For days now I’ve read about how guns are the key. Getting rid of them or getting more of them–either choice is supposed to stop these violent massacres. Never mind the number of accidental gun deaths.* Never mind the people who don’t have guns so they use their trucks or cars or bodies as bombs. If you’re gonna kill, you’ve crossed a mental line. “How” is the least of your concerns.
Nobody is talking about why our kids–let’s be honest, it’s mostly our boys, and I’ll get to that–are getting to the point where they’ve crossed that mental line and said “I will find a way to end multiple lives, including my own.”
Nobody talks about how many times those boys think that they are actually SETTING THE VICTIMS FREE.
Why do you think these shootings keep happening in schools?
When No Child Left Behind passed in 2002, schools irrevocably changed culture. They now became much more tied to one type of testing, with success and subsequent money measured by the success of the testing.
One of the major pieces of NCLB is the “Our Way Or The Highway” classroom provision:
The act requires schools to rely on scientifically based research for programs and teaching methods. The act defines this as “research that involves the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to education activities and programs.” Scientifically based research results in “replicable and applicable findings” from research that used appropriate methods to generate persuasive, empirical conclusions.[10]
Non-scientific methods include following tradition, personal preferences, and non-scientific research, such as research based on case studies, ethnographies, personal interviews, discourse analysis, grounded theory, action research, and other forms of qualitative research. These are generally not an acceptable basis for making decisions about teaching children under the act.
I’ll boil it down for you; for decades teachers have known that different kids require different types of classroom environments and teaching methods. Many times those children, most often boys, have behavior types that don’t integrate into the current classroom setting. These boys would have done very well in the Blab Schools of the past, where the lessons involved speaking loudly and regularly. They often do well now in Montessori situations. But the type of classroom that the government mandates in NCLB doesn’t work for some personalities.
That’s okay. For that we have Ritalin! And for the side-effects of Ritalin we have Prozac. Your boy doesn’t do well in school because he is A LITTLE BOY and he’s active and physically inquisitive. But that doesn’t work because we don’t have enough time for three recesses a day and two PE classes a week because we have to make sure everyone passes the NCLB-mandated tests. So the teacher tells you that your boy “may have” a disorder. And it’s on YOU to make sure that your LITTLE BOY–who is acting like a healthy, active, physically inquisitive little boy–gets the expensive tests and the expensive drugs that will keep him quiet and keep him from being a nuisance to everyone else in the class.
Yes, there are people with genuine attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It’s a frustrating brain chemistry for the person to have and I’m thankful that there are medicines to help those people.
I am outraged that those medicines are misused to tranquilise other children and turn them into zombies ‘well-behaved pupils’ so that teachers with the impossible task of maintaining the classroom style a bureaucrat finds acceptable can “teach”. It isn’t the teachers’ fault, ultimately. They are between the Devil and the deep. It isn’t your fault for having given birth to an active little boy.
Anyway, now we’ve got kids on drugs that are not meant for kids, but are the only things left to try because the side effects from the other drugs not meant for kids are slowly breaking their little minds. I’ve seen little boys who were mentally handcuffed by drugs turn despondent, violent and suicidal. I’ve seen it happen a lot since 2002.
And now I strongly suspect that I’m seeing some of those boys grow up to take out others on their personal exit path.
*Or purposeful gun deaths. Suicide is the #1 cause of gun deaths in the US. In most of those cases the guns are legally owned, obtained and kosher hunting rifles or duty-issue sidearms.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
Do you know what the untreated side effect of ADHD is? Mild multiple personality disorder – in other words, the brain makes its own way of dealing. Also, a waaaaay better side effect than whatever the hell Ritalin does to you.
Remember the line from Uncle Buck? I don’t think I want to know a six-year-old who isn’t a dreamer, or a sillyheart. And I sure don’t want to know one who takes their student career seriously. I don’t have a college degree. I don’t even have a job. But I know a good kid when I see one. Because they’re ALL good kids, until dried-out, brain-dead skags like you drag them down and convince them they’re no good. You so much as scowl at my niece, or any other kid in this school, and I hear about it, and I’m coming looking for you!
Oh man! I loved that movie so much. I need to go back and watch it again.
That line pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?
It sure does. Maybe if we treated kids like kids… Let’s quit putting teenage sluts on MTV. Let’s quit expecting military discipline at the age of 4. Quit the extreme stuff and let kids go outside and play (and turn off the damn video games and *make* them go outside and play) and let’s let life happen when it should.
I have NEVER recommended medicating any of my students. Most teachers that I know are opposed to medicine unless absolutely necessary. My school not only supports teaching to different personalities, but actually requires it. In my experience, children with behavior issues are not acting out because the evil school is squelching their natural childish behavior. Rather, it very often coincides with absent, neglectful, or overly permissive parenting. I am not a fan of NCLB, but it is far too easy for people to blame everything on the schools. Teachers laid down their lives to protect their students in Connecticut, and most teachers I know, including myself, would do the same.
When this discussion continued over on FB I made it clear that your school and school system and classroom were examples of the ideal. Several parents in other states (Michigan and Tennessee and Ohio and Texas) aren’t as lucky as the kids who have you.
I’m not putting you down when I say this because I don’t know you at all, but I find it so oddly circular that parents blame teachers for their kids’ problems, and then teachers turn around and blame parents for the same problems. On a scale of things, I spent so much of my childhood in school that it had more influence on my social problems than my parents did. No matter how perfect you try to make schools, you can’t erase the numerous hours children spend there for 13 years of their development. It has an effect. It has to. And it usually isn’t a good one for learning-disabled kids who don’t fit in socially. Teachers always brag about how wonderful they are, but I laugh cynically at them because, as a learning-disabled person, I thought teachers were mean and nasty. All of them–even the ones who got emotional highs off “saving the children” (until I attended a private high school, where I actually felt respected). Katherine says your school is ideal, and that counts for something. But please remember that most schools aren’t ideal.
Ripping someone off an antipsychotic (for instance) with no or little taper (as doctors often do in their cluelessness) can cause disastrous effects. Doctors prescribe this stuff like candy and then switch people around to different meds (because the first med isn’t working). You start to feel like a lab rat, trapped in a horrible cycle of “waiting for the next med to work” while suffering through “withdrawals” from the previous drug. (But they aren’t withdrawals, they are “discontinuation effects”. I don’t care what they call them. I know what they feel like…going crazy, coming apart at the seems.) It’s hard enough for someone like me who has more experience in life, but a teenager with no experience and therefore no ability to put the dark feelings in perspective, it’s no wonder some of them crack. Without my faith in Jesus, I shudder to think…
I’m with you on the rest of it, but I have to dispute:
> If you’re gonna kill, you’ve crossed a mental line. “How” is the least of your concerns.
Because it really isn’t. “How” is a huge factor. No, you can’t stop someone who is dedicated to getting it done. But killers are just like anyone else in that some of them are lazier than others.
A gun allows a person to kill more people more quickly and with less effort and less personal discomfort than any other method that isn’t already more difficult to obtain. That’s what it was designed to do. The harder we make it to obtain such weapons the more we may deter all but the most determined.
“How” can additionally be a factor in “whether” one crosses that line to begin with. Shooting up a room full of people like a mad cowboy can provide a romantic incentive in this culture to a certain mindset that running a bunch of people down with a car never will. If you’re in it for the glory more than the kill, then How matters very much.
I’m not generally a big fan of banning anything, but it does seem prudent to take steps to make it harder for the average idiot to get hold of devices that both radically simplify the killing process and multiply the number of victims while providing the killer with a culturally ingrained testosterone boost.