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[Education] - Where Silicon Valley Is What's The Matter With Kansas

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    DecatusDecatus Registered User regular
    zagdrob wrote: »
    The only real difference is the app, which is terrible yes its being mandated from the top but I'd bet a lot of teachers just ignore the policy and do whatever it is they want.

    This part REALLY depends. Like Gniz said above, it's often the case that these apps are used to track metrics and fuck over anyone that admin doesn't like.

    As a completely random example that in "no way" reflects my work experience...

    Mr. Football got the JV team to State last year so he can do no wrong and his kids wander the halls/campus being assholes. I teach ELA and my kids are suffering from years of learning loss, 70% are learning English as an additional language, and I have zero parental involvement. My State test scores suck due to these factors. Say I let a kid use the bathroom one too many times, or a kid slips out of class when Im working with a high needs kid because "lol what are class size caps, here are 40 kids good luck."

    Guess which of us is not getting their contract renewed, or their position will be cut due to budget and so they'll be shuffled off to a new school next year? Best of 3, but your first 2 guesses don't count.

    PSN: decatus90
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    N1tSt4lkerN1tSt4lker Registered User regular
    So we have a similar digital hall pass. At our school, it really amounts to admin doing a school-wide crackdown because a small percentage of kids abuse bathroom breaks to vape or skip class. The bathroom on our hall is literally ten feet away from our room, so I've never used it, and our admin is generally "you use this the way you need to that works for you." We have a pretty supportive set of administrators who trust us. It is absolutely a thing that can be abused by both at the teacher and admin level, and largely an over-reaction to the vape-in-the-bathroom trend/parents getting annoyed at the teachers that their wander-the-halls-instead-of-be-in-class child has bad grades (the app will email their parents). So, voila! Digital bathroom pass. 🙄 It's just...really ripe for abuse. I've met too many teachers who absolutely think bathroom breaks are a personal affront to their class authority or something.

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    HydropoloHydropolo Registered User regular
    A school implementing a bathroom pass app is insanity to me, and not for ANY reason so far listed. That's a PII nightmare. I'm willing to bet none of these schools have run this past their infosec folks, or... you know, have good ones. We do multiple PII type certs, including hipaa, and we're just the transit portion of things, so our risk is actually very low, but the idea of holding onto potential kids PII and entrusting it to a third party app? HOOOOO boy.

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    MillMill Registered User regular
    Willing to bet none of the fuckers making this call, ever bothered to ask child protective services about what qualifies as child abuse. Denying a child the ability to use the bathroom qualifies as child abuse and it's maddening that school systems keep finding fuckers that want to rehash the whole "I don't to let those unruly children use the bathroom because they just abuse it to skip class!" bullshit, which these fuckers keep losing when someone gets around to fighting them on it.

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    Mc zanyMc zany Registered User regular
    every time I read a story like this I wonder if the phrase "duty of care" has any meaning in the USA.

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    AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    Mc zany wrote: »
    every time I read a story like this I wonder if the phrase "duty of care" has any meaning in the USA.

    The USA has a long, storied history of treating children as the property of their caretakers - with everything that implies.

    XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
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    MorganVMorganV Registered User regular
    In the conflict between "duty of care" and "respect my authoritah!", duty never stood a chance.

    I guess I shouldn't be surprised that those positions are attained by people seeking any small amount of power, but the whole concept is alien to me.

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    AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    Indiana legislators have proposed a law allowing college professors to lose tenure and be fired if students find they aren't "promoting intellectual diversity" (read: espousing right wing positions to the satisfaction of the Turning Point set):
    A new Indiana law allows universities to revoke a professor’s tenure if they don’t promote so-called “intellectual diversity” in the classroom.

    Supporters of the measure say it will make universities more accepting of conservative students and academics. But many professors worry the law could put their careers in jeopardy for what they say, or don’t say, in the classroom.

    “I’d say it ends tenure in the state of Indiana as we know it,” said Ben Robinson, associate professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University. . .

    The law also creates a system where students and staff can submit complaints that could be considered in tenure reviews.

    Campos explains why this is utter gooseshit:
    The notion that “intellectual diversity” is by definition desirable inside a university classroom is nonsense, as I’ve argued before. Intellectual diversity is good when it advances the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and bad when it harms those things, which are why the university exists in the first place.

    XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
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    N1tSt4lkerN1tSt4lker Registered User regular
    Hydropolo wrote: »
    A school implementing a bathroom pass app is insanity to me, and not for ANY reason so far listed. That's a PII nightmare. I'm willing to bet none of these schools have run this past their infosec folks, or... you know, have good ones. We do multiple PII type certs, including hipaa, and we're just the transit portion of things, so our risk is actually very low, but the idea of holding onto potential kids PII and entrusting it to a third party app? HOOOOO boy.

    I’m pretty sure ours is an app inside of/attached to PowerSchool, so I’m not sure PII would be a problem given that PS already has all that info? But I only have to worry about PII with my own students’ stuff so I’m not sure how that works at an institutional level with school-management software.

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    GilgaronGilgaron Registered User regular
    Sounds like the sort of thing that will inspire lots of doctor's notes for intervention plans.

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    HydropoloHydropolo Registered User regular
    N1tSt4lker wrote: »
    Hydropolo wrote: »
    A school implementing a bathroom pass app is insanity to me, and not for ANY reason so far listed. That's a PII nightmare. I'm willing to bet none of these schools have run this past their infosec folks, or... you know, have good ones. We do multiple PII type certs, including hipaa, and we're just the transit portion of things, so our risk is actually very low, but the idea of holding onto potential kids PII and entrusting it to a third party app? HOOOOO boy.

    I’m pretty sure ours is an app inside of/attached to PowerSchool, so I’m not sure PII would be a problem given that PS already has all that info? But I only have to worry about PII with my own students’ stuff so I’m not sure how that works at an institutional level with school-management software.

    Not up to speed on PowerSchool and IANAL, I just work closely with our IS officer and I mentioned this (the bathroom thing, not what you said) to him and he just about had an aneurysm. After he recovered his next words were "what on earth could be worth that kind of possible extra liability?"

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    GnizmoGnizmo Registered User regular
    Gilgaron wrote: »
    Sounds like the sort of thing that will inspire lots of doctor's notes for intervention plans.

    That is such a massive pain in the ass that school administrations often love to try and undermine unless you throw a complete fit.

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    shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    We just never had hall passes or bathroom passes at all. You just asked to go pee and then the teacher was like "Sure" and then you went. And they weren't stupid so they'd not let more then a few people go at a time and they'd notice if you were gone too long or whatever. And the vast vast majority of students just went pee like normal goddamn human beings and then came back to class.

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    enlightenedbumenlightenedbum Registered User regular
    Lawsuit is being pitched to my school board to try to sue the big social media companies to pay for the downstream harm caused by addiction to their platforms (mental health, security issues from social media threats, etc.). Legal theory is the same as that used to go after the opioid companies (public nuisance). I'm kind of fascinated by it.

    Lots of districts have apparently already filed this kind of suit.

    Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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    GilgaronGilgaron Registered User regular
    On the one hand they're not wrong, on the other I guess I'm not sure if it helps or hurts since the likely effect is a lot of teens using mail.ru email addresses to interact with social media run beyond prying eyes of adults and govts. But maybe 4chan is better than some algo honeypot anyhow.

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    enc0reenc0re Registered User regular
    I’ve been saying for years that social media is the next tobacco. They are optimizing for teenage addiction, they know about the harm, and they are not subtle about it.

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    Lord_AsmodeusLord_Asmodeus goeticSobriquet: Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered User regular
    Gilgaron wrote: »
    On the one hand they're not wrong, on the other I guess I'm not sure if it helps or hurts since the likely effect is a lot of teens using mail.ru email addresses to interact with social media run beyond prying eyes of adults and govts. But maybe 4chan is better than some algo honeypot anyhow.

    They'll have to settle for forums, discord servers and reddit communities

    Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
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    DonnictonDonnicton Registered User regular
    Boldly into the new frontier.

    Principal of a high school in Baltimore was suspended in January over a recording that was "anonymously" emailed to teachers ostensibly of that principal making racist and antisemitic comments.

    Investigators concluded this week that the recording was a deepfake and the school staffer who created the fake - the school's athletics director who had previously gotten into conflict with the principal over the director's questionable behavior - has been arrested.

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/26/us/pikesville-principal-maryland-deepfake-cec/index.html
    The recording went viral in January, provoking rage in suburban Baltimore. It seemed that Pikesville High School Principal Eric Eiswert had been caught making racist and antisemitic comments. Angry phone calls overwhelmed the front desk. Employees felt afraid. Security was tightened.

    Eiswert was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. He received various threats of violence. A police report said one person told him the “world would be a better place if you were on the other side of the dirt.”

    All along, Eiswert denied making the offensive remarks. He said that wasn’t his voice on the recording. He believed it was an AI deepfake. And on Thursday, law-enforcement authorities announced they believe he was right.

    The recording was indeed a fake, according to the Baltimore County Police Department. And the man accused of making it — a school employee who had clashed with the principal — was arrested on charges that included disturbing the operation of a school.

    “Today, we are relieved to have some closure on the origins of this audio,” Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski said at a news conference on Thursday that hinted at the disturbing possibilities of artificial intelligence. “However, it is clear that we are also entering a new, deeply concerning frontier.”

    ...

    Whole story is pretty wild, one of the teachers the recording was emailed to was also known not to get along with the principal, and took it upon herself to email the recording to the media, the NAACP, and gave a copy of the recording to a student she knew would post it all over social media.

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    Captain InertiaCaptain Inertia Registered User regular
    Welp

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    Phoenix-DPhoenix-D Registered User regular
    Pressing X to doubt until I see the proof of how it was determined to be deepfaked.

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    LilnoobsLilnoobs Alpha Queue Registered User regular
    Maybe deepfakes will be the snake eating its tail. The internet mentality has often been guilty before proven innocent - maybe the prevalence of deepfakes will bring us back to innocent until proven guilty? That is after a long transition of people doxxing/canceling others based on AI generated evidence until the culture catches up.

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    ShadowfireShadowfire Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
    Gonna be a real fucking fun election...

    WiiU: Windrunner ; Guild Wars 2: Shadowfire.3940 ; PSN: Bradcopter
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    Gabriel_PittGabriel_Pitt (effective against Russian warships) Registered User regular
    Phoenix-D wrote: »
    Pressing X to doubt until I see the proof of how it was determined to be deepfaked.

    The dumbass who made the deepfake did it on school computers and didn't seem to consider the fact that the parts that required online access would leave a followable footprint.

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    MorganVMorganV Registered User regular
    edited April 27
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Maybe deepfakes will be the snake eating its tail. The internet mentality has often been guilty before proven innocent - maybe the prevalence of deepfakes will bring us back to innocent until proven guilty? That is after a long transition of people doxxing/canceling others based on AI generated evidence until the culture catches up.

    Nah.

    The internet isn't built for self-reflection. It's built for massive overreaction first, and then pretending you had nothing to do with it second.

    I mean, people have been fucking this up since at least the Boston bombings over a decade ago, through at least the Sydney stabbings two weeks ago.

    It's a variation on the Gabe Internet Theory. Quasi-anonymity plus non-accountability, coupled with "engagement metrics" means it'll get worse.

    There's been a few people that have been caught on the back end. Alex Jones for Sandy Hook, Rudy for Moss/Freeman. The idiot responsible here.

    But way more lives have been fucked up on the front end, and I can't see that changing. It'd require a massive change in perspective of how we use the internet, and it's just getting shittier and shittier.

    ADDIT - And that's not going to happen until there's a monumental shakeup of how social media works. Twitter, Facebook, whatever, care about virality. Which requires being first (and being outrage-ous), over being accurate.

    MorganV on
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    TryCatcherTryCatcher Registered User regular
    edited April 27
    So, from a headline that looks like came out from The Onion but is CNN, and didn't found a better thread to put it, Tennessee signed a law to have teachers carrying weapons:
    (CNN) - State legislators in Tennessee passed a bill Tuesday allowing teachers and school staff in the state to be armed.
    “A teacher is not allowed to put a rainbow flag on her desk, but she’s allowed to carry a gun in this state,” Democratic state Sen. Raumesh Akbari said.

    Lower half of salary rankings between US states (36 out of 50), and no guesses at how the school curriculum looks, yet these people expect teachers to face off against school shooters.

    TryCatcher on
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    GnizmoGnizmo Registered User regular
    Teachers with guns means more students shot. There is no other end to this path.

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    TryCatcherTryCatcher Registered User regular
    Gnizmo wrote: »
    Teachers with guns means more students shot. There is no other end to this path.

    And not even by teachers (God that's fucked up to type), students stealing guns from teacher's desks will 100% happen.

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    Ninja Snarl PNinja Snarl P My helmet is my burden. Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered User regular
    It's all the fun of irresponsible gun ownership at home brought directly into the classroom so now every kid has to play "it's not loaded" roulette instead of just kids of shitty parents.

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    GnizmoGnizmo Registered User regular
    It's all the fun of irresponsible gun ownership at home brought directly into the classroom so now every kid has to play "it's not loaded" roulette instead of just kids of shitty parents.

    Any parent that doesn't teach their kid The Gun Is Always Loaded has no business having a gun anywhere near them. Shitty gun owners piss me off so much.

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    ElvenshaeElvenshae Registered User regular
    I mean, shit, I do that with NERF!

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    N1tSt4lkerN1tSt4lker Registered User regular
    TryCatcher wrote: »
    Gnizmo wrote: »
    Teachers with guns means more students shot. There is no other end to this path.

    And not even by teachers (God that's fucked up to type), students stealing guns from teacher's desks will 100% happen.

    As I’ve said for years any time someone is all “but wouldn’t you want a gun in the even of an active shooter?”—that gun can either be accessible or it can be secure. There’s no both/and here, so no—aside from the fact that if there’s an active shooter at my school, it’s likely to be a student I have seen/known and like fuck how am I expected to shoot them???—I do not want a firearm of any kind in my classroom. It will either be useless in the instant due to security or it will be stolen by a short-sighted student. And neither of those things are worth whatever the fuck they think they’re doing in Tennessee. And I hate all of it especially given that my state currently has a bill proposed to allow teachers and administrators with a valid conceal carry permit to carry on campus. 😡

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    MvrckMvrck Dwarven MountainhomeRegistered User regular
    I fully expect we hear a story about a school shooting that went on longer than it should because the shooter kept getting to rearm from all the guns laying around the school.

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    daveNYCdaveNYC Why universe hate Waspinator? Registered User regular
    OK, fine, but have you considered Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!

    Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
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    ZibblsnrtZibblsnrt Registered User regular
    Mvrck wrote: »
    I fully expect we hear a story about a school shooting that went on longer than it should because the shooter kept getting to rearm from all the guns laying around the school.

    Or they'll just scapegoat the teachers regardless, because the presence of A Good Guy With A Gun on the premises frees the media from having to ever think about police cowardice again.

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    HevachHevach Registered User regular
    It should be noted that this idea (which is old but has been quiet for years after a safety demonstration at the first school to actually consider it ended with a cop shooting a teacher by mistake) was suddenly revived hours after Uvalde.

    It's fine that the police are scared. The teacher is already in there.

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    MorganVMorganV Registered User regular
    edited 2:19AM
    Hevach wrote: »
    It should be noted that this idea (which is old but has been quiet for years after a safety demonstration at the first school to actually consider it ended with a cop shooting a teacher by mistake) was suddenly revived hours after Uvalde.

    It's fine that the police are scared. The teacher is already in there.

    Yeah, the whole argument is predicated on the idea that threat awareness is woefully inadequate amongst police, and will be even worse with teachers who will likely have much less practical training.

    You hear gunshots. You hear screams. Your adrenaline spikes. You retrieve your gun. You see someone moving within your field of vision. It looks like they have a weapon in their hand. They turn in your general direction. You fire.

    You've just shot someone. They're not moving. You move over, keeping the gun on them, and realise that it's a student or faculty holding a cellphone. You hear a noise off to the side. You turn your head to see. Now you're shot, because another adrenaline spiking teacher with a gun saw you pointing a gun at a wounded/dead student, and look in their direction.

    And that's before you get the police involved.

    The whole fucking idea that adding more guns will de-escalate a shooting is just crap. It's much more likely to result in other people getting shot. Because training for police, who have this training fairly regularly, is substandard, and now you're putting this in the hands of people that are already overworked and underpaid and often don't have the time or funding for training directly related to their jobs, let alone something that while common in the total, is actually a small part of everyday life.

    Best I could find (most articles only cover mass incidents), had it at 346 last year, which was a significant peak, where a gun was used (non-suicide). That's way more than should ever happen, but there's more than 100,000 schools. So most teachers, even on a 40 year career, are statistically never going to be in one.
    https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/states-with-the-most-school-shootings

    To be explicitly clear, I'm in no way wanting to diminish the horror of this shit brought about by lax gun control measures. My point is, arming teachers is one of the most stupid decisions I can think of to prevent loss of life when they happen. Because they're going to be badly trained at best, for something they're never likely to use.

    MorganV at
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