Said Slytherin, “We’ll teach just those Whose ancestry’s purest.” Said Ravenclaw, “We’ll teach those whose Intelligence is surest.”
Said Gryffindor, “We’ll teach all those With brave deeds to their name.” Said Hufflepuff, “I’ll teach the lot And treat them just the same.”
About the Hufflepuff part.
A lot of people think that this means that Hufflepuffs have no defining traits. That we are simply the people the other Houses leave out. Like being the last one picked for the team in gym class. Of course, we know from the other Sorting Hat songs that this is wrong. That there are very specific traits that are associated with Hufflepuff.
And I think this song actually shows one of those traits. In the disability community, it might be called radical inclusion, although that’s become so much jargon and used for such purposes that I hesitate to use it.
What it means is that everyone belongs. Nobody gets left out. Nobody gets given a list of their faults and told “You are the weakest link, bye bye!” (Which is one of the most chilling lines I’ve ever heard in a game show.)
It means that one of the Hufflepuff values is not leaving anyone out, not if there’s any way to help it.
Of course that has to be done intelligently: Leaving a serial bully in a community in the name of inclusion, just means you’re excluding hir victims.
And Hufflepuffs can be prone to forgetting that fact. Like all values, lots of Hufflepuff values can go really ugly if taken to ideological extremes instead of evaluating based on the situation. "Including" a serial bully is excluding hir victims, which is not inclusion at all.
But the idea – the vision – of radical inclusion. Of a place for every student, regardless of their talents. That is the very opposite of a House having no defining traits. Radical inclusion is a defining trait of Hufflepuff that is not present in any other House to such a strong degree. It’s not about being the leftovers, it’s about the entire idea of leftovers being invalid. It’s about creating a place where the teachers will teach you regardless of what your talents are, regardless of what your disabilities are.
One thing I’ve heard from the best inclusion advocates in the disability rights community is, “If you can tell the ‘regular kids’ from the ‘inclusion kids’, you’re doing inclusion wrong, all you’ve got is integration, not inclusion.”
Hufflepuff at its most ideal best is a place where someone with an intellectual disability can learn right alongside someone without one. And they will be treated the same in one important way: The teaching is tailored towards whoever the student is. They are treated equally, not identically. And this means that each student is able to get the most learning out of their classes within Hufflepuff.
There’s also, in my headcanon, an ethic among Hufflepuff students where it’s assumed that each student has something to contribute to the other students’ learning. This means that people who are good at one thing, help people who are not as good at that thing. And the people who are not as good at that thing, help the others with the things they are good at. This goes both for school subjects, and for life in general. There is a general ethic of helpfulness and contributing your abilities to the greater whole, without anyone being put down for lacking abilities in any particular area.
And Hufflepuffs will often team up with Ravenclaws to create assistive technology for disabled wizards, including disabled Hufflepuffs.
A lot of disabled students end up in Hufflepuff because it’s generally the most disability-friendly of the Houses. This contributes to some of the ableist stigma that Hufflepuff is stuck with.
At any rate, “I’ll teach the lot and treat them just the same” doesn’t mean leftovers. It means nobody is leftovers. It means everyone is valued. It means treating everyone with the same value, with the same respect, with the same attention to who they really are – not treating everyone identically.
And that’s one of the best attributes of Hufflepuff, when done right. Like all House values, some hold to it more than others, and it’s more something to aspire to than something everyone has reached. But it’s very important, and for some reason very overlooked.
In 2013, Kiera Wilmot, then a 16-year-old at Florida’s Bartow High School, was arrested and recommended for expulsion after a science experiment using aluminum foil and toilet bowl cleaner malfunctioned in her biology class. But it doesn’t end there. Just last year an L.A. teacher was suspended for his students’ project.
We all make bad decisions sometimes, but have you ever wondered what mental obstacles can lead you astray? This infographic goes over 20 of the most common cognitive biases that can mess with your head when it’s decision time.
i hate how “netflix and chill” is a sexualized phrase now like no if i ask you to come watch netflix and chill ima be in my sweatpants eating ice cream out of the container with a big spoon im not gonna fuck you
Okay that NASA logo with his name legit made me tear up a little. I could have used this kind of support when I was wee. I hate that he got so hurt, but I’m so, so glad that the entire nerd universe is coming back to say: you rock, Ahmed.
Boy did a lot of people suddenly start smoking marijuana.
Washingtonians
and visitors have spent almost a quarter-billion dollars on retail weed
since legalization. It’s a lot of money. Enough to cover a week’s worth
of Forest Service firefighting costs this August. Enough to pay
Marshawn Lynch for almost 21 years of Beast Mode at his
current compensation.
A lot of money. Unless you compare it to something much more expensive: the drug war.
In that case, it’s a pittance.
A
decade ago, a team of economists tried to estimate the total cost of
pot prohibition nationwide, arriving at an estimate of $10 billion to
$14 billion a year. Split the difference and factor in inflation, and
Washington’s first pot year starts to look puny – it would finance about
1.7 percent of the annual cost of enforcing our country’s unjust and
wasteful reefer madness.
So, while Washington’s first year of
legal marijuana resulted in a lot of economic activity, the most
important economic marker is what we didn’t spend: Almost $1,000 per
person. That’s based on the ACLU’s estimate of the minimum per-capita
cost of pot enforcement in Washington before legalization.
In
other words, however much free adults spend on marijuana from here on
out will pale in comparison to how much every single one of us has
already been spending on prohibition – as well as the exorbitant social
costs of a racist system of enforcement.
sometimes u go on google searching for a reference image and you just find something that is totally not what you are looking for but is better than anything u could have ever dreamed
~*~
Amazingly~*~, we’re not the only two people in the world
who do not “feel ashamed for our words and deeds”
and don’t think Quiet’s design is justifiable in any possible way. Not with “she HAS to uncover her skin, because narrative reasons”, not with “Hideo Kojima can do no wrong”, not with “MGS is a silly franchise, so ANYTHING absurd is acceptable”.
Here are some of my favorite things Jim says in the video:
I’d have been so much cooler with the situation if [Kojima] just said “The secret reason for her exposure is that I just wanna get a gigantic fucking hard-on with my big Kojima cock.”
Indeed. If you guys were wondering why BABD is so hung up on Quiet compared to many similarly bad designs, it’s because how straight-up disingenuous (and inconsistent) her creator is about the character’s conception.
What Kojima promised would be the “antithesis to the women characters appeared in the past fighting game who are excessively exposed” is instead the embodiment of characters in the past who are excessively exposed.
If you explain away everything with “It’s a Metal Gear game, it’s always silly and you’re stupid if you criticize it”, then you ultimately do Hideo Kojima himself a disservice as a writer.
Interestingly, another baffling excuse we’ve been hearing again and again since we started criticizing Quiet is “The Boss is awesome, therefore every MGS heroine is just as good”. And while Jim agrees about Boss being great, he knows she’s just one character, and therefore should be upheld as a model for women in the franchise, not as a proof that female representation is okay already in MGS.
Also, predictably, this is the sort of replies the video gets:
Apparently not being able to go back in time and complain about twocharacters in military uniforms with absurdly deep cleavages, while he currently complains about another military-themed character clad literally only in a bikini and fishnets makes him a “hypocrite”.
President Obama sent the tweet above and joins a viral army of vocal supporters for young science whiz Ahmed Mohamed who was arrested and suspended from school for bringing a homemade clock to school to show to his engineering teacher.
President Obama joins notable names absolutely dominating Twitter today with support for Ahmed:
Assumptions and fear don't keep us safe—they hold us back. Ahmed, stay curious and keep building. https://t.co/...
Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.
Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed's circuit-stuffed pencil case.
So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it's a clock.
...He loved robotics club in middle school and was searching for a similar niche in his first few weeks of high school.
So he decided to do what he's always done: He built something.
Ahmed's clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.
He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn't get quite the reaction he'd hoped for.
"He was like, 'That's really nice,'" Ahmed said. "'I would advise you not to show any other teachers.'"
Let's pause here for a moment to consider that a teacher, only the first of many, thought a clock looked like a bomb. And instead of doing something to protect his student against the possible consequences for carrying something around that a bunch of dipshits would mistake for a bomb, he just told him to put it back in his school bag.
So Ahmed put the clock back in his bag, but later his English teacher "complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward." She told him it looked like a bomb, to which he quite reasonably replied, "It doesn't look like a bomb to me." The teacher kept the clock, and, later that day, Ahmed was pulled out of class by the principal, accompanied by a police officer.
They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he'd never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: "Yup. That's who I thought it was."
...The principal threatened to expel him if he didn't make a written statement, he said.
"They were like, 'So you tried to make a bomb?'" Ahmed said.
"I told them no, I was trying to make a clock."
"He said, 'It looks like a movie bomb to me.'"
So this is the basis on which this kid was terrified and intimidated: Some asshole's perception of what bombs look like based on what he's seen in the movies. Fucking hell.
And, of course, a perception clearly influenced by the fact that this clock resembling "a movie bomb" was built by a Muslim child.
Ahmed never claimed his device was anything but a clock, said police spokesman James McLellan. And police have no reason to think it was dangerous. But officers still didn't believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story.
"We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb," McLellan said. "He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation."
Asked what broader explanation the boy could have given, the spokesman explained:
"It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?"
They decided that, yes, they do take him into custody—and Ahmed was marched out of school in handcuffs in front of other students.
Police led Ahmed out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., his hands cuffed behind him and an officer on each arm. A few students gaped in the halls. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor — the one "who knows I'm a good boy."
..."He just wants to invent good things for [human]kind," said Ahmed's father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed.
...Ahmed [was released to his parents and] is sitting home in his bedroom, tinkering with old gears and electrical converters, pronouncing words like "ethnicity" for what sounds like the first time.
He's vowed never to take an invention to school again.
Rage. Seethe. Boil. As a number of people have already observed: It's a real mystery why there aren't more people of color in the STEM fields. Instead of being rewarded for his initiative, creativity, and skill, and delivered on shoulders straight to the nearest science camp, Ahmed was delivered in handcuffs to the yawning maw of the school to prison pipeline.
I am so angry and sad that Ahmed was treated this way. I hope he continues his "tinkering," and someday invents a device capable of measuring the profundity of my contempt for the adults who saw danger where there was invention, because of their own despicable prism of prejudice.
This is it. This is the one. This takes the money it wins this guy has literally summed up me into one video I am alive and well my skin is clear and I am as alive as I will every be because no post or video has ever more accurately described me.
So, earlier this week, the bf and I had a weird spat about, of all things, John Oliver. My brain wants to me clarify this by pointing out that the spat was more about sports and politics than it was about John Oliver per se, but we'll just leave it there. ANYWAY, the bf claimed that he doesn't like Oliver because comedically, he tends to go for the low-hanging fruit. He feels that Stewart simply didn't do that. So, basically, this week I've had a lot of fun digging out specific examples of Jon Stewart grabbing that low hanging fruit off of the tree, and tossing it around for everyone to share.
A peevish Mitch McConnell forced the Senate to vote Tuesday evening, again, to begin debate on the Iran disapproval resolution. He lost, again. But true to form, he promised there would be even more Iran votes and set one up for Thursday, this time a procedural vote—which again requires 60 votes—to prevent President Obama from lifting sanctions on Iran under the deal until Iran publicly supports Israel.
As Democratic leader Harry Reid said, "The Republican leader has threatened to us, 'we lost and we're going to make you suffer.' […] The Republicans have lost. They lost this measure, and we should move on to something else." But they won't move on to something else, not until McConnell feels he has adequately "shamed" Democrats, as Politico puts it. The problem is, Democrats haven't been shamed, on any of the votes McConnell has tried this on.
For the second time in less than a week Tuesday, the Senate blocked an attempt by the majority leader to push a measure to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal through the chamber. The try-and-try-again strategy—amounting to a repeated public shaming—has become something of a go-to move for McConnell.
Problem is, it's not working, at least if the metric of success is producing a different outcome. Democrats successfully filibustered the Iran measure again on Tuesday on a 56-42 vote—with no one from Minority Leader Harry Reid’s ranks switching sides from the same vote last week amid gripes from Democrats that McConnell was wasting precious floor time. […]
But several of McConnell’s previous attempts at revotes have gone south. The most dramatic case was DHS funding, when Senate Republicans forced Democrats to vote four times on a funding bill for the agency that also would have cut off cash to implement President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Each time, Democrats filibustered, bringing the agency responsible for repelling terrorist attacks to the brink of a shutdown, and leaving Republicans no shortage of egg on their collective face.
This time, though, they seem to think it will be different. Because . . . national security? McConnell depute John Cornyn (R-TX) says that "this is the most serious national security vote we will have had at least since 2002, on the authorization of the use of military force," and that Democrats "underestimate the consequences of this both from the national security perspective and from a political perspective." Okay. Killing this deal to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons is the equivalent to going to war? And that's supposed to convince people to come over to his side? When we know what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan? Of course, this isn't the first time McConnell and team have tried the national security card. It didn't work when he was trying to keep the Patriot Act alive, and it's not going to happen this time, either.
Furthermore, McConnell is planning on punishing Democrats who want to do what McConnell also purportedly wants to do—strengthen Israel—by refusing to hold any votes on their amendments to do that unless they can prove they have 67 votes. Because he can. Meanwhile, the government runs out of money at midnight on September 30, and McConnell hasn't done anything about that.
Hardison didn’t come up with his
catchphrase. He heard it, liked it, and claimed it.
He was not the most popular kid in
school. He was a very much a geek, arguably over the line into being a nerd, well-liked by his teachers and not many others. He made
up for that somewhat with his naturally friendly temperament, but even so he
wasn’t most of the students’ favorite.
The other geeks were nice enough most of
the time but he didn’t fit the image of what a geeky high school kid should look
like. He was black and in the minds of most of his very white fellow geeks that automatically made him a
jock at best and a gangbanger at worst. He wore backwards baseball caps with Star Wars t-shirts. It didn’t match their image. And on top of that he was smarter than
most of them, so they were a bit jealous too. The jocks didn’t want him because
they could tell right away that he was a geek to his very core. Even so, he
almost never got straight up picked on because he was tall and strong and
nobody wanted to test whether he was a total nerd or not.
He didn’t go to his first prom. He
didn’t have anyone to go with anyway, and told himself it was really because
Nana couldn’t really afford a tux rental. He could always hack in somewhere,
get himself on a prepaid list, but there the whole idea circled back around to
not having a date.
“What you doin’ hidin’ out up here
instead of goin’ to your prom?” Nana asked.
He shrugged, glancing up briefly,
then back down at his computer screen.
“I know that shrug young man. Don’t
you gi’me that shrug. If you don’t want to talk about it tha’s ok, but you can
use your words to say so.”
“Stacy’s goin’ with the quarterback,”
he said, just catching himself in time to keep from giving another shrug. Nana
notices and smiled.
“You’ll get the last laugh and no
mistake.”
“How?” Hardison asked a little petulantly.
“He’s team captain. He’s got the girl.”
“And he’s got maybe a one in a
million shot at any of that mattering for the rest of his life. What you’re
good at don’t go ‘way after school. Don’t you know it’s the age of the geek?”
Nana asked. “Well it is and don’t you forget it.
The next year he also didn’t go to
prom but that time it didn’t bother him at all. He was busy hacking the Bank of
Iceland. Age of the geek indeed.
Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Muslim student was arrested at his high school in Irving, Texas, after bringing a homemade clock to class, which school officials mistook for a bomb. Mohamed showed his engineering teacher first, but when the alarmed went off later in the day, that’s when the trouble started.
what you think your theme says: minimalist. aesthetic. simplistic small font.
what your theme actually says: this is a blog for ants. no humans can read this. zoom is impossible because only ants are supposed to read this blog. i like giving people headaches
I was wondering how many webcomics there were out there with black protagonists (for my own reference). Then I figured plenty of other folks would love to see a list. So heeeeere we go! (Please reblog and add more!)
Police in Texas have arrested a 14-year-old boy for building a clock. Ahmed Mohamed, who lives in Irving and has a keen interest in robotics and engineering, put the device together on Sunday night. When he took it to school the next day, he was pulled out of class, interviewed by police officers, and taken in handcuffs to juvenile detention, after being told by teachers that his creation looked like a bomb.
The people and institutions that care about technology, science, and social justice are correct to rally in support of Mohamed because we need every talented and curious kid with thick glasses we can find.
OK, but I partially disagree with this headcanon, and here’s why:
1) Bruce is totally playing Gamora. You don’t think Bruce Banner has played Dungeons & Dragons before? Bruce Banner has absolutely played Dungeons & Dragons before. He played all through high school and college and when Bucky announces the campaign Bruce jumps at the opportunity because he just misses it so much (mostly rose-tinted nostalgia goggles but). So he sits Bucky down and asks him for every bit of info he can on the setting and spends a whole night with a pot of tea drafting up the five-page backstory for his space assassin and her family tree and her struggle with her relationship with the villain and comes to Bucky with a fully-ready character sheet and a list of things Bucky will need to OK before Gamora hops in.
Bucky quietly resolves to integrate as much as he can into the story, mainly because Bruce came up with some better ideas than he’d had.
2) Tony is definitely playing Quill, because Tony has never played D&D before. You don’t get to be where Tony Stark is in life and have much free time. He does what a lot of newbies do and bases a character on himself, or at least the parts he likes: clever, snarky, pre-’90s musical taste, beds space babes, heroic sometimes probably. He wants to be cool but has no idea how to be cool within this context (“My character’s name is Starlord.” “What? Tony, no.”). He hogs the spotlight all the time (all the time) but clearly has no idea what he’s doing and when someone who seems like they know what they’re talking about gives him advice he always takes (“I’m going to need that guy’s leg.” “Seriously? Alright” *Rolls to grapple*).
Quill’s backstory is primarily Bruce’s doing. Tony just handed it in with a “yeah whatever’s on there.”
3) Thor is playing Drax but didn’t join until a few sessions in when he tagged along and decided it looked like fun (“THIS PLEASES ME! ALLOW ME TO JOIN YOUR TALES OF ADVENTURE!”). He definitely needed help constructing his character sheet, but he had no problem coming up with a character. Bucky asked him what he wanted to play and got that glint in his eye and responded “I WILL FORGE A HERO WORTHY OF THE ANCIENT TALES OF ASGARD.” And he put a lot of thought into Drax, both in personal history and personality. He’s mostly modeled on Thor’s favorite Asgardian folk heroes, with some personal flaws and quirks thrown in that Thor thinks are interesting.
Of course Thor doesn’t really understand the game part of it, he’s in it for the story (“Thor what the hell man there’s no way we can take on Ronan at this level!” “AH BUT THINK OF THE THRILLING DRAMA OF THE MOMENT DRAX AND RONAN MEET AGAIN!” “We are all going to die.” “AND IT WILL BE A THRILLING TRAGEDY!”)
4) Steve is absolutely playing Rocket but what started as a complete joke ballooned into a fully fleshed-out character with a tragic backstory. Steve’s an artist, he’s a creative guy and little too creative for his own good sometimes and bouncing his ideas off of Natasha turned a simple joke into a more elaborate character dynamic than even Bruce’s. He trolls Bucky a lot and it’s even better for Steve when he really gets into Rocket’s character and plays up the drama, partly because Bucky can’t tell if he’s joking or not.
5) Somewhere in the brainstorming session, Steve and Natasha decided that Rocket has a partner who is a talking tree. Natasha pitches this idea completely straight-faced to Bucky and after the fiasco of Steve’s character idea Bucky’s just too tired to say no to the tree-man. Natasha gives him a bit of a backstory and how Rocket and Groot got together and it sounds pretty solid, so whatever, tree-man can stay.
Then when all the characters get introduced Natasha just hovers over Tony and puffs out her chest and says in her deepest voice: “I am Groot.”
And Steve snickers and nobody has any idea why.
A session later Natasha is responding to everything Tony says with that same deep “I am Groot.” and Steve goes blue in the face trying to hold in his laughter and Tony cracks and the game has to pause for 10 minutes while Nat and Steve recompose themselves.
Nat also has a better grasp of the rules than Bucky realized and completely tweaked her character into being able to do basically anything she can justify. And it’s all right there in the book, Bucky can’t even argue from a rules standpoint. They’re only level 5 Groot shouldn’t be essentially bulletproof but through some loophole in the rules, yep, there it is.
Natasha Romanoff is trained to exploit weaknesses. Of course she’s a total munchkin.
IRVING — Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.
Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.
So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.
In the meantime, Ahmed’s been suspended, his father is upset and the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.
Box of circuit boards
A box full of circuit boards sits at the foot of Ahmed’s small bed in central Irving. His door marks the border where the Mohamed family’s cramped but lavishly decorated house begins to look like the back room at RadioShack.
“Here in high school, none of the teachers know what I can do,” Ahmed said, fiddling with a cable while a soldering iron dangled from the shelf behind him.
He loved robotics club in middle school and was searching for a similar niche in his first few weeks of high school.
So he decided to do what he’s always done: He built something.
Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.
He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for.
“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”
He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.
“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.
“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”
The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.
They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”
Ahmed felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name — one of the most common in the Muslim religion. But the police kept him busy with questions.
The bell rang at least twice, he said, while the officers searched his belongings and questioned his intentions. The principal threatened to expel him if he didn’t make a written statement, he said.
“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” Ahmed said.
“I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”
“He said, ‘It looks like a movie bomb to me.’”
Police skepticism
Ahmed never claimed his device was anything but a clock, said police spokesman James McLellan. And police have no reason to think it was dangerous. But officers still didn’t believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story.
“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.”
Asked what broader explanation the boy could have given, the spokesman explained:
“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”
Police led Ahmed out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., his hands cuffed behind him and an officer on each arm. A few students gaped in the halls. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor — the one “who knows I’m a good boy.”
Ahmed was spared the inside of a cell. The police sent him out of the juvenile detention center to meet his parents shortly after taking his fingerprints.
They’re still investigating the case, and Ahmed hasn’t been back to school. His family said the principal suspended him for three days.
“They thought, ‘How could someone like this build something like this unless it’s a threat?’” Ahmed said.
An Irving ISD statement gave no details about the case, citing student privacy laws.
‘Invent good things’
“He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”
Mohamed is familiar with anti-Islamic politics. He once made national headlines for debating a Florida pastor who burned a Quran.
But he wasn’t paying much attention this summer when Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne became a national celebrity in anti-Islamic circles, fueling rumors in speeches that the religious minority was plotting to usurp American laws.
However, the Council on American-Islamic Relations took note.
“This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving’s government entities are operating in the current climate,” said Alia Salem, who directs the council’s North Texas chapter and has spoken to lawyers about Ahmed’s arrest.
“We’re still investigating,” she said, “but it seems pretty egregious.”
Meanwhile, Ahmed is sitting home in his bedroom, tinkering with old gears and electrical converters, pronouncing words like “ethnicity” for what sounds like the first time.
He’s vowed never to take an invention to school again.
If you've never been poor, you probably believe some of these common misperceptions about the lives of people in poverty. Here's the truth.
