Outside Over There: links of interest to outsiders

Some Students Live on the Edge -- Article by Rebecca Catalanello in the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail.

Nerd-Outcast-Misfit Resources by Bill Beaty. -- A list of useful links for nerds and geeks.

School Survival Guide, by SoulRiser -- A site for everyone who is or was ever trapped in school.

Why Nerds Are Unpopular by Paul Graham.

Now, a High-Tech Witch Hunt for Dangerous Students -- This column by Jon Katz is about a computer program called Mosaic-2000. It asks a student a series of questions, with the goal of determining how likely the student is to take violent action against his/her schoolmates. Katz makes the point that the program represents an infringement of students' civil liberties. Web-published by Free!.

Kids, Earn Extra Cash! Rat On Your Enemies! -- This column by Jon Katz is about a program, W.A.V.E. America, which rewards teens with prizes and even cash for reporting students who, among other things, "have excessive feelings of isolation or rejection", "feel constantly disrespected," or "have been a victim of bullying". The concept is that such students -- not their assailants, notice! -- pose a threat to the schools. (These quotes are straight from a link on W.A.V.E. America's website itself, not from Katz' column.) Katz' column is web-published by Free!.

After Katz published the column above, The Pinkerton Corporation, the developer of W.A.V.E. America, invited him to meet with them. In Showdown with the Pinkertons, published by Slashdot, Katz says, "The experience, in many respects, resembled talking to an affable stone wall."

In the interests of fairness and knowing one's enemy, here's a link to W.A.V.E.'s website. If you use this link to turn anyone in, even someone who's been bullying you, may divine retribution/nemesis/karma/the Threefold Law rise up and strike you.

Schools' Solution to Violence: Silence the Weird -- This column by Jon Katz is about Christopher Beamon, a 13-year-old from Texas who was jailed for five days for writing a Halloween story. His homework assignment had been to write a scary story, and he wrote about accidentally killing his teacher and a couple of his classmates. He got an A on the assignment, but he was sent to juvenile detention -- although no charges were filed against him! Web-published by Free!

Sports Daze: Memories of PE -- BBC feature about having to endure physical education classes, with comments from readers.

Schools of Alienation: The Hobbesian Culture of American Education -- Article by Nick Gillespie for Reason, web-published by FindArticles.

Carmina Popularia -- Outsiders with an interest in Latin may enjoy this site, which I also create and maintain. It contains Latin translations of various popular songs, such as "Puff, the Magic Dragon," "Leavin' on a Jet Plane," and "I am a Rock." I wrote most of them when I should have been doing my Latin homework in college, but I'm still writing a few new ones a year.

All original material on the Raven Days website, except the material appearing in the sections Words Out of Shadow and Lighting the Way, © 1999-2008 by its creator and maintainer, Meredith Minter Dixon.. Copyright to the articles in the sectionsWords Out of Shadow and Lighting the Way is retained by their authors. Counter: 6263