If books weren’t dangerous then totalitarian regimes wouldn’t bother banning them.
What the frak?
What else are kids supposed to do while cooped up in the bus for a couple hours every day… longer if the bus breaks down and the backup bus breaks down too…?
This guy is way ahead on the safety curve.
Keep kids safe at all costs.
The driver’s just jealous that these kids are getting an education.
Oh, thank god, someone has foiled the runaway scurge of book-related accidental impalement! Finally, someone thought of the children - and not just some petty, control freak with a totalitarian streak arbitrarily looking to make children into obedient, empty Stepford children, either. No, this is clearly a forward thinking Transportation Safety Hero who deserved the full backing and support of the school board in his drive to make school transportation into the unproductive, mindless drudge it should be. Next step: pallet wrap.
I’m sure it’s just that they don’t want to go on the slippery slope to the Midwich cuckoos.
Some things never change. My mom had to go yell at the school when they didn’t want me reading out on the playground, and that was back in the 80s.
Why isn’t there an X Prize to find a screening method to filter out people who want a position of authority just for the rush of power they get, no matter how petty?
Our bus driver was surprisingly tolerant… That is until we would get to Lord-o-the-Flies levels of activity at which point he would pull the bus to the side and utter “Keep your goddamn scratchers to yourselves you bloody little savages!”
If I couldn’t have read textbooks (and finished up homework) on the bus, I might have been in SERIOUS trouble for most of my school career. And don’t get me STARTED on “back seat Tootsie-Pop Club”.
Seriously though, I rode the same bus for all 13 years of public schooling, with the same driver. He was kind of a cranky guy, but he never really yelled at us or set rules. His method of discipline consisted of slowly lowering the volume of the radio (yes, kiddies, back in the 60’s we could listen to Top 40 radio on the bus), because the noisier we were, the less we could hear. If the radio went silent, we knew we were in trouble, but if we persisted he would tune in a country station. THAT usually killed any kind of bad behavior. As a last resort, he would pull the bus over, turn around and just stare at us. That would do it.
His brother drove my bus, obviously. The only difference was that he used Christian music as the final resort. We were s generally good bus because we liked the top 40 station!
“the person who drives the bus is allowed to make the rules.” What is this Mutiny on the Bounty? Buck-passing mindlessness at its worst.
But thanks for the awesome jet bus image. That’s proper context.
One of the other factors was that all grades, K-12, rode the same bus. Usually younger kids were a bit afraid to act up in the presence of “almost adults”, and even the junior high kids could be roped in by the seniors and juniors who just didn’t want to deal with the chaos.
The joke’s on him, because all along the road there are signs and advertising, and there’s no way to stop her from reading short of gouging out her eyes. At first, they seem like unconnected random messages, but in time they become the acrostic of a new gospel in the war between the generations.
What if she wore safety goggles and restricted her reading to really boring books?
That’s interesting. In my high school experience, the Junior and Seniors were powerful agents of organized chaos. I’d chalk it up to hormones and not being really bored, in addition to resentment for not being allowed the independence to drive themselves, since most of the Juniors and Seniors had licenses, but didn’t have cars. The few instigators were always figuring out ways to fray and then shatter the driver’s nerves, to the point where I remember getting on the bus several times with the driver’s eyes all puffy because she’d been crying.
I remember riding the schoolbus as an ordeals, and reading was the best way to endure the ordeal. However, I remember generally trusting the bus drivers, who seemed to look out for me.
I’m guessing this is out of the question:
Well it’s Canada. Maybe they were worried that if she kept on reading she might go on to become a climate scientist.
