The Eleven Year Old
Today I recieved this E-mail in my campus mail box:
IMSA Parents and Students:
We know some of you saw last night's report on the 10:00 Channel 7 (ABC Chicago)
news. Here is the link: http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/060705_ns_boy_genius.html.
Unfortunately, there was not time to inform you in advance, as we only learned last
night that the report would air last night. A statement by Jane St. Pierre, IMSA
director of marketing and communications, was included at the end of the report.
Later today IMSA will have a statement on our home page, www.imsa.edu, under
"happening now at IMSA."
Some of you have offered to contact Channel 7 and other media. We ask that you not
do this. We will respond to additional inquiries we receive and may involve
students and parents in some of these, but we do not want to give the story "more
legs" than it already has by inviting additional media attention.
We will address this media/public relations challenge in a forthright and
professional way.
Thank you,
IMSA Communications Team
That url in the e-mail does not function. It brings you to a 404 on ABC's site. Despite this, it didn't take long for me to figure out what's going on. However, for anyone reading this who isn't an IMSA student, it'll take a bit of explaining. So bear with me, if you care.
IMSA is a publicly funded laboratory school for math and science. It is residential. Students are typically accepted during freshman year and begin attending IMSA their sophomore year. However, sometimes students are accepted before freshman year but still enter IMSA as sophomores. Many of my friends were in eigth grade last year even though they are sophomores this year. The youngest person ever to be accepted into IMSA, before last year, was twelve years old. The class of 2005 had a twelve year old student. However, last year a younger student was accepted. Click Here In my opinion, this didn't go well from the start. Even though he was 11 when he started at IMSA, he still acted like a typical 11-year-old, geinus or not. I can't speak for my classmates, but I for one went to IMSA to get away from people who act like 11-year-olds. But anyway, I didn't really care then. I even sympathized with him. I mean, IMSA is hard enough to deal with without being 3 years younger than your roommate, or four years younger than any potential homecoming date. However, this changed when I found out that he had accused a prominent member of the history department, not to mention my favorite teacher, of racism. Likely hoping to avoid a confrontation, the IMSA administration quickly moved him to a different history class. Fat lot of good it did. This link glosses over the allegations he made during that ABC News report. Here's what is says:
June 8, 2005
A message to our shareholders:
The State of Illinois invests significant resources in the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy's work to develop talent and leadership in math, science and technology.
A recent news report featured one IMSA student and his parent who asserted that IMSA did not deliver a quality educational experience to the student and did not treat them fairly. We strongly disagree.
Students at IMSA come from every corner of Illinois. As a residential educational institution, we welcome all students as individuals and embrace their rich and unique cultural experiences. We have a strong tradition of successfully working with talented and gifted children from diverse backgrounds. For example, in the past 10 years, one out of five students has been African American, Latino or multiracial.
We understand the demanding academic and living challenges that our students face when coming to IMSA. Our faculty members, counselors, learning strategies specialist and other professionals provide an array of programs and services to support the academic, social and personal development of our students.
We are deeply committed to creating a nurturing living and learning environment that enables students to live up to their full potential. Fortunately, the vast majority of students embrace the opportunity to fully engage in the IMSA experience.
Well, if that kid had a chance of making friends at IMSA, it's gone now. He forces his way into IMSA, a newbie like all the rest of us, and then goes and makes allegations against respected faculty members, against the establishment itself. The little brat. Good riddance!
I'll also take this time to say that as a student in the class of 2007 at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, I find the claims made in the aforementioned ABC news broadcast of June 7, 2005 to be utterly false and incredibly insulting.
EDIT: Please realize that since the online version of the news report was not fully acessible by the time I was informed of its existence, I was able to retrieve only an extrememly small portion of the text through a search function. The amount of text I viewed appeared to make the direction of the report clear. However, as I was not able to acess the full report, my comments must be taken with a grain of salt. If anyone happened to view the report on TV or read it online, I would sincerely appreciate any comments. Thank you.
Note: re-posted from my old OO.net blog
IMSA Parents and Students:
We know some of you saw last night's report on the 10:00 Channel 7 (ABC Chicago)
news. Here is the link: http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/060705_ns_boy_genius.html.
Unfortunately, there was not time to inform you in advance, as we only learned last
night that the report would air last night. A statement by Jane St. Pierre, IMSA
director of marketing and communications, was included at the end of the report.
Later today IMSA will have a statement on our home page, www.imsa.edu, under
"happening now at IMSA."
Some of you have offered to contact Channel 7 and other media. We ask that you not
do this. We will respond to additional inquiries we receive and may involve
students and parents in some of these, but we do not want to give the story "more
legs" than it already has by inviting additional media attention.
We will address this media/public relations challenge in a forthright and
professional way.
Thank you,
IMSA Communications Team
That url in the e-mail does not function. It brings you to a 404 on ABC's site. Despite this, it didn't take long for me to figure out what's going on. However, for anyone reading this who isn't an IMSA student, it'll take a bit of explaining. So bear with me, if you care.
IMSA is a publicly funded laboratory school for math and science. It is residential. Students are typically accepted during freshman year and begin attending IMSA their sophomore year. However, sometimes students are accepted before freshman year but still enter IMSA as sophomores. Many of my friends were in eigth grade last year even though they are sophomores this year. The youngest person ever to be accepted into IMSA, before last year, was twelve years old. The class of 2005 had a twelve year old student. However, last year a younger student was accepted. Click Here In my opinion, this didn't go well from the start. Even though he was 11 when he started at IMSA, he still acted like a typical 11-year-old, geinus or not. I can't speak for my classmates, but I for one went to IMSA to get away from people who act like 11-year-olds. But anyway, I didn't really care then. I even sympathized with him. I mean, IMSA is hard enough to deal with without being 3 years younger than your roommate, or four years younger than any potential homecoming date. However, this changed when I found out that he had accused a prominent member of the history department, not to mention my favorite teacher, of racism. Likely hoping to avoid a confrontation, the IMSA administration quickly moved him to a different history class. Fat lot of good it did. This link glosses over the allegations he made during that ABC News report. Here's what is says:
June 8, 2005
A message to our shareholders:
The State of Illinois invests significant resources in the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy's work to develop talent and leadership in math, science and technology.
A recent news report featured one IMSA student and his parent who asserted that IMSA did not deliver a quality educational experience to the student and did not treat them fairly. We strongly disagree.
Students at IMSA come from every corner of Illinois. As a residential educational institution, we welcome all students as individuals and embrace their rich and unique cultural experiences. We have a strong tradition of successfully working with talented and gifted children from diverse backgrounds. For example, in the past 10 years, one out of five students has been African American, Latino or multiracial.
We understand the demanding academic and living challenges that our students face when coming to IMSA. Our faculty members, counselors, learning strategies specialist and other professionals provide an array of programs and services to support the academic, social and personal development of our students.
We are deeply committed to creating a nurturing living and learning environment that enables students to live up to their full potential. Fortunately, the vast majority of students embrace the opportunity to fully engage in the IMSA experience.
Well, if that kid had a chance of making friends at IMSA, it's gone now. He forces his way into IMSA, a newbie like all the rest of us, and then goes and makes allegations against respected faculty members, against the establishment itself. The little brat. Good riddance!
I'll also take this time to say that as a student in the class of 2007 at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, I find the claims made in the aforementioned ABC news broadcast of June 7, 2005 to be utterly false and incredibly insulting.
EDIT: Please realize that since the online version of the news report was not fully acessible by the time I was informed of its existence, I was able to retrieve only an extrememly small portion of the text through a search function. The amount of text I viewed appeared to make the direction of the report clear. However, as I was not able to acess the full report, my comments must be taken with a grain of salt. If anyone happened to view the report on TV or read it online, I would sincerely appreciate any comments. Thank you.
Note: re-posted from my old OO.net blog