10th Grader Gets Detention for Using Firefox (UPDATE: HOAX)

If my daughter ever gets detention for doing something like this, I’ll be the first to take her out for ice cream (or whatever the kids consider cool these days):

Now this is a sad story…if it’s true. According to this alleged school report, one student received a detention for using Firefox—as opposed to IE or Safari, we assume. And while there could be plenty of explanations for why the school would want to control student browsers, we loved the teacher’s write-up of the event:

Today in class [name] had a program launched called Foxfire.exe. I had told [name] to close the program and to resume work but he told me that is was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. I had given him two warnings but he insisted that it was just a “better” browser and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I had then issued his detention.

Absolutely sad.

Wired has the story:

Update: Earlier today we posted a story of the Pennsylvania high-schooler who received detention just for using Firefox in lieu of another Internet browser. Looks like this one was a hoax. Apparently the kid actually got in trouble for mouthing off to a teacher after being asked not to surf the Interwebz when he was supposed to be doing a written assignment in Microsoft Word. The supposed faux detention slip is a forgery the kid made after scanning the original.

7 Replies to “10th Grader Gets Detention for Using Firefox (UPDATE: HOAX)”

  1. Patricia Bealmear is a stupid old biddy who shouldn’t be teaching.
    Email Superintendent Richard Fry (rwfry@bigspring.k12.pa.us) and Principal John Scudder (jscudder@bigspring.k12.pa.us) by Wednesday to explain how this student was just being more efficient in his work and shouldn’t be punished.

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  2. This makes me very, very concerned about the education of our country’s youth.

    Do all these obsolete curmudgeons join the teaching profession just so they can exercise control over our youth and feel less adequate about their ignorance?

    When I was a sophomore at Ridgewood High School in NJ (roughly 1995) I was researching stocks on Yahoo! Finance on a public computer in our school library. The librarian kept telling me to stop looking at that web site because it was not “school related”.

    Note: my parents were paying tens of thousands of dollars in taxes to this town mainly because of this “top-tier” regional school.

    I was suspended the next afternoon for TWO DAYS.

    Are we training our children to think on their own or be mass-produced robots? The answer is pretty obvious.

    I’m definitely not sending my children to a regular school…

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  3. I think the problem is mostly that there are teachers who do not undersatnd computers or the internet or why one browser is better than the other. Nor do they bother to understand. The teacher could have become more involved with the students work and motivation by inquiring as to why it was better, in which case she could have learned that tabbed browsing could have made organizing and keeping track of the information easier and more efficient than keeping separate windows open and flipping through them. Or perhapps the student was just more used to using firefox altogether becasue maybe thats what was used at home.

    Thankfully, there are people with authority out there like principals, like the first person who posted mentions, who might be concerned as to how their schools are being taught or managed and weather the people there are making it a reputable and fun school fo everyone to come learn at or not.

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  4. Read the whole post!!!! It was all a lie…..he photo shoppedf the letter. You people are so lame. Ms. B is th best teacher we ever had so STFU

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  5. I assume she does not teach English.

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  6. now that's plain stupid, I won't let my kid enter that kind of school, it was just an internet browser, how come they make it that big issue..

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  7. now that's plain stupid, I won't let my kid enter that kind of school, it was just an internet browser, how come they make it that big issue..

    Reply

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