Endless Thread - Schooled

Episode Date: May 10, 2018

It's May, which means most of the kids in school right now are thinking about the summer. And to celebrate, we've got two stories about some rather unfortunate school mishaps.

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Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. It is May, which means that most kids in school right now are thinking about getting out for the summer. But just a few years ago, the kids at Yakima, Washington's Eisenhower High School were getting pumped about heading back to school. Because they had a brand new high school to go back to. It cost over $100 million to build, state of the art. Had a big shining, beautiful blue wall at the entrance to artistically represent one of the town's assets, the big, shining, beautiful blue Yakima River. What's the mascot?

The Eisenhower Cadet. This is Julia. Julia Noel 95 on Reddit. She graduated from Eisenhower High, or Ike, as it's called, in 2014. She says Ike has a lot of school spirit. They even have one of those hand-jive routines just for the school where you like snap and clap your hands and stuff to show your school pride. Near the end, there was one part where you would do like a fish swimming motion and they had to

change it like my sophomore year because it got super rowdy and someone got pushed off the bleachers. Point being Ike has spirit. So much spirit that people are getting knocked off the bleachers. So a whole brand new school back in 2013 when Julia was an incoming senior was a big deal. But when the kids came back to their new school after the summer break, they came back to a problem. Something was missing. One of the fundamental ingredients of any school building. And because the new school building was a big deal, this was a big deal. We begin tonight right here in Yakima.

We're students at Eisenhower High are wrapping up their second week at their brand new school, a state-of-the-art wonder. and then has students wondering how they could forget to include water founts. Yep, the contractors had apparently walled over the connections for those things he used to splash your buddies or cool off your gum, and I suppose every once in a while maybe hydrate yourself. And it wasn't like they just forgot to do something minor. This major new facility was going to need major changes to get the water through the walls and into new water fountains. So they put in a couple of vending machines with water that were like two bucks a water bottle. Julia loves telling this story, by the way, because to her, a senior when this water fiasco went down, it's kind of funny.

Fiasco, you say? Yes, fiasco. Because this little mishap led to a bunch of unforeseen consequences. It ended up getting to the point where I'm pretty sure they turned off the vending machines or once all the bottles were gone, they just didn't refill it. and there was this whole outrage, you know, the newspaper, you know, and the news picked up the story and we're like, oh, school, Yakima school bans water. How does a high school ban water? We will tell you, won't we, Emery? Oh, yes. We've got two stories, actually, about unfortunate school mishaps.

You'll cringe, you'll laugh, you'll cringe some more. But like good cringe. Anyway, we're going to call this one schooled. I'm Ben Brachian. Johnson, and this is Endless Thread, a show featuring the best stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I am here with my producer and co-host Amory Sievertson, and we are coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. All right, so Eisenhower, aka Ike High, has no water fountains. I guess they technically have two water fountains, but that's for the whole school of 2,000 kids and they're way out of the way.

So the teachers and administrators know this is an issue. issue. So the vending machines in the school get filled with bottled water. But that water costs money, so not ideal. They were kind of like, we have water bottles for sale, and then all the students were like, hot, we're in high school, we don't have money. And so they were like, oh, well, then just bring a water bottle. And the students were like, okay, I guess I'll do that. But then something kind of interesting happens. Julia says the year that this is all going down when she's a senior, there were some bad apples among the freshmen. Typical thing for a senior to say, typical.

Yeah, yeah. Blame the freshmen, why don't you? Exactly. And these freshmen, they are enterprising. They get an idea. They started bringing in vodka in water bottles. I think they started just bringing it for themselves. And then other students caught wind and were like, hey, you know, can you hook me up with some of that? And so they started selling it to other students around the school.

Vodka, clear like water. Genius. Introducing large amounts of vodka into the school for day drinking, not genius. How, like, widespread of a thing did this become? It was a pretty decent problem. There was a good portion of at least the freshmen. And, you know, it was a big school. So even if there was, you know, like 10% of students that's still going to be, like,

in double digits or potentially in, you know, 100 of students who are partaking in this. Julia says the kids reportedly were stealing vodka from the liquor store across the street. filling water bottles with it coming into school and selling them at a premium. Julia's boyfriend, Traven, also went to Ike. And in a quiet hallway near the gym, one of these freshman bootleggers tried to sell him some hooch. He was like, hey man, want to buy something to drink? And I had heard this had been going around at the time. So I was like, I asked him a question about it.

You know, I was like, are you saying alcohol right now? And he was like, yeah. And my reaction to it was, are you, like, this is a joke, right? you're not seriously trying to do this right now? Oh, you are? Okay. Well, no thanks. But I didn't want to be a narc. And so I kind of kept it to myself. Eventually, this problem got really bad. Julia says kids were wasted all over school, passing out at their desks, teachers started to smell it. At one point, there's a big school assembly, and a kid can't seem to walk up the bleachers. He ends up getting a breathalizer and blows way

over the legal limit for driving. But the legal limit for drinking as a high school. high school kid is 0.0.0. So it's now a big enough issue that it is clear that the water bottle thing isn't going to work. They can't check every single bottle. Eventually, the teachers had to, like, an emergency meeting about it. And they were like, what on earth are we going to do about this? This is ridiculous. Like, all these kids are coming to school super drunk. We can't, like, like, what are we going to do? Ban water bottles? Are we going to ban water from the school? And they did just that. And they said the school has a new policy that we're not allowed to have water. The issue with water at Eisenhower High School is expanding. First, the new school didn't include

enough drinking fountains. Now kids can't bring their own water bottles to class. Parents started threatening to like pull their kids because how can you ban water. It's, you know, it's necessary for life. There wasn't water at lunch. You could only buy milk. Ugh, milk only at lunch. That's gross. Yeah. Well, and you could only get like apple juice or something. thing if you had like a doctor's note saying you had a dairy allergy. So you couldn't even opt out of that. So how did it get resolved? Well, everyone got super upset.

And so the principal and, you know, all of the higher ups in our school were like, hey, hey, guys, you can't tell students that they can't have water. They need that to be alive and they're stuck here all day. And hydration is really important, especially, you know, when you're in a learning environment, you have to stay hydrated or your brain's not going to work right. you're not going to retain anything, you know. The kids' brains were working, though. The proof is in the jokes.

Traven saw evidence. In one of the computer lab classes I came in one day, and one of the desktop backgrounds of the screens had been changed to this aquafina ad that somebody had Microsoft painted over the lyrics to that song, Turned Down for What, over the thing and said it as the desktop background. As in Turn Down for What, the Lil'L John Dreaming. Thinking Anthem. Okay.

Okay. Eventually, things did apparently turn down. The year after I graduated, they fixed the plumbing at Ike. So they fixed all that, and they open the walls. But now not only do they have water fountains, but most of the water fountains actually have those water bottle fillers on them. We're jealous. We wish it was there when we were there.

There was one lingering irony, though. That wall, the one at the school's entrance, that represents the Yakima River? Well... Yeah, the big blue wall. Yeah, I think they've got it fixed now, but initially it leaked water like crazy. Yes, in the school

where there were not water fountains installed in the walls, water was leaking out of the wall representing the Yakima River. Eventually, that got fixed, too, and fixing that little construction error cost half a million dollars. Now the students know firsthand

how important it is to double-check their work. John LaCross, action news. How many bottles of vodka can you buy with half a million dollars? Uh, $30 bottles carry the one, 33,000? I did that calculating already. Oh, that makes me queasy just thinking about it. Here's some water, Amory. I brought my water bottle today.

Oh, thanks, Ben. Yeah, let's all have a tall glass of water. Back in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

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Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. Amory, we have heard a story from students. let's hear one from a teacher, a professor, actually. Yeah, because I'd like to think endless threat is nothing, if not fair and balanced. Totally. Super international, too, because this next story comes from Canada, University of Waterloo in Ontario. It is a research university and pretty tech-oriented.

People there sometimes call it the MIT of the North. It has a pretty strong presence on Reddit. The R-Slas-U Waterloo community on there is very active. And this is like Reddit's version of, Rate my professor right here. There's a kid in an introductory computer science class, CS-136, to be precise. And this kid, I'm going to call them Francis, just because. Nice.

Francis puts up a post about the professor in the class, Dave Tompkins. This post has a pretty clear thesis statement. Yeah, it's all right there in the title of the post, which is, Dave Tompkins is overrated. Pretty bold. And Francis lays out their case against Professor Tompkins. in a straightforward way. There are bullet points, and the accusations are as follows.

Dave Tompkins over-explains obvious things. Dave Tompkins is, quote, disgusting because he drinks too many Coke zeros in class. Dave Tompkins makes too many bad jokes, and this one's pretty specific. The student says that those jokes always seem to be about picking up girls. Because, as Francis complains, we're almost all virgins who have never approached girls. So the idea is like, Dave Tompkins is the comedian professor. who doesn't know his audience. This is so rough.

I know. And then there's the last bullet point. Dave Tompkins forces students in the class to talk to the people sitting next to them to check answers. And Francis writes, Dude, I don't want to talk to this guy next to me who smells like he just crawled out of a trash bin. And maybe the worst part here is that Professor Dave Tompkins sees this post. How do we know? Well, he responded to unread it.

And that response blew up. And also because you got to give you. accuse the right to respond, right? Fair trial in the court of the internet. Yeah. So we called the professor. My name is Dave Tompkins, and I'm a lecture at the University of Waterloo in computer science. How did you hear about this particular post on Reddit? The day that it happened was a bit unusual. My daughter was actually sick, and we had been up all night with her, and so I had actually decided to work for home that day and take care of her. Uh-huh. I think I had two or three people email me and say, hey, you've been mentioned on Reddit. And I think Reddit itself lets you know when

your username has been mentioned. Yes. So I got one of those notifications. And then I clicked on that post and I'm like, ah, I don't have time for this. That was basically my first reaction. That sounds very professorial. Yeah, it was late at night and I spent the whole day taking care of my daughter. So I was way behind on a lot of work. And so I decided I better reply. Okay. So you felt like you had to defend yourself a little bit. A little bit. And mostly because, he mentioned something about picking up chicks in class, that I joke about picking up chicks, and I really took offense to that.

Most of his other criticism I probably could have let go, but I didn't want to be just complacent and make people other people read this post and think, oh, Dave makes jokes about picking up chicks in class. That's not appropriate. Dave took offense to this one, because, for one, he says he's really careful in how he identifies people in his jokes.

But he was also already supposedly feeling some insecurity, because this was a thing he was afraid was going to happen. He was a popular guy at the University of Waterloo, hence Francis's overrated comment. Dave's high ratings made him nervous. A little bit. I mean, at one point people were selling seats in my class. So Dave's like, man, this sucks. I've become popular and I felt that pressure and now I've got this brutal takedown on Reddit for being overrated.

So he takes some time to think about it, but not too much time because he's a little sleep deprived and he's pissed. What was your approach in crafting your response? How long did you spend on it? I spent less than five minutes on it. If I had known it was going to get such a reaction, I probably would have spent a little bit more time crafting it. I mean, I wrote it. I read it one more time before I hit the button, and that was about it.

And here's what he wrote. Dude, I also think I'm overrated. Pazes to think about his response while he has a sip of Coke Zero. I love that part. I actually have a Coke Zero here in the studio. I thought that would be humorous. Perfect. I'll be honest.

When I started to become infamous for having good student evaluations, I start to get a bit nervous. I thought the student expectations would be way too high and then they'd be very disappointed when they're actually in my class. It's kind of like when you have a crush on someone and then you go on the date with them

and you kind of realize that they're not as great as you thought they were in your mind's eye. Oh shit. I forgot. You don't like it when I use date. analogies. But please note that I didn't actually specify a gender there. I'm usually pretty careful when I joke about dating and relationships to be gender neutral. Sometimes I slip, but I try not to. So I do take offense when you say I joke about picking up girls. I don't think that's a fair or accurate representation. And I'm sorry you can't relate to that kind of humor.

And I could totally empathize. I didn't lose my virginity until I was 25. But when I was an undergrad, I thought about losing my virginity a lot. And I tried to date miserably. But I guess I kind of do relationship humor because it tends to get a positive reaction. And I'm just a Pavlovian junkie. I'm open to new material, though. So tomorrow, I'll joke about batteries.

So back to high expectations. Dave's response blows up. 47,000 upfotes, something like 2,000 comments. The original poster, who we're calling Francis, deleted their account. But Dave didn't. And he got a deluge of direct messages. Also, emails. Some good emails.

Some emails that were scary. You actually received a death threat from someone in response to your response, right? Yeah, that was a little unnerving. It actually had a physical reaction on me that I was surprised by. You know, I kind of got, like, clammy, and, like, the hairs on the back of my neck went up. And basically, they were saying, you know, you put way too much personal information on the net. I know who you are, and I'm going to come slit your throat in front of your family. And obviously, I don't put too much weight into it, but it still had a visceral reaction.

Sure. Were you concerned about any professional repercussions from, you know, sort of responding to this student's post? When I first made the post, I wasn't that worried about it. The next day, I was very worried about it. People were talking about it. People who never dropped by my office were popping by. and going, oh, and I do not have tenure. And so there are a lot of people who said,

I would have never said that if I didn't have tenure. And a lot of those kind of reactions. And so I got a little bit nervous. They're not helping you. No, exactly. The dean popped by my office. Oh, man. The dean had never stopped by my office.

Oh, man. But he basically said, it's cool. You're okay. And so that took a huge weight off my shoulders. Did you learn anything from this? I learned a lot of things. I learned a lot about the community of Reddit. I was surprised at how many people responded.

When I was getting ready for this podcast, I decided, oh, why don't I just print out the responses so I can flip through them and remind myself what people said? Because I actually have not read all of the responses. And when I went to print it out, it was like over 300 pages. And I was just like, oh, no, I'm not going to do that. You know, there was a few. sort of patterns that emerged.

I joked in the post that I was a virgin throughout my undergrad degree, which is true. And so I got messages for people who are frustrated they can't lose their virginity, which surprised me because, you know, when I was that age, I don't think I would have reached out to some stranger on the internet saying,

how do I get laid? What was your advice? You know what, to be honest, I haven't responded to a lot of the posts. I've been, I had the new baby, and I've been really busy. Right. And I feel kind of guilty.

that I haven't responded to a lot of the messages that people sent my way. So that was one category of posts that definitely surprised me. I got a lot of people who are addicted to Coke Zero. And so, but a lot of people contacted me about Coke Zero. People concerned about my health or my teeth or empathizing and people theorizing that Coke Zero has got an addictive element in it and all sorts of interesting things about Coke Zero. So that was that. That was another category of responses I got.

If the student who wrote this post is listening to this right now, what would you want him or her to know? Like, what would your direct message to them be? Wow, I hadn't thought about that before. My first instinct was to try to relate to them and let them know that, you know, I remember when it was like to be 19 or 20 and to be frustrated. And it's okay to express those opinions. there might have been a more constructive way of going about it. And when you get older, I hope you look back and reflect about this and think about how you could have done things a little bit better.

But given your current frame of mind, I get it. I understand. And don't let the negativity get you down. You know, I've never been in a Dave Tompkins computer science class, but I think he gets points for empathy. Yeah. And here we are nearing the end of the school year. It's been a little while for me, but I was talking to a friend who was a teacher the other day, and they were talking about how at this stage in the year,

everyone is, like, so stressed out. And so thirsty. Thirsty. And there's all of this emotional intensity, too, because people are stressed and the year's ending, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, whether you're a teacher or a student, life goes on. Oh, are you going to get all Jerry Springer on me right now? Until next time, Emery, take care of yourself and each other.

Barf. I give that reference a really. Rating of barf. Be right back. I need to go to rate my podcast host.com and leave some very fake, very positive reviews. Wait, speaking of which, it's important to say that we too have gotten the Dave Tompkins treatment. Oh, yes. So there was one review on Apple Podcasts with the subject line of, nope.

And then they wrote, made it a total of five minutes into the first episode and had to turn it off. Horrible idea for a podcast. There's always at like at least. a couple. Another one said, unbearably boring and seems to just wander endlessly into seemingly unimportant directions. I think that sentence just wandered endlessly into seemingly unimportant directions. But seriously, we do want to know what you think about the show. If you like the show, please rate us on Apple Podcasts or whatever app you use. Yeah, but don't be a Francis. No, but be a Francis and leave a review. But don't be a Francis.

Right. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she says, WTF. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of mildly interesting. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vicus, who, whenever we go to record in the field with them, they remind us, Nature is lit.

Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and goes, Aw. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we try to have a serious meeting with him, he's all... You, I'm a toddler. Our theme music is by Squelcher. This week's episode, Art is School Trippin. It's from Reddit user Luke Robson. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread.

If you want to contribute art to an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. This week's story about water bottles, by the way. came from a comment Julian made in the Ask Reddit community answering the question, what is one rule that was implemented at your school or work that backfired horribly? This show was produced by Josh Swartz, also my producer and co-host, Amory Siebertson. I am senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.