Posted on 04/15/2014 2:09:42 PM PDT by Timber Rattler
A popular Los Angeles high school science teacher has been suspended after students turned in projects that appeared dangerous to administrators, spurring a campaign calling for his return to the classroom.
Students and parents have rallied around Greg Schiller after his suspension in February from the downtown Cortines School of Visual & Performing Arts. Supporters have organized a rally on his behalf at the campus scheduled for Thursday, gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition calling for his reinstatement and set up a social media page.
Schiller was ordered to report daily to a district administrative office pending an investigation after two students turned in science projects that were designed to shoot small projectiles.
(snip)
A school employee saw the air-pressure project and raised concerns about what looked to her like a weapon, according to the teachers union and supporters. Schiller, who said he never saw either completed project except in photos, was summoned and sent home.
Both projects were confiscated as “evidence,” said Susan Ferguson, whose son did the coil-gun project.
L.A. Unified School District administrators have told Schiller that he was removed from his classroom six weeks ago for “supervising the building, research and development of imitation weapons,” said union representative Roger Scott.
(Excerpt) Read more at living.msn.com ...
confiscated as “evidence, TO PROSECUTE! Parents if you dont step up who will?
Sounds like the science there has settled.
Any more reason to wonder why our country lags the world in student knowledge of science?
Your comment = exactly what I was thinking.
My college chemistry prof built a cannon that used a hydrogen and oxygen mixture to shoot a tennis ball across our lab. Obviously different times when today school officials have a fit if some grade school kid uses their fingers in a gun like gesture.
Wait till she sees what a rubber band held between two fingers can do!
And the story continues on (adding my little bit):
“...and they went on to become one of the largest distillery companies in the United States?”
Funny how those home grown science projects can turn into a major business.
The project should be reconfigured to accommodate a credit card sized/shaped object and be renamed a ‘rapid EBT card delivery device’ and then it will receive accolades.
My chemistry teacher did something similar with O2 and H and soap bubbles. I thought that the explosion was going to blow the windows out. Lol.
The rubber band is okay, just don’t point your finger and thumb like a gun.
As silly as it sounds, students can get in trouble for doing this.
They must really freak out when they watch Mythbusters.
A good rubber band and a hair pin or re-bent paper clip could kill if it hit the right area.
I (in school - early fifties) put them through comic books 1/4” to 3/8” thick. A hair pin could be imbedded into a plank of pine wood a good 1/8” deep.
My brother did that for a science project. He got an A and then drank the beer he made.
So now any hysterical airhead can have a hissifit and get someone fired for some wacko notion that flits through the empty space in her brain.
Yup, those big 3/8 inch wide suckers were the magnums, LOL!
Wish I had a kid doing one of these science fair projects - I’d suggest a trebuchet.
By the time the pinheads in the administration figured out what it was (if ever), it’d be too late.
I took a special night chemistry class in high school with my brother. The teacher (who was one of the school’s vice-principals) taught us how to make a combustible concoction of “rocket fuel.” My brother and his friend were intent on building a rocket with this stuff as fuel.
One night, they decided they’d test the thrust by stuffing the concoction in a flask, inverted the flask (holding the stuff in initially with wax), and ignited it. The expectation was that the fuel would burn and produce thrust that would keep the rest of the fuel in the flask.
It didn’t work. With a whoosh, the wax was gone, and fuel fell on the asbestos pads on the floor and ignited. The resulting burn left a foot of smoke at the ceiling.
The year after they graduated, they came back to try a rocket they built. It was not so much a rocket as a pipe bomb with fins—because it just exploded on the ground.
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