Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
WBKO / Via wbko.com One wonders what was going through the mind of Edmonson County High School Principal Tommy Hodges when he ordered a teenage girl to get on her knees so he could measure her dress length. The Kentucky school has a dress code requiring skirts to end no more than six inches…
Last week, with little fanfare, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York did something very few private companies would ever do to protect its users’ privacy: it quietly began to purge its interlibrary loan records. “This policy change is motivated by the idea that libraries should not keep more information about their…
It’s now readily apparent that we’re in the midst of a new wave of college student protests. From the ConcernedStudent1950 movement that led to the ouster of University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe to the Million Student March that spanned 110 campuses and called for a debt-free education, campuses across the nation are witnessing an…
In his well-known essay On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt defines bullshit as speech that is designed to impress but lacks a direct concern for the truth. Under such a definition, a large portion of what we read online today is likely to be bullshit. Some types of bullshit are political in nature, such as the misleading…
UCLA Civil Rights Project The reliance on student suspensions to maintain discipline in public schools varies dramatically across the 50 states, according to a new statistical analysis by UCLA researchers. Their report identified the individual districts with the highest suspension rates, while finding American children are losing almost 18 million days of instruction due to…
A Louisville police officer is facing assault and misconduct charges after his alleged use of force at a middle school. Screenshot from school surveillance footage Over the past year, video footage from around the country of law enforcement officers killing citizens, many of them black, has brought scrutiny on policing in the streets. Yet,…
Entry Text Last year when I attempted to pick my daughter up from school, the volunteers in the carpool line tried to put a fourth grader in my car, not the four year old I was attempting to retrieve. Both of us were vehemently shaking our heads, both of us looked totally confused, but the…
Ahmed Mohamed is a smart kid. At 14, he’s already making his own radios and repairing go-karts. Normally, that type of do-it-yourself know-how earns praise from teachers and even classmates. But because Mohamed is a Muslim American student living in an area with a history of Islamophobia, it made him a prime suspect for terrorism….
Hoping to impress the teachers at his new school, an Irving, Texas, high school freshman named Ahmed Mohamed brought a homemade clock with him to MacArthur High Monday morning, which he’d assembled before bed the night before. When he showed it to those teachers, though, they were something other than impressed, and by Monday afternoon,…
On Monday, teachers at the Irving Independent School District in Irving, Texas, had police arrest a 14-year-old student named Ahmed Mohamed for building a simple electronic clock as an engineering project. Police escorted Mohamed of out of school in handcuffs — photos of the arrest show him wearing a NASA T-shirt — and accused him of…