![]() ![]() That school suspended him for three days because their bigotry made them afraid of a child’s home science project. Mohamed, rather than finding a community of people who would share "what ifs" and napkin scribbles with him, was punished by his own school for trying to make something new and share it with others. They showed him that his passion and creativity are to be feared rather than embraced - that such things are not for young Muslim boys who share a surname with the Prophet Mohammed. How many other Muslim kids will hear about Ahmed's arrest and decide that making things isn’t for them?Īhmed Mohamed’s school and community sent him a very different message. That message stuck with me, and it continues to enrich my life to this day. It mattered that I got the message that building new things was so exciting that it was worth the risk of failing in the attempt. It mattered that I was surrounded by people who looked at problems and thought, "What if?" It mattered that I had teachers and parents and peers who encouraged such thinking, and who showed me its possibilities. Some of their work saves lives, and some of it makes your latest smartphone a bit more fun to play around with, but all of it contributes something of value.Įven I, a traitor to my community who became a journalist, still benefited from that environment. Today, those napkin scribblers are researchers at universities like MIT, or for companies like Apple and Google. And I can’t even count the number of times I saw someone, with an excited glint in her eye, say something like, "Well, we could try…" and sketch inscrutable diagrams on the nearest napkin. My house, like Ahmed’s, had boxes of spare wiring and diodes and switches lying around, lest anyone felt an urge to see what they could do with some copper wiring on a rainy afternoon. Nice clock ahmed twitter full#My childhood was full of cloud chambers and circuit boards (we called them "bread boards" for reasons I can’t remember). The town where I grew up is home to one of the best engineering schools in the world, and I grew up surrounded by scientists and engineers. In the words of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, "Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest." Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, September 16, 2015 You’ve probably seen the story about Ahmed, the 14 year old student in Texas who built a clock and was arrested when he. And perhaps to add that if the Irving, Texas, PD had access to such a device, it would have tipped them off that they’re living in the 21st century, and that their reaction to both basic technology and the existence of Muslim Americans is therefore appallingly out of date. It’s tempting to respond that the only "explanation" needed for clocks is that they provide the helpful service of telling time. And yet the school suspended Ahmed for three days and sent a letter to parents suggesting that Ahmed might have violated a "code of conduct" by making a "suspicious device." And the police took until Wednesday to decide not to charge him with a crime, arguing at first that he had failed to provide them with a "broader explanation" for why he made the clock and took it to school. Ahmed Mohamed has consistently explained to anyone who will listen that it is not, in fact, a bomb. To be absolutely clear: This wasn’t a bomb, or a hoax of any kind. To school officials, a Muslim student with a homemade clock wasn’t a potential recruit for a science club or math team - he was a potential terrorist with a device that looked like bomb.Īnd so instead of the clock leading Ahmed to a tribe of fellow makers, as he’d hoped, it led him to a juvenile detention center where he was fingerprinted and threatened with charges of making a "hoax bomb." "Look, I built something," Ahmed's project said. ![]() And when his English teacher saw the clock in Ahmed’s bag, she called the principal - who called the police. His engineering teacher said the clock was "nice," but advised him not to show it to anyone else. Unfortunately for Ahmed, his school didn’t speak engineer. In other words, the clock wasn’t just a clock - it was the opening line of a conversation in the universal language of engineers. But this project was for a special purpose: Ahmed had started high school a few weeks before, and he hoped the clock would help him find his niche there. It was far from the most ambitious home engineering project he had ever attempted, the ninth-grader later told the Dallas Morning News - he threw it together in about 20 minutes from materials he had in his bedroom. On Sunday evening, Ahmed Mohamed decided to make a clock. ![]()
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