What about the assignment – write a Facebook status update? No wonder the kid turned to fantasy.
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When I was about 12 years old, a friend of mine and I were playing at a local middle school ballfield in small-town Maine. A small snack-shack had been built the summer before, and it was at the time midwinter. A T-square had been left behind by the crew (individual?) who built he snack shack, and was covered with snow and frozen in the ice. We made the small, and admittedly not incredibly thoughtful decision that it had been abandoned, and when we were done playing, chipped it out of the ice and walked home. We were swooped upon by three police cars, put on the hood of the car and searched. We were finger printed, mug-shotted and told to wait for our parents. In the mean time, laughing nervously to ourselves, and giving confused answers to our “interrogators.” One officer remarked “You’re being pretty cavalier about this!” I still wish I’d had the wherewithal to answer with the appropriate irony, but again, I was 12. When we came back, a month later to have our community service assigned, the case manager apologized quietly for the overzealous policing of the state’s new “finders keeps” law, wherein you can be charged with theft if “you find a quarter on the sidewalk and don’t bring it to the police station”, and let us go home.
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Somewhere, in a parallel universe inhabited by sentient dinosaurs, a young tyrannosaurus is suspended for writing a story about shooting a child . Naw, I’m just messing with ya. A t-rex couldn’t write anything with those stubby arms.
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The story is so incomplete, I don’t see how any of us can make any real judgment calls. I mean from what was said in the article it’s probably safe to assume that an arrest and such is a sever overreaction, but the article was obviously written by someone who didn’t really understand the entire context.
Next we’ll probably see someone objecting to phrases like “cure the disease” or “clean up the filth”.
I can hardly wait for the day when something like this happens and it turns out the child was just recounting (or better yet, brazenly plagiarizing) a Bible story.
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Presented for your amusement. Apparently dragons are real too!
He could dictate.
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No wonder the current governor is a tea-bagger. Authority figures have spent a good deal of time conditioning Maine residents for it.
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I’m not bothered by the gun reference per se, but considering he bought the gun to kill his neighbor’s pet and I wonder about his psychology.
Still, certainly not a punishable offense.
Your post is the one that made me think back to my high school days. I was an editor on the school’s literary magazine, and the faculty supervisor allowed me to publish some of my poems under a pseudonym because they were clearly about suicide. It was an open secret which students, like me, were in very dangerous family abuse situations. Some teachers showed special preference to us - if we were good students - but otherwise did nothing. This was long before mandatory reporting. The good old days, right?
Now here we are in 2014. If that child had written about being abused at home (or at school) or having suicidal tendencies, instead of about killing someone/thing else, the police probably WOULDN’T have been called.
Having grown up in a situation where I witnessed the two all-too-common polar responses to family abuse – to turn inward and become self-destructive or to turn outward and become abusive to others – I wonder if this student has an active imagination, or is reacting to something.
So I see this story as indicating more than the current state of student freedom of speech.
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There’s gun control, and then there’s gun control trolling, which is to say that there is hostile woo (as in magical thinking and quackery). People get upset over being accused of such a thing, but there really are some people out that see guns or even the mention of word “gun” as their golden ticket for unlimited public dickishness. And in this case there’s someone who sits in an office thinking (at a level just below conscious thought) “How can I think of myself as an absolutely wonderful person and still be a sadist towards children?” That right there is what you call “superego pathology” - a bullshit moral crusader with strong sadistic tendencies. This is a failure to develop in the adolescent years, so naturally this is the person who thinks they have a special gift for working with kids, which is obviously dead wrong.
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The United States used to have this thing that protected the freedom to write anything you wanted. I think it was called “the first amendment”. It even applied to things kids wrote in school. But since now everyone thinks that kind of freedom is crazy, I guess the US must have gotten rid of it. I wish the press had reported on it when it was repealed.
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In the U.S., children are legally chattel and do not have the same Constitutional rights as adults. Seriously.
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So every English assignment from now on at that school can be a variation on writing a story about how the cops came and took you away for writing a story about how the cops took you away for… Just keep copying the one paragraph recursively till you hit the required page count.
They could also get their parents to write them notes excusing them from writing English assignments for fear of being taken away by the cops.
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Didn’t think it was necessary to add a [sarcasm] tag…
“Southern state check. Union school teacher check. Gun check. Over reaching police action check. Ok print it boys this will get them riled up.” Fox producer says
“Sir what about the other articles today supporting the ferguson police?” The umm reporter said.
“Who cares, this is Fox News. Our audience will have already forgot.”
How is a 16 year old a ‘child’? The headline gives the impression of a 6 year old Calvin being arrested for writing about killing dinosaurs.
That… could actually be brilliant. If you can get enough parents to say “we will not allow our children to turn in any written assignments until you provide us with a sufficiently clear policy that we can know that turning it in will not result in police action,” that could actually work.
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For some reason I read the first few comments on the article at the site (my masochistic nature coming to the fore, I assume.) One of the first contained this gem:
Who writes about using guns to kill dinosars…really?
I honestly wondered if it was a joke post for a moment.
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I swear, we need to make the internet harder to use again.
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