Monday, April 14, 2008
Kids these days are so much more resourceful than I was at their age.
It used to be that all a kid had to worry about was being picked last for kickball or dodgeball. (These were dangerous activities — like prostitution or iron smelting — that children were allowed to do in less-enlightened times.)
Now kids have therapy sessions, spinning classes and benefit dinners. I’d tell my children they are growing up too fast, but they ignore my e-mails on their Blackberrys.
Even misbehavior in school used to be simpler.
When I was in second grade, my class had a tyrannical teacher. She terrorized the children who ate the dried macaroni noodles used for multiplication problems. It was rumored she had pulled out a handful of a student’s hair the year before. She kept me after school for using the word “nincompoop.” She told me, “We don’t swear in my classroom.”
One day she was absent, so we made our move, picketing at lunch for her dismissal. The lunch lady reported us, and when our teacher returned, she questioned the ringleaders: the girl who lived across the street from me and me.
The girl turned state’s evidence, claiming it was all my idea.
Was it all my idea? On the advice of my lawyer, I refuse to answer that question in keeping with my rights under the Fifth Amendment.
The teacher asked why I did it. “Because we don’t like you,” I said. (I was a very forward child.) The rest of that school year was not fun.
Last week, though, third graders in Georgia took the reaction of frustrated students into the new millennium, plotting to attack their teacher with a broken steak knife.
They also had handcuffs (obviously brought by the student with the kinky parents) and electrical tape (brought by the student with possibly kinkier parents, or maybe just a parent who is an electrician).
The teacher was described as a “veteran educator,” meaning she has old-fashioned notions regarding the appropriate times for students to stand on chairs. When she tried to stop a student who hadn’t gotten the chair-standing memo, she precipitated the conflict.
Without having to waste valuable Internet-surfing time conducting parental interviews, I can tell you right now what their parents would say: “It’s all her fault. My precious little [non-harmful woodland creature] wouldn’t hurt a [widely detested vermin].”
Of course they are correct. The teacher and her outdated worldview is to blame. Her obsolete pedagogy probably doesn’t even have room for teacher-student sex, no matter how mature the 32-year-old teacher finds her 14-year-old male students to be. Get with the times, lady!
This teacher is apparently laboring under the old notion that childhood is an innocent time that is meant to be cherished. The new ideology is that childhood is the new virginity: something shameful that is flung away to the first older guy with a moped and a bad teenage mustache who comes along.
Luckily for the students, the only thing more out of date than their teacher is the Georgia criminal code, which does not allow for the 8 and 9 year olds to be charged with a crime.
Otherwise, they would have to find time in their busy adult-like schedules for arraignments and Dateline NBC interviews.
Minster is a Lawrence senior in economics.
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