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Originally Posted by Gemini Cricket
I don't see this as an act of suppression. I see it as a lesson of appropriateness in a period of time post-Columbine. Your friend's comment (bringing a gun in to kill a teacher) may not have been taken seriously at all back then, nowdays it would be. A kid saying that stuff now would be seen as a danger to those around her.
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It was taken seriously and as I understood it, her actual-threat-to-a-teacher's-life got her much more punishment than I got. In fact, I believe we were both treated with punishments equal to what we actually did, shock of shocks, since we both had actual threats involved. Yes, it wasn't the same.
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Originally Posted by GC
It's a different time from when we were in school. There weren't huge shooting sprees in schools when I was a kid. Now there are.
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There's the heart of it, right there. I personally don't think that changing our fear level actually prevents anything. I personally think that measures like these are just a lot of posturing, much like supposed bag searches that don't do a thorough job. It's all icing on a rotten cake.
I don't think anything has changed. I feel the same way in a post-Columbine world as I do in a post-9/11 world - that others have used these tragedies to steal freedoms. That the measures taken don't protect or help anybody. That we are feeding on our own fears and are making things worse. That the terrorists and the Columbine kids did achieve something - they made America into a land of quivering cowards who feel better when people in authority overstep their bounds.
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And, to answer your question, unless it's stipulated in the homework itself, it's never okay to turn in homework with doodles on it. At least that's the way it was in my school. You'd get your paper handed back to you and you'd have to re-write the entire thing.
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Yeech. All your teachers were like that? You went to public school? When I think of all the art I saw on other people's papers...
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Anytime there's an occurrance that is threatening or can be miscontrued as a threat, that's when it's okay for the school to address it. There are varying degrees of penalty, but there needs to be some sort of sense of accountability for someone's actions. If there isn't, then it gives the message that it's okay to continue that behavior.
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Again, you're sticking to general concepts, and I want to know where the cutoff is. If I doodle something on my TrapperKeeper, and someone overreacts to it, is that ok for the school to interfere? I've mentioned many different things....knives, scissors....how about an iron maiden, or a cowboy brandishing a pistol? Can you, GC, you personally, draw a line as to what is permissible and what is a threat, or is that at the mercy of whatever fear-ridden shmuck decides is a threat to them? Is it ever ok to say to that shmuck, "You're being a shmuck, just calm the fvck down, it's a goddamned doodle"?
If you cannot draw an objective line, you cannot enforce it, and if you cannot enforce it, it must be thrown out as subjective posturing BS, in my humble opinion.
However, I'd like to restate that if a child seemingly has actual issues, they need counseling.