So… the school and police acted stupidly and illogically in response to a clock, but in response to a bomb they would have acted intelligently and logically?
Hmmm…maybe it didn’t! It might have been easier for him to just keep a watch or something with an alarm in the backpack and then go up and tell the teacher it was his project that made the sounds.
Two different scenarios. The school defenders like to bring up the “Pop Tart gun” – can we say that the school reacted stupidly to a Pop Tart but that doesn’t reflect on how they’re react to a real gun?
Just because the school and police go balls out to slam a kid for a clock on the pretext that it’s a “hoax bomb” doesn’t mean that they’d run around in circles if they saw something they legitimately thought was a bomb.
Same thought I had. It’s as much a safety issue as a reliability or aesthetics problem. eta: that transformer should’ve been frame mounted to assure the primary contacts don’t get grounded also…
Don’t know who took the photo and when, but I presume at the time of the disruption in English class, there was a 9V battery connected.
I’m not sure why the pro-Ahmed crowd is so dismissive of this line of reasoning about the nature of the clock. I’ll admit that I thought this case was perfectly clear from the outset – the school didn’t actually think it was a bomb, they thought it was a clock, everyone thought it was a clock, and yet they had him arrested anyway. Dumbshit racist school administrators, no problem. I saw the clock and thought the workmanship was shit, but if I’d spent many hours soldering together a circuit board, even if it was just one of those DIY clock kits you can buy online, I probably wouldn’t care too much about making it pretty. Well, I mean, I would, but I can see that part not really being a big deal to a teenager.
But now that people have pointed out that he didn’t solder together his own clock, looking back at the picture, that’s obviously true. He didn’t solder together that circuit board, he didn’t program it. He didn’t do shit. He took a clock out of one case and put it (poorly) into another case. That can’t even rightly be called “case modding,” because the whole point of the case modding community is to take something boring and make it look cool, not take something boring and make it look like cobbled together shit.
Gutting a clock and putting the guts into another case is not really an achievement. It’s just not. What would you do as a teacher if one of your students showed it to you? I don’t even think I could feign any sort of excitement. What did he learn? What was the point of that exercise? To learn that clocks are made out of components, and those components can be hot-glued to things? It’s a pointless exercise in tedium. Why would he even bother?
Armed with this perspective, I can’t help but think that maybe this was a test of the school’s response. At least that motivation makes sense to me; I can’t understand why a smart sophomore would be motivated to show off maybe 10 minutes of work with a screwdriver and a glue gun, but I *can *understand why a teenager might want to make a political statement.
The really mind-boggling thing about this line of thought is that it means the school made the conscious decision to give the Mohammeds exactly what they wanted. “Hey Gary, the Muslim boy brought in a shitty electronics “project” to try and get us all riled up and overreact. Let’s get all riled up and overreact.” It’s unbelievably short-sighted. They could have quietly recorded all of the details and let everyone go home, and if the Mohammeds really were trying to make a political statement they would have had to come back and done something more outlandish. Then the school could show that there was a history of these sorts of shenanigans and everyone would be on their side. Instead, we’re left with some uncomfortable ambiguity.
Really?
The 9 volt is for power outages, the alarm will still go off, even when the power is off.
It’s how modern manufactured clocks are built. Well, the good ones are.
Since he was “invited to the Whitehouse”, I would bet some trained professionals are busy working on that problem. Because they don’t like ambiguity about what the intent was.
Seriously, you’re hinging his intelligence on whether he leaves a battery in a clock instead of repeatedly taking it out and putting it back? For real?
Well I thought of that too; what’s Obama gonna do when he shows up with this clock? Pat him on the head? Give him a golden screwdriver award? It’s going to be a farce. At this point they’d be better off doing a quick tour, a photo with Biden and then sweep the whole thing under the rug.
I remember being young and essentially tracing a drawing but feeling proud of my ‘creation’. I used to tinker with someone else’s BASIC program and felt proud, despite someone else doing most of the actual work. Big deal. Feeling pride in small projects is how you move onto bigger projects.
I suspect you’d make a terrible teacher then. Part of educating is fostering enthusiasm in the subject matter. The fact that the kid gave enough of a shit to even perform a case mod on an alarm clock and show it off to his teacher would put him above 99% of his peers who are probably texting through class.
He’s being invited to Astronomy Night on the White House lawn, presumably with a bunch of other kids. Obama’s not giving him the key to the city or putting the clock in the Smithsonian or anything. I assume what Obama will do is say a few encouraging words, smile and nod.
steronz, you seem massively confused about why people have respnded to Ahmed as they have.
Hint: It has nothing whatsoever to do with the complexity or novelty of the clock. Think hard, and it will become clear why there is nothing that.needs to be swept under the rug.
That’s a bullshit rationalization of a mundane task. What if he’d come into school with a bunch of long division problems that he’d done at home? 99% of high school kids couldn’t be arsed to go home and do long division either, but it’s dull and pointless and not age appropriate for a sophomore. So are you going to feign excitement over this kids’ love of long division in order to foster his enthusiasm for math?
Huh? Of course. Absolutely. If I was a math teacher and a kid came in with a bunch of independently done math of any type, I’d be thrilled. If I thought he could be challenged further, I’d give him a hearty “Attaboy” and then suggest something a step up.
Spell it out for me then.
Or, let me ask you this. What if Ahmed doesn’t give a shit about electronics. What if his thing is politics and political activism, and the clock was just a means to an end? The end being to point out racism or religious discrimination is his school. He succeeded, right? Good for him. But let’s not get excited about the clock.
Right now too many people are getting excited about the clock and STEM and how we need to encourage kids to be creative. If the story were just about the kids political activism, it’d be OK.
But I’m guessing he can’t come out and say he didn’t care about the clock at all because then he might actually be guilty of a crime. He’s got to pretend like he’s really into case modding clocks to stay out of jail.
Of course not, that would be ludicrous and inappropriate. I’d arrest him.
Oh dear God, the horror, the horror.
AFAIU, there was no “building the clock”. An old clock was taken out of its case and put into a pencil case. Presto: “tech genius”.
OK. And…??
Seriously, this isn’t about whether this kid is the next Thomas Edison, or just a kid who did something incredibly trivial. It’s about the fact that he got treated like a fucking terrorist for whatever it was that he did, and that people are still saying he created ‘half a bomb,’ fercryinoutloud.
You think Sarah and Bristol Palin are up in arms at Obama because the quality of Ahmed’s science project wasn’t adequately vetted, or because they thought this kid might still be a terrorist?
What if monkeys fly out of my ass? What if Hitler’s brain is still alive? What if the gnomes of Zurich actually control the TriLats?
There’s actual evidence for the “the kid invents and tinkers” story. There’s no evidence for the “the kid’s a political activist” idea.
Because of the law of parsimony for one (you’re needlessly adding assumptions in order to support the “hoax” version), and because there’s no indication in any reporting of the circumstances that shows Ahmed was being anything but earnest in how he presented the clock. No prankster behaviors, no bragging or showing off to other students, no slyness in answering teacher questions or attempting to hide the device.
He’d spent a few minutes the night before putting a clock into a pencil case. Yes, it’s not a fabulously cool idea in and of itself, and yes, it was poorly executed, but it’s the type of thing a tinkering teen does all the effin’ time. An art student might have doodled on all surfaces of the case with enamel paints, or added studs and buttons or gone wild with an engraver.
So he brings the crappy little case in to the new school he’s starting and shows it to the teacher in the class he’s most looking forward to. Because that’s also what kids do in new schools or with new teachers; they test the standards for the quality and quantity of work expected.