Flutterby™! : Shocked!

A New Hampshire high school student, Kyle Dubois is suing his shop class teacher, Thomas Kelley, for allowing Mr. Dubois to shock himself:

During class on March 11, Kyle Dubois willingly placed an alligator clamp on one of his nipples while a second student placed one on his other nipple and a third student plugged in a cord providing electricity, sending an approximately three-second jolt through Dubois, police said in a statement following an investigation of the incident.

Uh. Yeah. To be fair, the article mentions that the suit alleges that the teacher egged the kid on, a previous article says more on that:

"There appears to be somewhat of a conflict in terms of what the students are saying and what the teacher has said on the record," O'Connor said. "My job will be to sort out what is the truth."

[ related topics: Cool Science Children and growing up moron ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2010-09-01 04:22:58.539226-07 by: meuon

Darn, the Darwin awards almost got a poster child.

There were 3 idiot students involved, and not one of them understood that this was a stupid idea? First lets sue the parents for producing idiots, and unless the 3 students were already failing, the teacher gets fired for incompetence. If they were failing class, I'll stand up for the teacher. But he already resigned.

#Comment Re: made: 2010-09-01 08:45:26.047226-07 by: Dan Lyke

So reading the second article, the teacher had also been doing some sort of "conduct electricity as a chain" thing, and it may have involved line voltage. I'm all for the static electricity demos in physics class, but the more I learn about current flowing from, say, one hand to the other, the less cool I am with doing such things as party tricks.

So, yeah, the kid wasn't terribly bright, but it also sounds like even if the "I'll give you a Mountain Dew if you do that" story is false, that there are other things the teacher was doing that were a little outside reasonable practice.

#Comment Re: made: 2010-09-01 10:29:20.583226-07 by: petronius

A Mountain Dew? I'd hold out for at least a Mike's Hard Lemonade.