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Comedy writer Nate Kushner doesn’t like plagiarists. So when a stranger offered to pay him to write a college paper on Hinduism, he decided to write the paper, find out her name and expose her online and to her professor as a cheater. She’d found him based on an old AOL profile that listed one of his hobbies as “Eating Hindu Sculpture.” She turned out to be a dean’s list student at Lewis University near Chicago.

I wouldn’t go to all this trouble to punish a plagiarist myself. But he did warn her that “plagiarism is not going to free you from the painful cycle of death and rebirth any quicker.”

Update: Here’s the follow-up.

Shea Riecke, a freshman at McKay High School in Salem, Ore., wanted to add a photo of her brother, Marine Cpl. Bill Riecke, to a social studies bulletin board featuring McKay graduates’ career choices. But school officials balked when they realize the Marine, photographed with two friends while serving in Iraq, was holding a weapon in the photo. In a letter on the Marine Corps Moms web site, Shea and Bill’s mother writes:

Shea gave Mr. Costa (one of her teachers), a picture of her brother to hang along with other McKay graduates in his classroom. Shea is extremely proud of her brother and the profession that he has chosen and she was happy that Mr. Costa recognized the accomplishments that Bill has made. He is a US Marine and a decorated veteran of the Iraq war. The picture depicts Bill in Iraq in combat uniform with other members of his unit, and carrying a gun. School administration denied Mr. Costa’s request to hang the picture. From what I understand the picture is being scanned and the gun removed and will be returned to Mr. Costa to hang in his classroom.

The Rieckes don’t believe a photo of a Marine carrying a weapon is likely to incite violence, and don’t want the photoshopped version to represent their son’s career.

Update: When the principal said posting a photo with weapons sends the wrong “message” to students, a reporter pointed out that the school’s “Royal Scot” mascot is pictured carrying a sword.

To protect the privacy rights, some police departments in Illinois won’t tell principals the names of juvenile sex offender enrolled in their schools. The Chicago Tribune reports:

It was by chance that an East Peoria woman discovered that a boy who was found guilty of molesting her 7-year-old son was in the same physical education class as her teenage son.

The 16-year-old was registered as a sex offender with the Illinois State Police. But because of the disarray surrounding the juvenile sex offender registry, the information didn’t get to the school until the mother informed officials herself.

About 10 years ago, a father told me that the boy who’d tried to rape his daughter had enrolled at her high school. When she complained he was harassing her, the principal suggested she transfer. The boy couldn’t be moved because he’d been labeled behaviorally disabled; his special education class was located at the girl’s school.

Eight states — Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Tennessee, Idaho, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Utah — claim to rank 49th in education funding, according to a column by Vicki Murray of the Goldwater Institute in the Arizona Republic. It all depends on what’s counted.

For example, Census Bureau rankings include certain capital outlays. The National Education Association’s “Rankings and Estimates” and Education Week’s “Quality Counts” exclude such funding.

Arizona’s ranking also changes considerably depending on how you define education funding. For instance, the Census Bureau ranks Arizona anywhere from 18th to 51st on 20 funding measures. Such variety makes it possible to pick and choose a state’s ranking and then put it under an ominous “education funding” headline.

Via Chris Correa.

Seeking uniformity, Cambridge University has banned kilts at graduation ceremonies. The Scots are mad.

Childhood obesity is a concern in Australia too. At some pre-schools, teachers are inspecting children’s lunch boxes, and confiscating lollipops, fruit juice, chocolate, potato chips and other sugary or processed snacks.

Early childhood teachers believed the inspections were the only way to stop children eating junk food, regularly packed for them by their parents.

But a leading nutritionist has slammed the idea, saying it would have no effect on children’s dietary habits.

“That is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard,” Griffith University senior lecturer of public health, Shawn Somerset, said.

The only way to change children’s eating habits is to persuade parents to feed them differently.

Two 19-year-old Australians were arrested at the Denver airport on charges they robbed a bank in Vail.

Police said the robbers, whose faces were hidden behind ski masks, were armed with air pistols.

Authorities said the Australian ski enthusiasts were easily detectable because of their accents, name tags they were wearing and the types of weapons used.

They wore name tags?

Math test prep booklets sent to New York City teachers were riddled with errors, reports the New York Post.

Perhaps the most embarrassing error is on the cover of the booklet for the fourth grade — make that the “forth grade.” That’s how educrats in the department’s division of mathematics spelled it.

But they’re mathematicians, not spelling-bee champs, right?

So a mathematician would know that 15 + 10 = 25, right?

Apparently not.

Before a Chippewa teen-ager went on a killing spree in Minnesota, the Christian Science Monitor researched a series on Native American education. To summarize: The kids aren’t all right.

In response to this story on Cherokee immersion classes, Amritas, a linguistics professor now working in the private sector, is skeptical that Cherokee can be revived as a living language by teaching it in school. People learn and use a second language when they need it. Cherokees can do everything they need — except talk to elderly relatives — in English.

A middle school in the Seattle-Tacoma area may be named for Bob Satiacum, a Puyallup Indian activist who was arrested for fishing rights protests, and for conspiring to murder a rival and molesting a child. From a Seattle Times column:

In 1982, Satiacum was convicted of racketeering, selling contraband cigarettes, illegal gambling and the murder-for-hire plot.

Claiming he was being punished for his activism, he fled to Canada.

There he was accused of fondling a girl and convicted by a Canadian court. He died of heart failure waiting to be sent back to the U.S. to face possible life in prison.

Leaving aside the other felonies, naming a school for a convicted child molester seems like a bad idea to me.