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Some Days in the Life - April 22, 1999

 April 22, 1999

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It's a bright, sunny, cheerful day. A wonderful, warm spring day. The sort of day we craved all winter.

Which does not change the fact that we need rain badly. I drove by another forest fire last night. Under control, but how long can these controls last? Especially since New Hampshire firefighters are being called down to Florida to help with their fire problems.

Last night was a good time. I drove over to Maine (after dropping off my laundry -- laundry is such a good thing) to see the folks. Mom and Dad continue to be well. Dad changed the oil in my Saturn (which he's been asking to do for two weeks, as it was about a thousand miles overdue). Mom and I toured the grounds. She's started her radishes, her chard, some other vegetables that don't mind if they take a frost or two and she's put in a strawberry patch. She's also extended the path that goes through the woods that surround the house a good way, including a stretch that parallels the brook she dug six years ago to drain the swampy high ground on the land a bit and generally add the pleasantness of a brook to the property. It's named the Polly Brook, after the dog we had while I was growing up.

My mother isn't Supergirl, but only because she isn't blond. I keep expecting to walk out back and see her floating off the ground, filling the bird feeders.

The homestead looks good, right about now. It's beautiful, though all the trees are barren. That's the same over here in New Hampshire. No leaves. Last year, when I first interviewed at Brewster Academy on March 26^th, the trees were lush and wonderful and full. This year, we haven't a leaf on the trees, and likely won't until we get that aforementioned rain. But it was an awfully pleasant walk, punctuated with Buddy -- our current dog, who's something of a ballistic missile -- tearing around on all sides doing his "my brother's home" dance.

There is something deeply satisfying about the affection of a dog. You climb out of your car, and see your dog for the first time in a couple of weeks, and it is the most incredible experience that dog can remember. He's thrilled. This is good for the ego.

We drove down to South Portland and had dinner at the Weathervane. Good food, largely based in salt water. We talked. Mostly, we complained about Divas Live.

I got home tennish, and was a zombie until I went to bed, which I did far too late for no good reason.

While I was home, my father gave me an article from the New Yorker. It was on Jack Cole, the man who invented the comic book character Plastic Man, and it was written by Art Spiegalman, the genius who wrote and drew Maus, which if you haven't read, you should be doing that right now instead of reading my silly little thing.

It was thought provoking -- the idea of comic books as artistic expression in the forties and fifties. And a take on the silliest comic book character of all time I'd never thought of before. The liberation that silliness can bring. The fluidity of the character as expressive art by making the character literally fluid.

Jack Cole committed suicide. So did a number of the early Quality Comics creators. Jack's comic book career was obliterated by the "Seduction of the Innocent" Senate hearings and the creation of the Comics Code. He went on to be one of the pioneering cartoonists for Playboy and was quite affluent before he methodically took his own life.

There is something terribly sad about the creator of Plastic Man committing suicide.

On the subject of comic book creators, John Broome has died. He's responsible for the Silver Age Flash, Green Lantern and a number of other icons of American Mythology. It's a damn shame we grow old and die. We ought to rethink the design.

Occasionally, we restrict the amount of time our students can be on our E-Mail system, because they're using it half the day. So, we cut it back so the only thing they have time to do is access their assignments and send their attached assignments to their professors.

This morning, a student was asking to have the restriction lifted because we barely give him enough time to read and answer his e-mail to his friends, and now he doesn't have time to do his work. Sometimes, they miss the point in a huge horking way.

Which brings up the concept of student privacy in e-mail. Whenever we happen to intercept an e-mail (which we don't go looking for unless we develop a reason to go looking) that's bad for a student, they always ask the same thing. "How could you invade my privacy like that?"

Which leads us to today's topic. "Privacy and Other People's Computers."

I have better things to do with my time than to read the e-mail of fifteen year olds. It's terribly boring stuff to anyone but the recipient. The same is true of the Dean of Students, the Systems Administrator, etc. on down the line. However, the simple fact is -- this isn't the students' e-mail system. They didn't buy and install it, they aren't maintaining it, they aren't paying the costs of the connection to the Internet, and it's not there for their purposes. It's there for academic purposes and the academic program.

(The argument that they're paying tuition and therefore they did is wrong on two counts. First off, not a single one of our students is actually paying for his Brewster education. Their parents are, and their parents, universally, support our policy in this. It's called "keeping an eye on the kids. Secondly, the tuition being paid is for a program they're signing up for. It's not a la carte. "Oh, I'd like the math class with a side of private e-mail access please." Our machine, our rules. You pay, you play by the handbook. Especially at a private school, where if you don't like our rules you can go to public school like everyone else, for "free.")

And everything on that machine is accessible to the administration, and the machine is not "private" in any sense of the word. We tell them this at orientation. We have this in the Community Handbook and the Tech Handbook.

It's the only way we can work, for two reasons. One, they're children -- legally and generally emotionally -- and we're responsible for them under "in loco parentis," which is Latin for "we're insane enough to act like their parents." As such, we have to try to educate and raise them as best as we possibly can. Without being 'fair' about it. Fair is irrelevant. Two -- when the students go out into the real world, their work e-mail is going to operate under exactly the same principle as their school e-mail does now. Their employers will run it, own the machine that provides it, and will not consider it private.

Your employers do the same with your e-mail. And if they're ethical, they don't go rooting around in it for no good reason. But they will go rooting around in it if they have a good reason.

The sooner these kids get that soaked into their skin, the easier their life is going to be later. If you want private e-mail, don't use the system other people are providing for you. Take it into your own hands and then you have screaming rights.

Even then, most ISPs (not all) will have something in their contracts about what you can and can't do on their systems, and you'd better believe they reserve the right to check those systems to ensure t'ain't funny business going on.

The rule in question is simple -- Freedom of Speech doesn't mean other people have to pay for your hall, and Privacy doesn't apply when you're keeping your private materials on someone else's property. My personal e-mail has mostly migrated to my own, personal, privately owned machine. That takes a court order to access. Do I have anything incriminating on there? Nope, but it's my stuff so I'll take care of it myself.

My access is still through the school, so if the school asks me to remove something or change something, I will. The information and machine are mine, but the route to the world is theirs. However, since I'm such a dull person to begin with, I'm not expecting any trouble.

Which goes back to kids and searches. I should tell my search story. Later, if I have a clear afternoon. Or tomorrow, if I don't.

My mother's take on the Colorado tragedy:

"I guess what we should 'learn' from all this is that our kids should be taught not to tease other kids because they're different."

Mom's cool.

4:21 pm

I'm still at work for the next few moments, so I'm going to cover some of this afternoon really fast, and I'll go in depth tomorrow.

A student who should have known better was teasing one of our other students. The other, a young girl, is a friend of the boy in question. They were just playing around. He threw one of her shoes downstairs and she went after it, and in the meantime, he picked up her powerbook and pantomimed hurling it into the lockers to get her to screech a bit.

There is a problem in swinging the (admittedly somewhat heavy) "Wall Street" model Powerbook G3's with slightly sweaty hands. They slip. The girl's computer went flying and smacked the lockers, doing little damage to the (wooden) lockers but smacking the wood and then falling onto the ground.

This same girl had dropped her computer down some stairs before, causing significant damage and a loss of all her schoolwork and dozens of poems. We told her then to back it up from now on, but she hadn't. So she screamed and became quite hysterical quite fast.

We retrieved her hard drive and backed all her files off it. No problem. She's clear. The student who broke it feels awful and admitted everything. The mother of the student (it's Parent's Weekend this weekend -- of course the Mother was around) was understanding and is buying her daughter a Zip Drive.

All should be well. My head hurts.