Snippet: Clock or Bomb? ☇

Avi Selk for The Dallas Morning News shares an awful variation of Robot or Not?:

Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.

Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.

So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.

After reading this, I had a few thoughts. There is an obvious discrimination aspect to this. While that itself is infuriating and may actually draw the most attention to this situation, I saw some similarities to stories I’ve heard at some other high schools—any time a student does something outside of the norm for that particular school, especially be it being ingenious or curious or appearing different, they’re immediately labelled as a threat. Some of this is overzealous administrators and the post-Columbine thought that anything that is different is a threat to the safety of other students.

I’m more bothered by the fact that nobody seemed to look at the context that Ahmed Mohamed appears to be a good student that is very involved, and that his engineering teacher couldn’t or didn’t vouch for him. Besides that, what message is that sending a student? Don’t try to get creative outside of school and make things, especially if, meshed with your ethnicity, could cause morons to assume the worst. I hope this doesn’t discourage him and he continues to try to learn more on his own, especially since it sounds like he’s not getting it at MacArthur High.