It’s an “every classroom needs a bucket of rocks” to hurl at intruder argument all over again.
Look. A whole generation of kids have grown up from kindergarten onwards with shooting-up-the-school as an acceptable solution for rage.
They got random shooting drills since 1999, escalating since the “false flag operation/crisis actor/fake” shooting in Newton 10 years ago.
They ask each other which one of them will be their school shooter from 4th grade onwards. Not if, but which one.
They’re all grown up now and some of them are going to be teachers themselves. They will be the ones that solve this. Not us. We had our shot and keep coming up with ridiculous solutions like buckets of rocks.
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No. I believe arming teachers is absolutely ludicrous for all kinds of classroom management issues.
But I live in Florida and I’m sure they’ll be arming teachers here soon, at their $17K pay rate. More teachers will drop as they have been. I’m glad you’re rambo about it – and I’m sure some of our mostly Republican teachers here are too – a few of my teachers are precisely the ones that should never be allowed to carry around their students.
But I’m ignorant and stupid and contribute nothing and am fully aware of that. You are right and I am wrong and that’s just how it is. I get how it goes here. I hope it all works out, truly. Bless.
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I just spent 20 minutes arguing with someone who claims to be a teacher who is deeply believing the ‘arm-all-teachers’ standard rhetoric so popular right now and I reached a point in it where I said “look, maybe you’re right and I don’t care who is right at this point because we’ve been doing things wrong for far too long”.
It kills me that kids graduating this year have never known a day without school shooting drills in school. It replaced the duck-and-cover – and I was lucky to only get fire drills – and never had police entering the school for simulations. They’re so traumatized that it’s normalized.
Shooting up the school is a socially expected way to express rage in their generation. They joke about it. They look around to figure out “which one is going to do it?” in their classes, not “if”.
I can’t believe our generations have so failed them and continue to. I do what I can on my side; I don’t go as deeply as you John, but being an internet netizen, I’ve done my share of ad-hoc assistance in mental health; a few correct words here or there at the right time and place and hoping it helps. But we need to do more of the right things and less of the wrong things. It’s very frustrating to witness.
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