WWTBAM Bored

With all the PC support for Ahmed I thought I'd share what his "clock" actually looked like.

This is NOT it. This is the rather innocent looking picture put out there by some media.


This is what "went off" in class and what the teacher, school admins, and police saw.



Is this just what they claim, an inquisitive and creative young man's innocent creation? Perhaps. But the next one won't be.

And I STILL have to take my shoes and belt off to get on a plane.

The kid looks remarkably like my nephew did a few years ago, when he was that age.

If a white student had made this device, they would have called it a nice science project. But his name is Ahmed Mohamed, so they think he's a terrorist.

BackInTex wrote:With all the PC support for Ahmed I thought I'd share what his "clock" actually looked like.

This is NOT it. This is the rather innocent looking picture put out there by some media.


This is what "went off" in class and what the teacher, school admins, and police saw.



Is this just what they claim, an inquisitive and creative young man's innocent creation? Perhaps. But the next one won't be.

And I STILL have to take my shoes and belt off to get on a plane.

Perhaps? Perhaps?

You can make the same "All that's missing is the C4" remark about a cheap alarm clock. The school district was way out of line, and I am very disappointed (but, sadly, not surprised) that not a single one of the declared Republican candidates, even the one who headed a technology company until she got fired, has seen fit to publicly express support for Ahmed. --Bob

jarnon wrote:If a white student had made this device, they would have called it a nice science project. But his name is Ahmed Mohamed, so they think he's a terrorist.

I'm impressed you know what they think and even more impressed you know what they would have done under a scenario that did not happen. Who's your pick to win the Super Bowl?

I will tell you this....if we did an analysis of all of the terrorist acts planned or enacted (roadside IEDs, suicide bobmings, etc.) over the last 15 years, and those that will happen in the next 15 years, more perpetrators were/will be named Ahmed than Dennis.

Bob78164 wrote:Perhaps? Perhaps?

You can make the same "All that's missing is the C4" remark about a cheap alarm clock. The school district was way out of line, and I am very disappointed (but, sadly, not surprised) that not a single one of the declared Republican candidates, even the one who headed a technology company until she got fired, has seen fitfit to publicly express support for Ahmed. --Bob

I, nor you, nor anyone but Ahmed (and perhaps his father) fully know the innocence of this. Perhaps Ahmed is truly innocent, but perhaps his father encouraged him to build it and take it to school to see the reaction and even to create the "cry wolf" result so next time an Ahmed brings a homemade timing device the authorities will look the other way out of shame. Perhaps. Yes.

Bob78164 wrote:I am very disappointed (but, sadly, not surprised) that not a single one of the declared Republican candidates, even the one who headed a technology company until she got fired, has seen fit to publicly express support for Ahmed. --Bob

Bobby Jindal wrote:I don't think a 14-year-old should ever get arrested for bringing a clock to school.

jarnon wrote:

Bobby Jindal wrote:I don't think a 14-year-old should ever get arrested for bringing a clock to school.

I didn't think most 14 year olds even knew what a clock was. Time is something you read off of a smartphone...

lb13

BackInTex wrote:

Bob78164 wrote:Perhaps? Perhaps?

You can make the same "All that's missing is the C4" remark about a cheap alarm clock. The school district was way out of line, and I am very disappointed (but, sadly, not surprised) that not a single one of the declared Republican candidates, even the one who headed a technology company until she got fired, has seen fitfit to publicly express support for Ahmed. --Bob

I, nor you, nor anyone but Ahmed (and perhaps his father) fully know the innocence of this. Perhaps Ahmed is truly innocent, but perhaps his father encouraged him to build it and take it to school to see the reaction and even to create the "cry wolf" result so next time an Ahmed brings a homemade timing device the authorities will look the other way out of shame. Perhaps. Yes.

News flash: Many kids wear shoes to school. Maybe one of them plans to emulate the shoe bomber. We should make them all prove they won't before we let them in.

By the way, where do you stand on the issue of teachers bringing loaded weapons to school? --Bob

Bob78164 wrote:News flash: Many kids wear shoes to school. Maybe one of them plans to emulate the shoe bomber. We should make them all prove they won't before we let them in.

Only those named Ahmed.

You fail to see, or accept, the obvious. My only solace is that I have immediate family in only 2 of 100,000 public schools in the U.S. The chances of one of those being the one that gets bombed are slim. But one somewhere in the U.S. will. Within 5 years. And it will be a student that delivers the device. And someone will have seen it before hand. But they said nothing.

It is sad we are where we are, sad that kids can't be kids. But putting our heads in the sand won't make the problem better or make it go away. We are on a path to being in the same situation as some of the countries in Europe and the Middle East because we (not me, but you and others) are afraid to hurt someone's feelings. So you allow them to get blown up instead.

Bob78164 wrote:By the way, where do you stand on the issue of teachers bringing loaded weapons to school? --Bob

I'm not a fan. But am open to the idea of specific administrators (e.g. APs) being allowed to be armed if they are properly trained. We have armed police in our schools now. They are human, but trained. So are the APs. The problem with allowing teachers is you expand the number of people allowed and you loose control of being able to understand the proficiency and training each has. Then you get into a situation where folks like you would expect everyone to be treated the same and allowed the same gun toting privileges as everyone else, regardless of their peers' perception of their mental stability or ability to handle stressful situations.

This Ahmed Mohamed situation is such a hornet's nest, it almost feels scripted.

On the one hand, I unfortunately agree with the people who said if the kid was not Muslim, he would not have gotten in trouble for this. And if he did, I don't think it would have made national news.

On the other hand, one has to ask if bringing a clock that (let's be honest) really seems to resemble a bomb is actionable. The Zero Tolerance policy has historically been that anything resembling a weapon will be treated as a weapon. Let's remember that children have been suspended for bringing G.I. Joes to school before.

This is my first time seeing a picture of the clock he built. I fully believe that Mohamed was really making a clock and nothing more, and I think it's a great project for the boy. He should be proud of the work he put into it, and I hope he grows his talents to do great things. But now that he's got the mechanics down, the next step is to work on aesthetic design, namely being aware that the clock you just built looks just like a bomb you'd see in a movie. Maybe taking it out of the metal suitcase would be a good start.

BackInTex wrote:With all the PC support for Ahmed I thought I'd share what his "clock" actually looked like.


Is this just what they claim, an inquisitive and creative young man's innocent creation? Perhaps. But the next one won't be.

And I STILL have to take my shoes and belt off to get on a plane.

I guess I should have been arrested too. I brought a bomb to work this morning:



I was just missing one thing, just like that kid.

I wish....

I wish the first teacher would have said, "Oh, what a neat project! Let's go show it to the principal so he can appreciate it, too!" And then sent an email to the principal to give him a heads-up before they got down there. Instead of treating it, and him, like they were something dangerous.

I wish the father would have said, "you know what, son? Maybe an unlabelled, unidentified electronic device is not the greatest thing to bring to your brand new school where nobody really knows you without notifying someone. Why don't you explain it your teacher today, and then see about bringing it tomorrow?"

I wish the kid and his father would have told the story the same way after the media had shown up. The school keeps insisting that the story has changed, and I don't doubt it one bit. I've seen too many examples of it in my years of teaching.

I wish people would understand that schools are justifiably jumpy about this sort of thing. I think this was a great deal more than zero tolerance. I think it pushed the tolerance meter up to 50% or so. Could they have handled it better? Probably. But how would the national media and the public citizens of Texas have reacted if this really had been a bomb, and it went off at lunchtime, and it turned out that several teachers and administrators had seen it and done nothing? Do any of you want to try to tell me that a person couldn't build a device that looked exactly like Ahmed's clock, and load it with enough explosive to level that school? Go ahead, I dare you. I'll laugh in your virtual face.

I had a brilliant kid come in before school a few years ago because he wanted to show me his project. I immediately recognized it for what it was, and recognized that it was not currently armed and could not be, without partially disassembling it. Still, I immediately locked it in my closet, called the principal, and ran through the operation of it with her, showed that it could not easily be armed, and that I wanted her to be in the conversation from the beginning. She thanked me, then asked the student to take it home immediately, and she would excuse his tardiness (I was his first period teacher.) I didn't agree with her, but I supported her decision. A rail gun with a 10 farad capacitor could do one heckuva lot of damage, under the right circumstances, so she was understandably nervous.

And oh, yeah. I wonder if the national media would be making as big a deal out of this if it actually was a nice suburban white kid who got in trouble for this exact thing. It has happened, you know. And reverse racism is just as bad, if not worse, than the original stuff.

BackInTex wrote:

Bob78164 wrote:News flash: Many kids wear shoes to school. Maybe one of them plans to emulate the shoe bomber. We should make them all prove they won't before we let them in.

Only those named Ahmed.

You fail to see, or accept, the obvious. My only solace is that I have immediate family in only 2 of 100,000 public schools in the U.S. The chances of one of those being the one that gets bombed are slim. But one somewhere in the U.S. will. Within 5 years. And it will be a student that delivers the device. And someone will have seen it before hand. But they said nothing.

When I looked for the photo that I attached to my last post in the thread, I googled digital clock bomb and phrases like that, I got dozens of sites that purported to tell me how to make a home made detonator using a wrist watch, kitchen timer, cell phone and other devices. There's also dozens of "how to" videos on You Tube. Some of them say they are designed to set off fireworks but that's an obvious crock.

So if Ahmed, or anyone else wanted to set off a bomb and had some C4 or other explosive, it would be very easy to do so, and my guess is that assembling these detonators would be a heck of a lot easier than what was required for Ahmed to build his digital clock. The key to all this is obviously to prevent them from getting their hands on the C4 in the first place.

mrkelley23 wrote:
I wish the father would have said, "you know what, son? Maybe an unlabelled, unidentified electronic device is not the greatest thing to bring to your brand new school where nobody really knows you without notifying someone. Why don't you explain it your teacher today, and then see about bringing it tomorrow?"

Very wise words. A little bit of common sense could have gone a long way to avoiding all this. As others have mentioned, you cannot ignore something that 'looks' like a bomb that has been brought into a school and not say or do something. Did they overreact? Sure, but better to overreact than to ignore. Maybe this kid was just too much of a kid to think about the fact that he was carrying what every Hollywood action film hero would know was a bomb into his school. Surely his parents should have thought of this. All it would have taken to avoid all of this would have been a simple phone call or email to someone at the school.

Some of you may remember JipterWest that occurred in Vegas just a few weeks after the 911 event. In our mock WWTBAM game I had made a device to send the correct answer to our 'Regis' just to keep things real to make sure 'Regis' didn't know the correct answer while giving the choices. It had a couple of boxes, lots of wires, batteries and lights. Toss in some explosives and it would have been just like a bomb. I shipped it out to our hotel prior to JipterWest but timing meant that I brought it back in my luggage. Before heading to the airport I separated the batteries and put them in a different bag. Once at the baggage check line I got the attention of one of the airport guys, set the bag down, stepped back far enough so that I could not touch it and told him that I had some wires and stuff inside the bag that he needed to search. I briefly explained what it was and exactly what he would find when he opened the bag. The bag was searched and it was a non-event.

I have no doubt that had I just tossed my bag on the conveyor belt that my trip home would have been delayed somewhat.

jaybee wrote:

mrkelley23 wrote:
I wish the father would have said, "you know what, son? Maybe an unlabelled, unidentified electronic device is not the greatest thing to bring to your brand new school where nobody really knows you without notifying someone. Why don't you explain it your teacher today, and then see about bringing it tomorrow?"

Very wise words. A little bit of common sense could have gone a long way to avoiding all this. As others have mentioned, you cannot ignore something that 'looks' like a bomb that has been brought into a school and not say or do something. Did they overreact? Sure, but better to overreact than to ignore. Maybe this kid was just too much of a kid to think about the fact that he was carrying what every Hollywood action film hero would know was a bomb into his school. Surely his parents should have thought of this. All it would have taken to avoid all of this would have been a simple phone call or email to someone at the school.

Some of you may remember JipterWest that occurred in Vegas just a few weeks after the 911 event. In our mock WWTBAM game I had made a device to send the correct answer to our 'Regis' just to keep things real to make sure 'Regis' didn't know the correct answer while giving the choices. It had a couple of boxes, lots of wires, batteries and lights. Toss in some explosives and it would have been just like a bomb. I shipped it out to our hotel prior to JipterWest but timing meant that I brought it back in my luggage. Before heading to the airport I separated the batteries and put them in a different bag. Once at the baggage check line I got the attention of one of the airport guys, set the bag down, stepped back far enough so that I could not touch it and told him that I had some wires and stuff inside the bag that he needed to search. I briefly explained what it was and exactly what he would find when he opened the bag. The bag was searched and it was a non-event.

I have no doubt that had I just tossed my bag on the conveyor belt that my trip home would have been delayed somewhat.

That is what is concerning. Either his father is the most naive person in the world, he didn't know what his son was doing, or this was planned, either to for the "gotcha" or to study the reaction.

Andy Reid should hire this kid as a clock consultant.

mrkelley23 wrote:I wish....

I wish the first teacher would have said, "Oh, what a neat project! Let's go show it to the principal so he can appreciate it, too!" And then sent an email to the principal to give him a heads-up before they got down there. Instead of treating it, and him, like they were something dangerous.

I wish the father would have said, "you know what, son? Maybe an unlabelled, unidentified electronic device is not the greatest thing to bring to your brand new school where nobody really knows you without notifying someone. Why don't you explain it your teacher today, and then see about bringing it tomorrow?"

I wish the kid and his father would have told the story the same way after the media had shown up. The school keeps insisting that the story has changed, and I don't doubt it one bit. I've seen too many examples of it in my years of teaching.

I wish people would understand that schools are justifiably jumpy about this sort of thing. I think this was a great deal more than zero tolerance. I think it pushed the tolerance meter up to 50% or so. Could they have handled it better? Probably. But how would the national media and the public citizens of Texas have reacted if this really had been a bomb, and it went off at lunchtime, and it turned out that several teachers and administrators had seen it and done nothing? Do any of you want to try to tell me that a person couldn't build a device that looked exactly like Ahmed's clock, and load it with enough explosive to level that school? Go ahead, I dare you. I'll laugh in your virtual face.

I had a brilliant kid come in before school a few years ago because he wanted to show me his project. I immediately recognized it for what it was, and recognized that it was not currently armed and could not be, without partially disassembling it. Still, I immediately locked it in my closet, called the principal, and ran through the operation of it with her, showed that it could not easily be armed, and that I wanted her to be in the conversation from the beginning. She thanked me, then asked the student to take it home immediately, and she would excuse his tardiness (I was his first period teacher.) I didn't agree with her, but I supported her decision. A rail gun with a 10 farad capacitor could do one heckuva lot of damage, under the right circumstances, so she was understandably nervous.

And oh, yeah. I wonder if the national media would be making as big a deal out of this if it actually was a nice suburban white kid who got in trouble for this exact thing. It has happened, you know. And reverse racism is just as bad, if not worse, than the original stuff.

I'll paraphrase from Facebook: They never thought he had a bomb.

When you think you have a bomb threat, you evacuate the school. They didn't.

When you think you may have a bomb, you call the bomb squad. They didn't.

When you think someone may have built a bomb, you separate him from the device. They didn't. They kept him and the clock in the same office. And then they transported it to the police station in the same car with him.

I'll say it before and I'll say it again: If this kid's name hadn't been Ahmed, nothing like this would have happened. We can now put electronics while brown up there with driving while black. --Bob

School personal don't always handle these things well. You can go back with hindsight and track where they went wrong but the bottom line is that teachers and administrators just do not have much experience in these types of emergencies. I've seen too many first hand accounts of events in our school history - one involving one of my kids and a false rumor that he had a gun - where the course of action taken by the school was very poor. Poor to the point that had any of these events been an actual danger their actions would have made it worse.

While zero tolerance policies in schools are basically a bad joke, they are also quite colorblind. If the lilly-white honor student is found with a butter knife in his backpack, his ass is gone.

This is definitely one of those threads where you look at the subject matter of the OP, test out all possible responses to the OP'er in your mind, realize what the result is going to be and say "Fuck it...it's not worth it".

jaybee wrote:School personal don't always handle these things well. You can go back with hindsight and track where they went wrong but the bottom line is that teachers and administrators just do not have much experience in these types of emergencies. I've seen too many first hand accounts of events in our school history - one involving one of my kids and a false rumor that he had a gun - where the course of action taken by the school was very poor. Poor to the point that had any of these events been an actual danger their actions would have made it worse.

While zero tolerance policies in schools are basically a bad joke, they are also quite colorblind. If the lilly-white honor student is found with a butter knife in his backpack, his ass is gone.

Don't confuse the poor dears with facts, Jay - their allegiance to their talking points won't allow that kind of reasoned response.

jaybee wrote:School personal don't always handle these things well. You can go back with hindsight and track where they went wrong but the bottom line is that teachers and administrators just do not have much experience in these types of emergencies. I've seen too many first hand accounts of events in our school history - one involving one of my kids and a false rumor that he had a gun - where the course of action taken by the school was very poor. Poor to the point that had any of these events been an actual danger their actions would have made it worse.

While zero tolerance policies in schools are basically a bad joke, they are also quite colorblind. If the lilly-white honor student is found with a butter knife in his backpack, his ass is gone.

Yep, this always makes me wonder how I'd deal with my teen self in high school in today's environment.

And my answer is "not very well." Between a lot of self-medicating (mostly Tums and aspirin), occasionally carrying a knife at times (small one, two blade Uncle Henry) and later replacing it with an aluminum rat-tail comb, sneaking into locked rooms (I knew how to pick the lock to the band room, which I primarily used for practice. Band director knew I did it, didn't care as long as I didn't teach the method to anyone else), occasionally carrying the band equivalent of brass knucks (Bach 18C tuba mouthpiece), I figured I'd end up spending some time in detention or worse. And that doesn't even count the time I brought in a fifth of Jack Daniels (actually, an old bottle with colored water) as a class skit prop -- in a dry county, no less!

And I'd probably be building something electronic like this -- I was trying to build a ham radio in HS -- except that I learned very fast that dyslexia and polarized parts don't mix.

jarnon wrote:If a white student had made this device, they would have called it a nice science project. But his name is Ahmed Mohamed, so they think he's a terrorist.

Try carrying a "Judge" buzzer system (which this clock could be its cousin) around in public, let alone through airport security, no matter what your race, and watch the looks you'd get. (Most quiz bowl people know what I'm talking about).

But it looks like from reports I'm reading he wouldn't cooperate, I have a feeling this was a setup.

Bob78164 wrote:

mrkelley23 wrote:I wish....

I wish the first teacher would have said, "Oh, what a neat project! Let's go show it to the principal so he can appreciate it, too!" And then sent an email to the principal to give him a heads-up before they got down there. Instead of treating it, and him, like they were something dangerous.

I wish the father would have said, "you know what, son? Maybe an unlabelled, unidentified electronic device is not the greatest thing to bring to your brand new school where nobody really knows you without notifying someone. Why don't you explain it your teacher today, and then see about bringing it tomorrow?"

I wish the kid and his father would have told the story the same way after the media had shown up. The school keeps insisting that the story has changed, and I don't doubt it one bit. I've seen too many examples of it in my years of teaching.

I wish people would understand that schools are justifiably jumpy about this sort of thing. I think this was a great deal more than zero tolerance. I think it pushed the tolerance meter up to 50% or so. Could they have handled it better? Probably. But how would the national media and the public citizens of Texas have reacted if this really had been a bomb, and it went off at lunchtime, and it turned out that several teachers and administrators had seen it and done nothing? Do any of you want to try to tell me that a person couldn't build a device that looked exactly like Ahmed's clock, and load it with enough explosive to level that school? Go ahead, I dare you. I'll laugh in your virtual face.

I had a brilliant kid come in before school a few years ago because he wanted to show me his project. I immediately recognized it for what it was, and recognized that it was not currently armed and could not be, without partially disassembling it. Still, I immediately locked it in my closet, called the principal, and ran through the operation of it with her, showed that it could not easily be armed, and that I wanted her to be in the conversation from the beginning. She thanked me, then asked the student to take it home immediately, and she would excuse his tardiness (I was his first period teacher.) I didn't agree with her, but I supported her decision. A rail gun with a 10 farad capacitor could do one heckuva lot of damage, under the right circumstances, so she was understandably nervous.

And oh, yeah. I wonder if the national media would be making as big a deal out of this if it actually was a nice suburban white kid who got in trouble for this exact thing. It has happened, you know. And reverse racism is just as bad, if not worse, than the original stuff.

I'll paraphrase from Facebook: They never thought he had a bomb.

When you think you have a bomb threat, you evacuate the school. They didn't.

When you think you may have a bomb, you call the bomb squad. They didn't.

When you think someone may have built a bomb, you separate him from the device. They didn't. They kept him and the clock in the same office. And then they transported it to the police station in the same car with him.

I'll say it before and I'll say it again: If this kid's name hadn't been Ahmed, nothing like this would have happened. We can now put electronics while brown up there with driving while black. --Bob

You didn't paraphrase, as far as I can tell. You quoted. There's a difference.

So if there's a seed of doubt in a teacher or administrator's mind, your official advice is to evacuate the school, call the bomb squad, and treat the kid as an outright criminal, right? I just want to get that clear. For the next time it happens.

And if you can quote from Facebook or Twitter, so can I. What if the kid's name had been Steve, instead of Ahmed? And it had been 40 years ago or so? Would he have been in trouble? You be the judge:

the media are hypocrites, and so are the people who mindlessly parrot them.