Two weeks ago, Ian's class sat down in a circle for reading time. The new boy, John, sat in Ian's chair. Ian was ticked off. He pointed two fingers at the boy and curled around the other two. He formed a gun, looked down the site, and made a gun sound, which had been perfected by hours of video games. John jumped up and hit Ian in the stomach. Ian hit him back.
Letters were sent home. Ian got in more trouble for making the fake gun with his fingers, than John did who actually hit Ian. We were told that schools no longer tolerate that sort of behavior, and that he would never be mainstreamed if he formed imaginary guns. Ian was scared straight and doesn't fake shoot his classmates any more.
Steve and I were plenty steamed about this and sent a volley of e-mails back to the school telling them that they were overreacting. At home, we told Ian that he had to knock it off. This hyper-vigilance is part of our post-Columbine, post-911 world, and our e-mails, no matter how rationally argued, weren't going to change that reality.
There's been a big media storm over the first grade kid who brought a camping cutlery set to school and was suspended. Ian's case of the imaginary gun is even more extreme.
In Federalist Paper #10, Madison wondered how to protect a nation from the danger of factions, groups that had the aim of destroying the democracy. He first considers eliminating the causes of factions, freedom and inequality. If you want to eliminate dangerous groups like the KKK, you can take away freedom or make everyone have the same opinions. Both options were impossible, he said, so instead we have to live with the fact that there are dangers out there and create a system that made it very difficult for factions to put their plans into effect.
These school boards are dealing with the dangers of Columbine killers by taking away freedoms and by making all children the same. Someone should hand them my tattered copy of the Federalist Papers.
Apt. 11d 
I have a couple of friends who are grade-school principals. They really believe the underlying claim — that fake-shooting inevitably leads to real shooting. I’ve always assumed that it’s because they see all the problem kids (and problem parents) and few of the others. Or maybe they drank the hysteric kool-aid, I don’t know.
One of them is at one of the lowest-rated schools in the state (which is really saying something — this is California), and due to the demographic, she has to take certain actions very seriously, as they have gang implications. Gang activity in an elementary school — is this a great country or what?
LikeLike
My sun tried to sneak a toy camping knife to his preschool in his pocket (plastic, part of a camping set). It was funny. He knew that it was forbidden (he was sneaking). And, it probably was. I caught him and took it home before he could be caught by the teachers.
I guess I think that this stuff should be taken seriously, and that it is OK to make the arbitrary rule that even fake/pretend won’t be allowed *in school*. But, I think the consequences should be outrage, and heated emails, not suspension or other real consequences. (i.e. fake guns, words, but not real consequences).
And, what do they do in those areas of this country where they love their guns? Are kids allowed to bring fake weaponry to school? When are they allowed to bring real weapons? (i.e. I’m going hunting after school, can I bring a rifle in my backpack and keep it in my locker)? I’m not trying to snark, actually. I’m wondering if there’s a real divide.
LikeLike
Maybe it’s time for a visit from Eddie the Eagle?
http://www.nrahq.org/safety/eddie/
LikeLike
Letters were sent home. Ian got in more trouble for making the fake gun with his fingers, than John did who actually hit Ian.
Can you quantify “got in more trouble”? All you said was that letters were sent home to both kids’ parents. We’ve had to deal with a few “problem kids” who freaked my daughters out by making fake guns when they were angry, sometimes accompanied by a “bang, you’re dead” or some similar statement. It can be a very scary thing for little kids. Luckily, they didn’t respond with hitting the finger-gun-kids, so we don’t know how the school would react to the escalation.
Now, I’m not saying that there’s not appropriate and inappropriate responses. And I’m not saying that there wasn’t over-reaction here. But if I’m the parent of the kid who had a finger-gun pointed at her, I’m going to report it, and I’m going to want some follow up. Letters home and stern warnings that “this sort of thing is taken seriously” seems like an appropriate response for a first time. I don’t see anything less reasonably appeasing the other kids’ parents.
LikeLike
Ragtime, maybe this is a girl-boy thing and I only really know the boys. Boys play with imaginary guns. A lot. All day long. They turn their rolled up socks into bombs. They pick up sticks in the street and turn them into uzis. They learn about Medieval battle instruments and make them out of pop sickle sticks. Hockey sticks are guns. Their forks at dinner time are guns. Taking these matters seriously is just laughable to me.
LikeLike
I’m reading A Tribe Apart and one of its key tenets is that rules are put in place primarily to deal with the small percentage of problem kids, but that the result is that most of the kids feel like criminals. If they think you’re a criminal already, some of them argue, why not live up to that moniker. Obviously, aggression between kids needs to be monitored as it can escalate into something that is harmful, physically or emotionally, but you can’t treat every fake gun creating kid like a gangster. You need to treat the issue more complexly.
LikeLike
I have a couple of friends who are grade-school principals. They really believe the underlying claim — that fake-shooting inevitably leads to real shooting.
I’d like to think that they cannot really believe that since, if it were true, nearly every boy who grew up in any time in recent history would be a killer. Even the probablistic claim (that pretend shooting makes real shooting more likely) seems likely to be very weekly supported, if supported at all.
I can imagine supporting a weak sort of “zero tolerance” policy for knives and the like as they can be dangerous for kids, even if they are not trying to hurt anyone (as my several witteling (SP?) accidents in boy-scouts show.) But in most cases it’s deeply implausible to think that more than taking away the knife, sending a message home, and perhaps the most mild of punishments (missing recess?) is needed or appropriate, at least for a first case. That so much more is put in place makes me seriously doubt the intelligence of those in charge.
LikeLike
Sometimes I feel like I’m 100 years old. If we did anything at recess that didn’t involve using a fake gun, it was a full-contact contest involving a ball and not-understood remarks about the sexual orientation of the guy with the ball. Except for the time when we decided to have a contest to see who could get the biggest pile of rocks. That lasted about one week, before the teachers noticed that pieces of pavement were ‘rocks’ in this game and that a half-dozen eight-year olds can destroy alot of pavement given sufficient motivation.
LikeLike
I’m not saying it’s not “normal” or that it’s inappropriate for boys to pretend to play with guns. Of the 30 or so boys in each of my daughter’s classes, there are about 25 who play gun-games with each other all day, and about 5 who don’t. My daughters know who those five are, and play with them at recess and after school, doing non-gun tomboyish things like climbing trees and stuff. They avoid the other 25 like the plague.
Most of the other 25 play with each other, leave my daughters alone, and there is no problem while they chase each other around yelling “bang bang.”
Every once in a long while, one of the gun-boys will decide it would be fun to chase after and “shoot at” one of the 30 girls (or one of the five non-gun boys). Then, one of us parents have to go up to the boy and yell at him until he’s scared enough to internalize the rule that all the other boys knew intuitively — you only play guns with kids who have agreed to play guns with you.
For most kids (including — it sounds like — Ian), one “yell” is enough. They get the message that some people find guns scary, and don’t want to play. They go back to leaving the non-gun-kids alone. Then, there are the one or two kids that just learn a good new way to scare the girls, and don’t stop. These kids are the bullies, and should be dealt with like any other form of bullying.
But you can’t distinguish the kids who “get it” from the kids who can be “scared straight” from the kids who are the “bullies” if you don’t scream at the kid the first time he points his finger-gun at a kid who doesn’t want it there.
LikeLike
I am really struck by Laura’s comment about all boys playing with guns. I only have girls, and they are SO FAR from playing with guns. (Although they do wield Harry Potter wands in a way that fills the same semantic gap, I suppose.)
It’s striking me, though — is this because my kids are simply unfamiliar with guns? And is their unfamiliarity based on our no-video-game status as a household?
Just curious, how do people here feel about kids playing video games involving guns? Do you let your kids play them?
LikeLike
A story from the “wow, have times changed” file (in reference to bj’s question above): my dad used to teach high school agriculture, and students at his high school were, indeed, allowed to bring their hunting rifles to school (a sort of high school show-and-tell). This was in the late-70s/early-80s.
My 5-year-old son turns lots of things into guns, too, and the most violent media he’s been exposed to is probably from Pixar. When it first happened, we did (and continue to) talk to him about the fact that even just pretending to shoot someone can be very scary for that person. I just did’t find it all that alarming, but I can understand why someone (particularly a teacher) might take it more seriously.
If prompted, he will repeat the three rules of gun safety: treat every gun as if it’s loaded, be sure of your target and beyond, and keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot…this, delivered in his little-boy voice, never fails to have me laughing into my hand. (Yes, he does also know the real rules: “stop, don’t touch it, leave, tell a grownup.”)
LikeLike
I don’t think I’d blame videogames, Jen. When I was growing up there were not any for a while, and when I did start playing them, there were not “shooting” ones for quite a while (we’re talking the ‘pong’ to ‘tron’ period here.) And, my parents didn’t want to give toy guns to my older brother and me. But we’d just use sticks or tools or whatever to play “guns” with, so they eventually gave in. We had a lot of experience with real guns, later. Given all of this, neither one of use ever considered actually shooting anyone.
Ragtime- doesn’t this just show that schools should focus on bullying and teasing and the like rather than imaginary guns, and that focusing on the latter is likely to be a distraction and a stupidity of the sort that kids can understand, making them less likely to comply? It certainly seems so to me.
LikeLike
I’m actually shocked that some girls find imaginary guns scary. My sister and I were never into guns ourselves, but we had a little brother who was. Like Matt, my parents wouldn’t let him have a gun when he was going through his cowboy stage and he started making them out of sticks. My parents rethought their rule and bought him a cap gun. My sister and I played guns together with the neighborhood boys and then we made them play Barbie with us.
Kids who play with guns aren’t bad kids.
There is absolutely no correlation between video games or playing with imaginary guns and actually being violent. Study after study comes to this conclusion.
LikeLike
“Kids who play with guns aren’t bad kids. ”
They don’t have to be, for the interplay between people who find it scary and not to have to stop. I think there’s a couple of different levels being combined here. There’s the view that boys who play with guns are more likely to be columbine style nuts than the ones who don’t (and, I agree, an unsupported argument. It makes intuitive sense to some of us, but I don’t believe intuition should overcome data) and that pretend play with guns is in itself threatening behavior.
It’s odd, I think, to be shocked that some people find pretend gun play to be threatening (Ragtime has pointed out that it’s both boys and girls, though the majority are girls). I personally find toy soldiers lined up pointing guns at each other to be stomach-churningly uncomfortable. The first time I saw a little boy do it (babysitting), I felt icky and didn’t get it; now I find it vaguely disturbing. And, no, we don’t have any little toy soldiers with guns in our house. I think part of the effect in our house is that we have extremely vivid imaginations. The little plastic soldiers are quite effective at bringing up (cuing) images of horrific war, and the pretend guns of the series of events that follow real guns. Those vivid imaginations (yes, more likely girls, but also boys) make violent pretend play different for those children than for those with less vivid imaginations.
Now, I don’t believe that screaming at a child should be the first step in avoiding the behavior that someone else finds threatening. But, the threatening activity should be stopped, even if it’s only pretend.
LikeLike
PS: We have the same imagination issues with fictional content (both books & movies). My daughter once said, with an entirely straight face, “Why do penguin movies have to be so sad?” I think this was after significant exposure to Happy Feet, March of the Penguins, and Surf’s Up. I don’t think that most people would consider those movies to be sad, in the greater scheme of the world.
When watching Monster’s inc for the 300th time, my daughter still started weeping during the scene where Sully scares the animitron boy, and Boo is hiding nearby. She told us “for a second, I felt like I *was* Boo.” This when she was about 3. She’s learning to control these emotions now, but they color her interaction with violent pretend.
LikeLike
You know, I don’t want to be unkind, and I was a sensitive girl myself once upon a time, but I think it’s a lot more rational to teach the kids who freak out when someone shoots an imaginary gun at them to roll their eyes than it is to make finger-guns illegal. That isn’t bullying or concentrated meanness or harassment; it’s just boys (and sometimes girls) being goofy.
Um, reading up, I think I just said what Matt said.
I honestly think a lot of the stupid roughhousing behavior of small kids (mostly boys, but my older girl is something of a roughhouser) is intensified by “treating it seriously.” It’s a way of giving it power instead of treating it like the annoying silliness that most of it is. I mean, seriously, a friend of mine’s kid has been sent out of class for an entire class period for poking another kid in line. What kind of message does that send about how easy it is to get a big reaction and disrupt operations?
LikeLike
Now, I don’t believe that screaming at a child should be the first step in avoiding the behavior that someone else finds threatening. But, the threatening activity should be stopped, even if it’s only pretend.
I have a variety of inchoate thoughts prompted by that, so I’m just going to note that there is no way to impliment that system such that a reasonably intelligent four-year-old couldn’t game it to become playground dictator and that two reasonably intelligent four-year-olds couldn’t render completely impossible for any teacher.
LikeLike
And laura, I am furious on your behalf that they’re suggesting this has ANYTHING to do with Ian’s mainstreaming. It’s a sign of total normality in my opinion!
LikeLike
I have two girls, one of whom is pretty sensitive, and I have spent some energy teaching her to blow off low-level roughhousing like this. It’s part of life.
The trickier part has been teaching her when to take it more seriously, when it’s escalating. When being told not to be freaked out by some of the kids’ roughhousing she at least partially heard it as “You’re wrong to be freaked out.”
I guess I would say this: kids who play with guns are not bad kids. And kids who get freaked out by kids who play with guns are also not bad kids.
LikeLike
I think the problem is assigning blame to schools when there is a school shooting. I’m with Laura/Geeky Mom on this — school violence is hugely complex and is an illustration of broader problems in our culture (and cultures elsewhere, there have been some high profile German cases, for ex.)
Our public schools cannot hope to manage those difficulties and are set up to fail in their education missions writ large in all communities, esp. given the increases in weapons technology that make it feasible/legal to buy and carry weapons that would overwhelm some police forces.
The answer has been silly policies like the cutlery case and the finger pointing issue. (And laura, given the silent one’s social skill set — oddly, shouldn’t you be proud of this interaction? It seems quite a normal boy interaction to me.)
LikeLike
You know, I don’t want to be unkind, and I was a sensitive girl myself once upon a time, but I think it’s a lot more rational to teach the kids who freak out when someone shoots an imaginary gun at them to roll their eyes than it is to make finger-guns illegal.
There’s always context and discretion, of course. Is it a kid you know? Do you know the parents? Are the parents there and how did they react? Was my third grader “shot” by a kid in her reading group who she knows is harmless, or is the boy now chasing around and shooting my first grader who doesn’t know him? Was it finger-guns, or was the boy swinging a stick-gun?
The girls can certainly use some toughening up sometimes, but that doesn’t mean the boys don’t need some talking to, as well.
I am also shocked that some people find it shocking. How would you feel if your neighbor a block down who you’ve talked to twice in the last three years walked by you today and shot a finger-gun at you (and not in a Joe-Biden-Saying-Hello kind of way)? I’d certainly be freaked out, and I’m not blaming my girls for being freaked out as well, given a comparable context.
LikeLike
“…esp. given the increases in weapons technology that make it feasible/legal to buy and carry weapons that would overwhelm some police forces.”
I’m not a gun type, but is that really such an issue? Don’t nearly all criminals use pretty vanilla firearms?
LikeLike
In the cutlery case, the student was actually suspended. I presume that didn’t happen to Ian?
Though I’m perfectly willing to teach my children to be less sensitive, I’m only willing to go so far in this — I think her imagination and the empathy that comes with are desirable traits, and that if she doesn’t want someone to pretend to point a gun at her, they should stop.
But, I realize that we’ve had similar conversations about school-place bullying. I simply do not regard it as acceptable. Pretending to shoot someone who is not playing with you is bullying, and is unacceptable behavior. I wouldn’t suspend/expel someone for that unless they refused to stop the bullying, though.
And, Jen articulates an interesting concern, that I think was in my gut somewhere, but I hadn’t taught true. Indeed, the problem with de-sensitizing the child to something that makes them uncomfortable is also teaching them when the behavior is something they should actually be uncomfortable about.
And, lest we see this as a issue that only comes up when people don’t have experience with boys, I also have a son. He is more likely to engage in this kind of play than my daughter, but he’s not permitted to pretend to shoot people. He doesn’t do it around here. He’s just started K, though, and it’ll be interesting to see how this behavior evolves as he grows older and has a bigger group of peers. Star Wars is the current rage, and the kids definitely play with light sabers; I haven’t seen enough of the game to see how it plays out.
LikeLike
“How would you feel if your neighbor a block down who you’ve talked to twice in the last three years walked by you today and shot a finger-gun at you (and not in a Joe-Biden-Saying-Hello kind of way)? I’d certainly be freaked out, and I’m not blaming my girls for being freaked out as well, given a comparable context.”
I’m still contemplating the debate here, but …
I just finished Nurtureshock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Their conclusion states that one of the mistakes we make as a society is to assume that children think/react the same way adults do. This comment reminded me of that.
LikeLike
>>How would you feel if your neighbor a block down who you’ve talked to twice in the last three years walked by you today and shot a finger-gun at you (and not in a Joe-Biden-Saying-Hello kind of way)? I’d certainly be freaked out, and I’m not blaming my girls for being freaked out as well, given a comparable context.
Well, if my neighbor was seven years old it wouldn’t freak me out in the slightest. And not just because he would be smaller than me and no physical threat–because it is expectable seven-year-old behavior. So I guess I don’t think that is a comparable context.
LikeLike
My son doesn’t play with imaginary guns. (He’s 7.) I can’t think where he’d be exposed to guns, either. He watches only tv (Nick and Disney and PBS) and few movies. The only place he’s exposed to guns, I think, is through old Peanuts cartoons (he and his dad read the collected Peanuts volumes at bedtime).
I guess we’ve seen Star Wars and the 1st Indiana Jones. This is interesting to me because my son definitely has aggressive behaviors, just not gun-shooting behaviors.
LikeLike
bj, I think we really agree–the kid who reacts needs to be helped to understand the difference between some kid horsing around and a kid who’s really threatening her, and the kid making someone cry with a finger gun needs to be told that scaring other kids is not cool and you should back off if you’ve hurt someone’s feelings. But treating finger guns as if they were real guns doesn’t teach anyone any useful life lessons.
LikeLike
FWIW, I’m a super leftie on gun control issues. I have never touched a gun. The only gun that I’ve ever seen is on a policeman’s holster. I’m very typical NE effete liberal on guns issues. But I think that cracking down on imaginary guns in schools is insane.
And the “Joe-Biden-Saying-Hello kind of way” comment cracked me up.
By Ragtime’s estimate, 3/4 of the boys on the playground play with imaginary guns. I would think it’s higher. Last week, a tree dropped a dead limb on the street in front of our house. Every girl that walked by the house completely ignored the branch. Every boy that walked by picked it up and turned it into a sword or light saber or gun. It would have made a great video.
I worry that schools aren’t set up to deal with boys very well.
Ian’s situation is different, of course. He made the gun sign, because it’s hard for him to quickly find the words to say, “Get out of my seat, asshole.” He also learned sign language before he could talk, so it was more natural for him.
LikeLike
I’m getting google ads on the sidebar for firearm training. Ha!
LikeLike
“I worry that schools aren’t set up to deal with boys very well. ”
I sometimes worry about this, too. But, I think that the only solution is more male teachers. I don’t think segregating the boys helps. I think that school isn’t set up to deal with boys very well because it’s set up by women and girls.
Incidentally, the same problem applies to the rest of the world — i.e. out of school, where the world isn’t set up very well to deal with girls, because it’s set up by men and boys.
LikeLike
bj,
Gender segregation has some interesting effects, including on the teachers. When I taught English in Russia, my classes wound up being almost completely gender segregated. The boys were hoping to become cadets at the Marine Academy in Vladivostok. The girls were theoretically hoping to become ships’ psychologists, but actually had much more varied interests. The boys were generally frisky and immature. The girls were generally poised and studious. I was a totally different teacher in the two different classes. With the girls, I did lots of skits and cooperative stuff. There was an undercurrent of competitiveness between the high-achievers, but I didn’t need to stoke it. The boys were on average weaker academically and it was a constant struggle to keep a lid on things, so I did more games and competitions with them to keep their interest. I don’t know if the boys would have been better served by a mixed gender class (although probably individuals probably would have), but the gender segregation kept me thinking about their idiosyncracies and kept me from writing the boys off.
A friend from DC who went to an elite girls’ school said that it was fiercely competitive, a real pressure cooker, and that she had spent her entire adult life trying to escape the person that the school made her. I suspect that mixed-gender education may be worse academically, but better socially.
LikeLike
Sorry, but I’m having some trouble with the deterministic tone of a lot of this thread. Not every boy is wired to play with guns. Not every girl lives to sit still and study all day.
There’s more to our kids than their reproductive bits, IMHO.
LikeLike
“Not every boy is wired to play with guns. Not every girl lives to sit still and study all day. ”
Oh, I totally agree. That’s part of the reason that I think gender segregation is the wrong solution. I also think nothing in our analysis provides any evidence for “wiring” at all. We live in a gendered world, gendered behavior that results can’t be attributed to wiring.
There’s a fab interview of Carol Greider (Nobel Laureate, Medicine) in the NYT today:
Highlights include her description of struggling with reading and school in the early years and the following quote:
“When Lawrence Summers, then the Harvard president, made that statement a few years ago about why there were fewer successful women in science, I thought, “Oh, he couldn’t really mean that.”’ After reading the actual transcript of his statement, it seems he really did say that women can’t think in that sort of scientific fashion. It was ridiculous!”
LikeLike
“Well, if my neighbor was seven years old it wouldn’t freak me out in the slightest. And not just because he would be smaller than me and no physical threat–because it is expectable seven-year-old behavior.”
Yeah, it matters that they’re 7. What if they’re 9? 13? 16?
And, although us grown women should, properly, recognize that a pretend shooting by a 7 year old is not threatening, I’m not sure we can expect the same of a 7 year old girl.
“But treating finger guns as if they were real guns doesn’t teach anyone any useful life lessons.”
Maura, we do agree, though. And, table knives are not daggers, and ibuprofen isn’t LSD. Schools have a tough time, trying to draw clear lines on all kinds of things. But, sometimes, it does seem like rationality goes out the window. There needs to be some room for rational thought even in zero tolerance policies.
LikeLike
In fact, my 6-year-old does air guns and other behaviors that are considered disruptive “boy stuff.” (She freaked out another girl she was trying to play with with her loud dinosaur roars.)
I sometimes wonder if she would be cut more slack for this kind of thing under the “boys will be boys” provision.
LikeLike
Way back in the early 1980s, rifle shooting was part of my 8th grade course in Lifetime Sports. They were only BB rifles, but it was pretty good stuff.
LikeLike
By Ragtime’s estimate, 3/4 of the boys on the playground play with imaginary guns.
Actually, I estimated 25 out of 30, or 83.3% 🙂
And look, I definitely think this gun play is a bad idea, and should be discouraged. But I’m also not an idiot who thinks it I can completely change a big cultural norm.
But I don’t think it’s such a big thing to teach kindergarten kids, “Only roughhouse with kids who want to roughhouse with you — otherwise you are not playing, you are fighting.” Or, similarly, “Only play guns with kids you want to play guns with you — otherwise you are not playing, you are threatening.” And it is certainly reasonable to draw a line between what you play on the playground at recess and how you act in the classroom.
If everyone likes to play guns, then there is no problem. It sounds like the new kid at school felt threatened, though — perhaps unusually (according to some), but certainly not irrationally. Even if gun-play is somehow “normal,” kids should certainly be free to not be a part of it.
LikeLike
I read the cutlery article. It is indeed crazy. They suspended a kid ’cause he brought a set of camping utensils to school. They expelled a girl because a knife was sent in with a birthday cake. It’s insane. But, I’d say that the insanity is not trying to make all the kids the same, but ’cause they’re trying to take all the discretion away from the school, and the school is responding by acting nutty.
They’ve changed the law to allow some discretion for expulsions (after the knife/birthday cake incident) but, apparently, that doesn’t prevent the expulsion in this case. It’s clearly a district gone amuck. Is the Christina school district a hotbed of gang activity & violence? I don’t know the area.
LikeLike
“The Death of Common Sense.”
Not only did a college professor write a book with this title, but the VERY people–all the “sophisticated” lefty intellectuals in academia, post here, and are on the blogroll here; that places like IID champion as the “right thinking,” rational, “progressive” people of this world–are at bottom responsible for this trend.
Let’s not kid the troops, sports-fans, this is all of a piece–the inevitable result of the interplay of a post-modernist, permissive, relativist society spawning rampant drug usage, permissive sex and cultural anomie among the nation’s youth with all forms of previous cultural restraint dissolved. Then, when the inevitable sociocultural dysfunctions emerge among this nations’ youth the equally inevitable hamfisted bureaucratic overreaction (spurred on by fear of a legal system run law-suit-amok.) occurs in an attempt to tamp down the societal maladies that were brought on by the actions and attitudes of the very people now fearful for their own children. Ain’t Karma a bitch?
LikeLike
that places like IID champion as the “right thinking,” rational, “progressive” people of this world–are at bottom responsible for this trend.
Or — you know — not.
LikeLike
“Ian got in more trouble for making the fake gun with his fingers, than John did who actually hit Ian. We were told that schools no longer tolerate that sort of behavior, and that he would never be mainstreamed if he formed imaginary guns.”
Several things. I agree that threatening a classmate was disruptive to the class, and I do think that both boys should have been disciplined for physically hitting each other. For the hitting, though, I’d think that the boy who initiated the physical interchange should have been in more trouble. Both boys need to practice appropriate classroom behavior.
I’m troubled that there seems to be an implicit threat, “he would never be mainstreamed,” attached to totally normal boy behavior. What would happen if he were to write a story in which a character blew something up, or shot someone? Would any child get in trouble, maybe be suspended for writing such things? Or only boys? Or only boys who have an IEP? It’s a question of school culture. Would this school read Walter the Farting Dog? Could a boy write a similar story, and receive good feedback from the teacher, or would that be seen as something to be condemned?
Lastly, how do the boys in your school system fare on standardized tests? Our state breaks down state test performance by many criteria, gender among them. If there’s a larger gap between the genders in your town than in similar towns, that’s a cause for concern, in my opinion. I’m sensitized to this because our town has such a gap between the genders. Interestingly enough, it also has an outflow of boys, whose parents choose to send them to private school or move house.
LikeLike
I haven’t read through all of the comments so don’t know if I’m repeating something or missing something else here, but. I think there is a distinction between playing with imaginary guns, and pointing said imaginary gun at a new kid in your classroom who is doing something you don’t like. Which is not to say that there is something unusual or atypical or even proto-antisocial about such an act (which kids everywhere might be likely to try), but I would have to say that such an act simply should not be tolerated in school. A letter home and a talk with the kid and parents seems about right; threats about future mainstreaming, on the other hand, are just mean and unnecessary.
LikeLike
Ragtime/
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear (or “perfectly clear” if I’m channeling Nixon.) It was the permissive left that created the conditions that provoked the overreaction by both the right and center of the American polity. And now we see that a child of one of you “on the left,”–the proprietor of IID–has run afoul of the very mess her ideological side has created in the first place. True Karma.
LikeLike
True Karma.
Now I have to google your pinko Buddhist terms.
LikeLike
Way to kill a perfectly good discussion, virgil.
LikeLike
The Delaware school board has reportedly changed its zero-tolerance policy, according to the AP.
LikeLike
Laura, disemvoweling is a good tool for posters like Virgil Xenophon. Drive-by name-calling and spouting of canned talking points is not contributing to the discussion; you have conservative people, even very conservative people here who engage with the topics, who engage with the other people and make 11D an interesting place to spend time. Virgil’s track record to date is disruption for its own sake.
LikeLike
Good for Delaware.
LikeLike
First and last warning, virgil. Stay on topic.
LikeLike
Pesto and I were talking about this post, and he recounted fake-shot a substitute teacher. (I think it was with a pencil.) I was horrified. He also had GI Joe guys. And, he’s from PA and guns were acceptable. While I understand this is how he was raised, my mother had a strict “no gun” policy. (Though water pistols were the exception.) I recall her being furious one Christmas that a relative gifted my brother a gun that shot Velcro balls that you were supposed to aim at a target.
LikeLike
We used a walk around on the last day of school singing:
“Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. Teacher hit me with a ruler. Met her behind the door with a loaded .44 and teacher ain’t teaching no more.”
Nothing happened except for the teacher singing, “School’s out, School’s out. Teacher let the fools out.”
LikeLike
I am the mother of 2 girls. My 4 year old is actually kind of interested in guns. it is a direct result of playing with boys at preschool. The only time she’s seens guns is in Curious George books (they are there…the older ones) and she saw handcuffs in a book about Philippe Petit. But you know, its ok. I told her she can’t shoot anyone in the house, which is a rule she follows, and if she playacts shooting with her dolls I’ve decided that is generally ok, since she can tell the difference between dolls and people. we’ll see how it goes. So far I see this as a welcome respite from the princess crap.
LikeLike
“Not every boy is wired to play with guns. Not every girl lives to sit still and study all day.
“There’s more to our kids than their reproductive bits, IMHO.”
Certainly, but gender seeps into almost everything and some of the exceptional girls may be the ones that prove the rule (i.e. Aspie girls). As Laura posted recently, Wendy and I have (slowly) been doing a book club on Deirdre Lovecky’s Different Minds. Different Minds covers the complex relationship between giftedness, ADHD, Asperger’s, with quite a bit of material on how they manifest (often in kaleidoscopic combinations) in girls and boys. I’m partway through blogging the ADHD chapter, but it does look like gender (whether biologically or culturally or both) shapes the brain in very powerful ways. Asperger’s and ADHD can manifest very differently in girls and part of the challenge of girls is identifying Asperger’s or ADHD or giftedness when they look very differently than in boys. So, for instance, if we think of ADHD as being primarily about hyperactivity (which we might if we use boys as our paradigm), we are missing out on the fact that ADHD in girls (and in some boys) might manifest instead as inattentiveness or slowness. We aren’t sexless brains carried around in gendered bodies. The relationship between mind and body is significantly more complex than that.
LikeLike
Yesterday my son came home from middle school and recounted how the teacher in eighth grade health class had walked them through the process of making crystal meth, complete with diagrams.
Last week, they put condoms on a banana.
I’m just getting more and more confused about why teaching my kids how to manufacture drugs and get ready to have sex is a good idea, but allowing them to shoot an imaginary gun is a bad idea. I’d rather they teach my kid how to shoot a gun than how to make crystal meth. At least we could use the meat.
LikeLike