Believe it or not, this is one story that doesn’t come from MY classroom. A discipline letter from a local school is making waves on the internet after a student was apparently given two hours of detention for using the Firefox web browser in class instead of Internet Explorer. The teacher (a Business Education Career Project Teacher) was apparently unaware that Firefox is also extremely widely used. This is showing up on blogs and webpages all over the internet: here, for example. And here, here, and here. If you would like the foreign take on it, try this, that, or the other.
UPDATE 12/17/07 6.08PM: This was a hoax. Put the pitchforks and torches away, and call back the hounds. I was rather skeptical of it at first (because that’s just not how I would write a discipline referral), but I should have put my skepticism more forcefully than just saying “apparently” a lot. Whoever perpetrated this was quite clever!