bitterdiva

Battle on the school ground yard

When I was younger, (a young and impressionable 16), I had a card reading. The psychic said I was going to be a teacher, yah no. Perhaps she saw that I was going to be a professional student or work in the educational industry. Close but not a teacher.

After going to high school at what Kris refers to as Baby Momma High, cleaning brains off of walls was a better profession than teaching brains inside school walls. Though, in today’s world, one would have to worry about having to clean the brains you teach off the walls inside the schools. Upstate New York is quite different from metro Connecticut, an incident of a school shooting is displayed on covers of newspapers, journals, teacher’s unions newsletters, and on each of the local news in the cap region. It does make the news in metro CT, but the number of occurrences was greater than one incident.

In 1995 when I graduated from Baby Momma High, there was talk of installing metal detectors over the summer to combat the weapons in school problem. In my city, there were six public high schools, four of those where magnet schools, two were the general main schools. The two main high schools were the issue schools, the melting pot of the city that congregated each day to be molded and shaped into well-learned individuals. It was a breeding ground for violence, among the students, and among the rival high school. These two high schools had metal detectors. My high school had tortured souls, but they were more of the artistic nature.

There were incidents of students carrying guns, carrying knives, but for me the naïve student, I never noticed; I was of the believe “out of sight, out of mind.” My friends on the other hand were my informants and afterwards when I speak with them and reminisce I find out that one of the people that I knew did in fact carry something on their person. I was involved in action groups that informed the community of the evils of sexual harassment and of weapons in schools, which had the added benefit of breaking me loose of Baby Momma High for the afternoon.

Even though I am older and have lived in the area for almost ten years, I still retain the nonplused reaction to violence in the schools. But as information on the psychological background of these tortured individuals reveals to all the shocked residents of the community, the problem in suburbia and the country is bullying. The problem in the cities is financial and drug-related, and perhaps even includes bullying. Co-existing in a hostile environment every day for eight hours poisons a person into seeking an end to the “means” but the means does not justify the end. It’s a dilemma with no distinct resolution, but with effort on the part of administrators, teachers, and parents, the occurrences can be lowered.

11:01 AM

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Posted by: texasyankee at June 9, 2004 09:07 PM

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