After a few days of watching the total screw up of arresting a kid for bringing a clock to school, I started to think of all the things that went wrong in that situation. So, the school screwed up, if they really thought it was a bomb, they would have evacuated the school and called the bomb squad, same with the police. Ahmed probably should have known better than to bring an alarm clock to school, after all, it was the alarm going off that set in motion all the rest of the screw ups. All of that could have been prevented if there were some better “safe guards” in place.
With Ahmed and his clock, apparently his engineering teacher “expressed appreciation”. Then in English class, the alarm went off. When Ahmed showed the English teacher, the teacher commented that it looked like a bomb, so school security was called.
Why wasn’t the engineering teacher called? This is the second of many failures in this story. Other people have already documented many of the other failures.
Continue on below the orange omphalos for more skepsis.
Depending on who you talk to, the education system is in crisis. More kids in classrooms, the never ending fight for funding, teachers being bashed and blamed for public funding problems, and the list goes on. My own daughter was a very fast reader. In third grade she read The Lord of the Rings series twice in two weeks. Her reading and early math scores were exceptional. Our school system was, and still is, unprepared for kids that are on the very high end of reading and math. She was pushed ahead for reading and math. However, for other subjects like science and social studies she was not. She was using third grade social studies materials when she was reading at an 8th grade level. One of the bigger challenges is that every year she gets a new teacher. We have to educate the teacher on where she falls. There is very little continuity. She is now a freshman in high school, and struggling, not because she is having trouble learning, but because she is bored and the teachers are not able to keep her challenged in a way that works for her. A lot of the assignments are busy work, rather than challenging tasks.
In many school violence stories, there is an ongoing narrative of missed signals. When we look back we can see that the individual was trouble. In Ahmed’s case, the signals were there. Why didn’t the English teacher know enough about Ahmed to know that he likes to “tinker”? The English teacher, along with all the teachers should have known enough about those kids to be able to evaluate whether the kids are smart, curious, interested in learning, or on their way out. When kids have been attending school for 9 years, there is enough information that should be passed along that they can be put with teachers that will help them grow, and encourage their curiosity.
There is a lot of pressure on teachers. I can't imagine how any teacher would deal with true threats such as a real bomb or fire arms. And Teachers should not have to. they should not be on the front lines of societies failings, but they are.
There is plenty of research around education. There are standards and best practices around gifted education. Many states and school districts are failing these kids. I don’t know if Ahmed is gifted. If he is, all his teachers should be aware of it. This story would not have made national headlines if the English teacher would also have said “nice clock, turn off the alarm and put it away”.