I'm reminiscing about college a bit today.
I took an education class once in college, more just to pass the time than because I was interested in learning about education. But there was some interesting stuff there... some of which just made me laugh at how silly people can be.
One article talked about a project in which hundreds of children were encouraged to write poems. A couple paragraphs of it were devoted to talking about a child whose poems were "disturbing"... specifically, that he wrote about "shooting his teachers, and killing his mother and flushing her head down the toilet." He was removed from the class and put in counseling.
Now, I don't know if his teachers had ever been children. I know I was a child once, and I remember it very well, and I remember that when I was a child, at least half of the other children I knew sang some variation of a song that went:
"Joy to the world, [insert name of victim here] is dead.
What happened to her head?
I took it from her body
And flushed it down the potty
And around and around it goes..."
And they also sang some variation of a song that went:
"On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese,
I shot my poor teacher with a 40 MC
Thirty years later he rose from the dead
And I took my bazooka and blew off his head."
I strongly suspect that the poems written by the boy in the article were these ones, or something like them, and that the reason he wrote them was because he had heard them from other children. So he shouldn't have gotten in trouble for "disturbing writing"-- he should have gotten in trouble for freaking plagiarism.
Not that I approve of those songs, mind you. They're so unrealistic. You can't flush someone's head down a toilet. The only toilets that a human head would fit down are outhouses and porta-potties, and those don't flush.
But I digress...
3 comments:
Hello Erika,
I have started to hit on an interesting issue but do not go far enough. When we were children, we could say songs like that (or write papers on blowing up the school) because no one thought that it would happen. An analogy to that is that before 9/11, if anyone hijacked a plane, the best course of action was to sit still and let the hijacker make their demands. Now that 9/11 has occurred, anyone that tries to hijack a plane is in trouble because the passengers are not going to go to their death without fighting. I was the same with school, you may have a few suicides (which the authorities could never seem to do nothing about) but no one ever took the threats seriously.
Now that Columbine has occurred and that it is in peoples minds that some students would be willing to take out their fellow students in addition to themselves, the attitude of the powers to be has changed. Now statements like you mention above are considered dangerous and require expulsion and intense counseling. That is too bad because for the most part, they are just students letting off steam. Zero - Tolerance policies (which I call Zero - Responsibility Policies) do not help. They simply remove all decision making from the process and cause knee jerk reactions. It is true that probably some of those children are crying out for help but the authorities need to take in all the information behind what has happened before making such a life altering decision on the child.
Just another piece of childhood taken away. Just for fun, I will post my own anti-school song:
"Deck the halls with gasoline,
Fa-la-la-la-la La-la-la-la.
Light a match and watch it gleam,
Fa-la-la-la-la La-la-la-la.
Watch your teacher burn to ashes,
Fa-la-la Fa-la-la La-la-la-la.
Isn't if fun to play with matches,
Fa-la-la-la-la La-la-la-la."
Now that Columbine has occurred and that it is in peoples minds that some students would be willing to take out their fellow students in addition to themselves, the attitude of the powers to be has changed. Now statements like you mention above are considered dangerous and require expulsion and intense counseling.
Yeah, you're right-- and the annoying thing is that I don't actually think things have changed that much in reality. I think there have been school shootings for as long as schools and guns have existed, and I don't think the percentage of students who will go on shooting rampages has actually gone up very much, if at all, in recent years.
What I think is that there are certain factors that are making school shootings more *noticeable* lately. For one thing, news coverage is more thorough these days, so if a shooting happens, the whole nation is more likely to hear about it. For another thing, we now have guns that are capable of shooting more people in a smaller amount of time, so when there is a school shooting, the death toll is likely to be higher than it was many years ago. And also, the population has gone up, so there are probably more shootings simply because there are more
people to do them.
So it annoys me when everyone argues about *why* students are more likely to shoot each other in recent years, without even addressing the question of *whether* that is true.
Hey Erika,
I agree with you that school shootings have been going on as long as there have been weapons but I think there has been a change.
Before the 90s, I think the only school shootings that occurred were primarily in the inner city schools and were surrounded by riots, poverty, and gangs. Of course, the system did not care. In the suburban/rural schools, most children who were having a hard time with their peers would chose suicide. The idea of killing your fellow students was unheard of.
I think that changed when the media printed the first story of a school shooting. One, other suburban children realized that there was another route. Two, the shootings were not occurring in the communities where the people with power lived. I think that is when the rules changed.
As for automatic/semi-automatic guns, they were around long before the 90s. I think the M-16 was used in Vietnam and the AK-47 has been around forever. In fact, when I was in middle/high school, I had access to a semi-automatic rifle that could do damage.
I also think the whys are important when it comes to school shootings. I just think that the system is going about it the wrong way to find out. The whys are needed to find real and tangible ways to deal with the problem rather than knee-jerk reactions which only makes the problem worse.
So although you may be right in saying that school shootings have always occurred, I think that where they have occurred in the past vs. now is the defining factor.
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