  I lit a paper towel on fire, put it in a jar, and then sealed the jar.  The fire burned out before it ate the paper towel.  I opened the jar to show people, took out the paper towel, and fwoomph, it burst into flames again, and I dropped it on my teacher's desk, which was covered in papers.  We got it put out quickly.
• I tried to build one of those contraptions in high school where you have to get an egg safely to the ground.  My first attempt, my egg fell out and hit a kid in the head.  From three stories up.
• I was part of a rocket demonstration of how thrust works that wound up punching a hole in a window of another teacher's English class.
• My teacher once tried to demonstrate how air pressure changes at different points underwater or in space, and wound up launching a cork stopper out of the machine and out the door of the classroom where it embedded in a faux brick wall.  The principal of the school was standing near that exact spot when it happened.
• I shorted out an entire floor of the school.  Our lab tables had plugs in them, but there was no sign of any wires so everybody in the class thought they didn't work.  I unfolded a paper clip, poked it in one part of the plug.  Nothing happened, so I took it out (not getting electrocuted, so obviously it didn't work), folded it into a u-shape, and stuck it in both slots.  Yeah, the plug was actually live.   
• I was present when a kid left a beaker of chemicals on a Bunsen burner too long (with a stopper in the top, so the pressure was building).  He picked it up with his tongs, carried it over to a sink, and ran cold water over it.  The beaker exploded.  He didn't get in trouble.
•  For one science experiment, a group of us filled balloons with different gasses and then tossed them onto lit Bunsen burners so that the balloons would pop and the gasses would burn different colors.  We were graded on this.  We got an A-.
• I regularly picked locks of the trailers outside that classes were held in (our school was overflowing with students) and sat around in them during lunch being completely antisocial but not having to deal with the noise pollution from the cafeteria.  The locks were ridiculously easy to pick, too.
• In the cooking class I took, I almost lit the kitchen on fire while trying something that, let's just say, was a very poor choice of mixed ingredients in a hot pan on the stove.

My point?  You can't punish a child with expulsion and adult felony charges for wanting to learn.  Especially not one who, according to school officials who have taken her side, has "never been in trouble before" and was "an exemplary student."

Maybe a suspension for a couple of days if you want to be really strict, but I'd simply give the girl detention for a few days for being a bit irresponsible.  There was no malice in the act and there wasn't even any real risk to any body's health, it seems.  Now, if it had been a sturdier bottle, it could have been worse, but that's where the "being irresponsible" comes in.

Now, I'm not going to get into the debacle about unfair standards compared to other cases the ADA in charge of the case has overseen, or the apparent racial undertones that are being raised.  I just think it's ridiculous that in a time when we're falling further and further behind in science, and with all the struggles to get girls and women more involved in sciences, we're going to punish a girl for having the curiosity to perform her own experiment.