[3gg]

Two of us at school kind of earned the "hacker" badge. Far from being expelled, the teachers expressed admiration for our work and ability to dig into a completely unrelated area to schoolwork.

We never did anything stupid or caused damage. I think the relationship was somewhat based on an implicit statement of mutual trust.

[shakna]

When I got caught at school for this one, the approach was really split.

On the one hand, the administration punished me and one of my friends with something like six months of detentions.

On the other hand, the IT admin asked us to do it again, but write him up a proper report. Basically gave us the authority to do whatever we wanted, and encouraged us that it could be a career, if we did things the right way.

I think that trust and encouragement went a long way to influencing my career path.

[seanp2k2]

Funny, I had a similar experience -- school suspended me for a week while the IT admin and my father (who also worked in tech) just laughed it off and encouraged me to do more, but in an environment that I owned to experiment on consequence-free.

It's sad that so many schools in the US seem to have this attitude of "YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG AND MUST BE PUNISHED!!!" instead of actually using it as a teachable moment and encouraging someone who has demonstrated competency with tech to pursue that, given the chances of it leading to a lucrative career.

Imagine if a kid broke the technical rules of the gym and made a dozen 3-point basketball shots in a row -- I'd bet the gym teacher would tell the basketball coach about it instead of writing the kid up. Why can't we do the same for tech?