They forced us in high school to use a service called “TurnItIn” which I really disliked because they took ownership of your writing and added it to their database to diff against all future submissions.
It’s supposed to prevent plagiarism, but it made me frustrated to be forced to aid in this system or fail.
Being a public school student in the US sucks most of the time - no power and miserable adults. It’s like being imprisoned with some of the dumber, less successful people from the previous generation in charge of you and they have a lot of discretion over your future success.
Some teachers are great obviously and make a huge difference, but many are truly awful.
If they’re requiring services like turnitin as a matter of policy it’s not a surprise other stuff would be poorly handling student data too. School’s don’t value it, and even if they did - they don’t have the technical capability to fix it.
University felt like a limbo where the government expected me to be an adult and pay my own way but the school wanted me to be a child and trust that they knew what was best for me.
In our (UK) system, there's no profit incentive because there's no bad customer service that will be enough for you to give up the economic signalling. So, despite being the most expensive thing I've ever paid for, I had less input into how it was done than I do for my coffee subscription.
I didn't have a bad experience with school before that but I still remember distinct occassions of cruelty or unfairness. At that age you're just less well equipped to deal with it, nobody trusts you and you have no freedom, so your world is smaller. So a minor thing has a major impact. Adults used to tell me that it's all downhill after 18 - did they forget what it's like to be a kid?
Everyone isn’t stupid - today I work with wonderful, very smart people I can learn from.
HN and a lot of places online have wonderful people too.
The average American public school teacher? They’re not that bright and they can be petty. I usually didn’t have trouble because I was a good student.
Some examples:
- Teacher in health class said BAC wasn’t lethal until 40%, when I mentioned I think it was .4% she said I forgot to multiply by 100. On the final the multiple choice answers for lethality ranged from 10% to 40% BAC. She also had an obvious hyper-Christian abstinence only lean despite state law to teach actual sex Ed.
- Art teacher in elementary school called home and humiliated me in front of the class because I was talking about video games with another student while working on arts and crafts (this teacher hated video games).
- Middle school history teacher hated children, picked favorites, and was just generally mean, would bully kids in the class. She was worse than most middle school students.
It’s not a superiority complex, I had wonderful teachers too that cared about students and were kind. The incentives and pay of public schools are such that you get a lot of bad ones (and they’re impossible to fire).
When I tried to tell adults about what was going on they often dismissed it with condescending nonsense “oh it’s a tough age” - no some of these people you have in charge of us are legitimately crazy and should not be in charge of children.
Children have no power in school and it often sucks to be there.
Also reminded me of an older comment I wrote a while back that’s a little related (at least has some more absurd examples I had forgotten about).
“ Illegitimate (or at least arbitrary) authority is something schools seem to thrive on. Our school had a staircase you could only go up and one you could only go down and you got yelled at if you went the wrong direction. Naturally the building wasn’t made by insane people so the stairs were on opposite ends, this meant if you had to go downstairs but were near the “up only stairs” you had to traverse the entire building and would be late with 3min class change times (and you couldn’t run either).
We also couldn’t talk during the second half of lunch because it was too loud for the lunch monitors.”
> they don’t have the technical capability to fix it
This is a key point. Many school administrators just pick tools to use and don't bother understanding them and do not have the technical staff to setup and maintain them properly.
We all work in tech related fields, I assume, so think about the most sought after positions, have those ever been at a university IT department or K-12? Probably not.
There was a thread a couple weeks ago on here where it was joked (kinda half serious) that a school IT department is where you can go and just "coast" with great work/life balance.
> “ We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications.”
The entire value of the product comes from a corpus of student papers. The students are not compensated for their contribution to the company. Instead, their contribution is secured by extortion.
This is probably similar to the posts that regularly do the rounds claiming Facebook are asserting ownership of any photos or text you post to Facebook, when if you read the terms what they're actually saying is that by posting your giving them license to publish that content (because without that license any time they showed your photo to another user they'd be breaching your copyright).
>This is probably similar to the posts that regularly do the rounds claiming Facebook are asserting ownership of any photos or text you post to Facebook
Maybe it's true that FB don't own these right but they certainly did try. I recall a huge user campaign against Facebook who were brining out a new update to their ToS regarding photo ownership back in circa 2011. They ultimately backed down.
It’s supposed to prevent plagiarism, but it made me frustrated to be forced to aid in this system or fail.
Being a public school student in the US sucks most of the time - no power and miserable adults. It’s like being imprisoned with some of the dumber, less successful people from the previous generation in charge of you and they have a lot of discretion over your future success.
Some teachers are great obviously and make a huge difference, but many are truly awful.
If they’re requiring services like turnitin as a matter of policy it’s not a surprise other stuff would be poorly handling student data too. School’s don’t value it, and even if they did - they don’t have the technical capability to fix it.