12 thoughts on “High-School Science Teacher”

  1. “A school employee saw the air-pressure project and raised concerns about what looked to her like a weapon…”

    The operative word is “her.”

  2. Teaching projectile motion (or anything else related to Newtonian physics) should be banned as such knowledge can be dangerous in the wrong (unenlightened) hands.

  3. Heck, my friend who runs an organization doing science and engineering projects for educators has kids launching compressed-air rockets hundreds of feet. I gave him a huge book on medieval cross bows and now the kids build their own stocks and triggers and bend their own truck springs. As school projects, the kids break into teams and have to build things like a trebuchet or ballista. Some are working models, and some are full-size siege engines. They’re currently working on an all-steel free-arm trebuchet that will probably weigh several thousand pounds (It’s frame is something like 8×8″ box beams)

    Brochure that has a picture of one of the ballistas.

  4. If the teacher had signed them up for the Team America Rocketry Challenge, they would all be in jail on terrorism charges…….

  5. You know, back in the bad old days, I went on McDonnell Planetarium as party of a school field trip. McDonnell was building the Gemini spacecraft at the time. A young engineer was explaining rocket propulsion to us, and demonstrated how it worked. He had a sponged soaked with ethanol in a beaker, and lit it. It burned feebly with whatever air it could get. Then he dribbled liquid oxygen from a thermos onto it, and it burned energetically.

    We were all sitting close to him, and none of had glasses at the time. I can’t imagine the prison sentence he would get today…

  7. I am about as anti public employee union as they come, but this portion of the original LA Times article is very illuminating:

    “Schiller, 43, also was the teachers union representative on the campus and had been dealing with disagreements with administrators over updating the employment agreement under which the faculty works. His suspension, with pay, removed him from those discussions.

    The expensive Grand Avenue arts high school has a troubled brief history, including repeated administrative and staff turnover.”

    1. So they are arbitrarily enforcing a school policy (or more to the point, willfully misinterpreting one) to deal with a political opponent. Beria would be proud.

  8. In high school, we had Model Club. A number of women students expressed interest until it was explained that it was mainly about model rockets and airplanes and not about a career in clothing fashion.

    The faculty advisor was the Vice Principal of Academic Affairs or some sort of title. We would have planning meetings in his office, and my naive self asked about the framed plaque “Fly with the crows, get shot with the crows” having a prominent place in his office. He explained, “Most of you come to my office because of Model Club meetings, but there are some students who come here because they are sent here for breaking the rules. A student gets reported for smoking in the Men’s Room and tells me, “I wasn’t smoking, it was my friend Ralph smoking in the next stall”, and I point to the sign “Fly with the crows, get shot with the crows.””
    The interesting thing is that he had a rather Libertarian attitude to the activities of Model Club. We did everything short of actually making explosions (on purpose, anyway). A big part of what we did was Estes rockets, but you all know how tricky it is to get a launch electrically, so the guys would use fireworks fuses and light them with a match.

    I was mainly “into” scratchbuilt model airplanes with .049 engines. Expanded styrofoam was a novel building material in those days, and my parents gave me some scrap fake wood beam material left over from a family room renovation. Maybe that was before building codes saying you couldn’t have exposed styrofoam in a living space. Anyway, my fusalage was a wooden yard stick, the engine mount was a block of wood, and the wings and tail were carved from that foam.

    I didn’t know much about NACA wing sections so the profile was something that I thought would work. At a Model Club session out in the field we used, I finally got an engine start (I had the darndest time getting those engines to start), I launched the contraption where it promptly entered a zoom climb, stalled at the top of the arc because that wing had no lift to speak of and the CGs were probably all wrong, it then headed Earthward in a power dive, and smashed itself to bits. The Yearbook photographer got a snapshot of the crash, which made the Model Club annual picture, and I was celebrated by Club members for the year’s best wreck.

    My celebrity lasted until a session I missed, where a Club member took the smallest Estes rocket model, weighted the nose cone with pennies, put in the largest motor he could get (put an “E” into a model rated for an “A” motor), tipped the launch rod down for maximum slant range, and then came back an hour later after finding “where it went.”

    Maybe the point of the whole thing was letting us do dangerous stuff under a minimum of faculty restraint as this would keep us out of more serious trouble?

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