Cezary Jan Strusiewicz
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Teaching is hard. Kids are tough to deal with, the pay is bad and parents are always complaining. We understand that, and salute our teachers for the crucial job that they do.
Well, the ones who haven't gone utterly insane anyway. Apparently quite a few of them have...
Teaching proper conflict resolution to the more troubled students can be tricky. These are kids who let their fists do the talking, and the only word they know is punch. But we do know one thing: It's probably not a good idea to let them settle their differences in school-sponsored illegal bare-knuckled cage matches, like South Oak Cliff High did.
Reportedly, a number of teachers from the Dallas South Oak Cliff High let their more violent pupils into a makeshift Thunderdome in the boys' locker room and left them there until only one was able to walk back out again.
The boy with the dwarf on his head usually won.
Testimonies claim that the entire staff was in on it and that these practices went down for more than two years, between 2003 and 2005.
The entire faculty completely denies the allegations, especially the principal, who claims "ain't nothing to comment on," though considering his bizarre past (including staging his own kidnapping and fatally shooting an old guy) we're not sure why Texas put him in charge of kids instead of making him principal of the exercise yard at the county prison.
It was probably due to some kind of communication breakdown.
Since then, more reports from whistleblowers have surfaced, claiming that the staged matches were "gladiator-style entertainment for the staff," meaning that this whole silliness could probably have been avoided if the principal simply bought a TV set for the teacher's lounge.
We've been hearing for years how schools only teach useless facts and hone skills that have no application outside their walls. Well, a certain school in the UK recently decided to change that.
Hogwarts?
What is the one thing that all modern kids have to eventually deal with? That's right: MURDER. Wait, what? Oops, no time for follow-up question we have already put in motion the genius alternative lesson where we fake-murder the kids beloved teacher in front of their very eyes!
Sometime around March this year, children ages 10 to 13 at the Blackminster Middle School in Evesham were rushed into the playground for what they assumed was a fire drill, when a masked gunman appeared out of nowhere and "shot dead" a popular science teacher. While the rest of the school faculty (completely in on the "joke") rushed to his aid to perform hopeless CPR and shake their fists at the God who abandoned them, the students reacted less than favorably, suffering panic attacks and shellshock that will scar them for the remainder of their troubled youth.
Damn. The British D.A.R.E. is hardcore.
It took a whole 10 traumatizing minutes before the staff revealed that the incident was faked in order to set up some kind of bizarre Clue-style scenario, "to teach Year 8 pupils how to investigate, collect facts and analyse evidence".
All they had to do was look for the paw prints.
More troubling, maybe, is the spectacular degree to which the staff failed to learn a lesson from the whole thing. The head teacher, Terry Holland, shrugged the whole thing off and quipped, "It was one of the more popular teachers who played the victim, I don't think there would have been as much concern if it was one or two of the others." We can at least grade him a B+ in missing the point.
Back in the prudish golden age of March 2010, the Itawamba Agricultural High School in Mississippi faced the greatest moral crisis in its history: lesbians.
NNNNNOOOOOOOO!!!!
The gender-role-bending catastrophe emerged when a student named Constance McMillan declared that she wanted to bring a female date to the school prom while wearing a tuxedo!
Clearly, the school board was forced to intervene to prevent such insanity, lest up would become down, and sandwiches would leap from student lunchboxes to devour their human oppressors. After throwing a hissy fit and threatening to cancel the entire prom altogether, they finally decided to compromise by organizing a fake prom for the gay kids, far away from the normal students.
The fun they had missed.
We don't mean that the school sent the couple to a sham address in the middle of a haunted swamp or anything. We mean that together with the parents, they rented out an entire country club, stocked it with punch and other refreshments, put a few teachers inside as chaperones, and then only invited the lesbian couple.
To bolster the numbers, they also sent the word out to the school's population of disabled students. Because you don't want to be discriminatory with your discrimination policy.
All of this went down while the rest of the school partied at a secret location, without any queer kids making a mockery of the proud and noble tradition of the high school prom.
No gays would taint the spiked punch this night.
And thus the school faculty could pat each other on the back content with the knowledge that, while homosexuality might exist, at least there wasn't any that they knew of going on in that one particular building that one particular night. Money well spent!
Generally, you can forgive a school for being zealously overprotective of pupils with special needs, especially when you're living in Australia, where every animal, vegetable and mineral yearns to murder you and your entire family. Following that logic to its stupidest extreme, there is the Seven Hills West Public Schools in Sydney, which puts autistic students in a cage at lunchtimes.
"All the cages are taken. You stay here."
OK, maybe "cage" isn't the right word, because cages at least keep you safe from the elements and dive-bombing koalas. The special ed reserve at Seven Hills West is really more of a cow pen; a fenced area with a bench and a dirt floor outside the school building, where the handicapped students are rounded up each recess.
There's plenty of room to run around and all the grass they can eat.
This autistic detention center was allegedly implemented due to fears that some of those kids might venture off school grounds and, presumably, get run over by a gang of junk-clad gasoline thieves.
Australia.
There of course has been some opposition to the Seven Hills Free-range Project from the kids' parents and anyone who isn't a horrible human being, but dammit, the safety of the children is at stake here. How else are the teachers supposed to keep an eye on literally a dozen additional students each lunch break? If you have any better ideas Mr. Brainy Trousers, the school board would love to hear them. All schools cage their students, right?
We're not pretending to know a lot about British schools, other than what we've learned from porn and horror movies (and we suspect some of that information is less than accurate).
This happens a lot, right?
We assume that the curriculum over there has some kind of "harden the fuck up" policy when it comes to grieving for your loved ones, because that's the only way we can explain Ryecroft's decision to ban a couple of siblings from a Christmas dance when they took a few days off from school. After their dad died of cancer.
"Spoonful of sugar, right kids? Tip tip. Cheerio."
The head teacher at Ryecroft defended the school's decision, claiming that the Christmas dance was an additional treat set up to reward children who didn't miss a single day of school, because their goal is to "build a community that attends school and regards school as absolutely vital for the future." After all, if kids start using cancer as an excuse to skip school, it's just a very short slippery slope to the kind of scorched dystopian wasteland the movies warned us about.
Thanks a lot kids.
Later on, the school's administration did retract part of that decision claiming that the boy could have attended the dance after all. But not his sister.
After all, they can't back completely down from the decision. They don't want to look like a bunch of assholes.
Look, kids can be suicidal little lemming bastards. We get it. Turn your back on them for 10 seconds and they're diving toward the power socket with a knife outstretched.
This uppity motherfucker just won't stop trying to kill himself with that spoon.
But as much as we'd sometimes like to let them top themselves for the good of the (much diminished) future generations, most of us are instilled with a biological drive known as ethics.
Not so for the British Melksham Manor School whose policy is to do precisely jack shit when one of their students weasels himself into mortal danger. A five-year-old kid found this out the hard way a few months ago when he climbed a 20-foot tall tree and found himself stuck there. Some teachers noticed him, and proceeded to completely ignore his plight as per their health and safety policy.
Here in the States, when something gets stuck in a tree, we throw stuff at it.
When pressed for answer concerning what the hell they were thinking, the school's administration explained that the teachers were forbidden to act because they feared any rescue operation might distract the boy and cause him to fall. The policy apparently rests upon the assumption that he will simply learn to fly eventually.
"We would have put out the fire, but then they wouldn't know what to run away from."
Luckily, this hour-long acorn impression later ended without a depressing splat after the boy was helped down by a passing stranger, sparing the school awkward conversations with the kid's parents or the hassle of having to clean a vaguely child-shaped stain off the pavement. Naturally, the woman who saved the boy was later sued by the school for trespassing on private property.
If you enjoy lurking around outside New York's named junior high schools, chances are you were treated to quite a sight in April this year: a 12-year-old girl in handcuffs doing the perp walk, escorted off her school's premises by two police officers. Holy hell, what did the kid do exactly? Cap a Blood for getting all up in her grill?
"Crips 4 Life."
Nope. She wrote a sentence on her desk using an erasable marker.
The little girl got in trouble with the unimaginatively named Junior High School 190 after her Spanish teacher caught her scribbling "I love my friends Abby and Faith" on the desk, which in all fairness she probably thought were slang terms for "heroin" and "illegal abortions."
At least she wasn't having unprotected "Ashley."
After being dragged to the dean's office, the kid was witness to probably one of the strangest conversations in the history of ever. The dean, the representative of the entire school, actually picked up the phone, called the police and asked them to come and arrest the girl for totally not actually damaging school property at all. And they did. With handcuffs no less.
They even seized her Lisa Frank folders.
But 190's insane overreaction quota was far from filled. The school first suspended the girl and then took her to family court, where she was sentenced to eight hours of community service and writing an essay about what all this experience has taught her, which is probably something along the lines of "Adults never lose their capacity to grossly overreact to things."
You've probably noticed the pattern by now; while American schools tend to be blunt and direct with their policies of child abuse, schools in Britain prefer the more subtle and more deeply-scarring tactic of straight-up batshit lunacy. That's the best way we can explain this story: On July 10, 2009, the students at the UK Southway Junior School in Burgess Hill witnessed an alien abduction of their teacher.
The school had an amazing effects budget.
It started with a shrieking, piercing noise and a cascade of colorful lights, after which the principal informed the students that a UFO crash-landed near the school. Following a trail of debris, the students laid their eyes on an extraterrestrial space craft, from which aliens emerged. Then the aliens kidnapped a member of the staff and, if Hollywood didn't lie to us, probed his rectum with various phallic objects.
Of course, the abduction later turned out to be a "special performance" by the school staff, who even got the freaking police in on it, providing budget special effects in the form of sirens and flashing patrol car lights. Why? To stimulate the kids' imagination for writing assignments of course!
Well, mission freaking accomplished because, by the end of this, they stimulated so many imaginations of that many of the seven-year-olds broke down in tears and complete confusion.
"Why didn't I get to go on the spaceship ride?!"
Damn, who could have known that kids who still believe in Santa Claus would have trouble telling reality from fiction?
Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a freelance online journalist and Japanese-English-Polish translator. Contact him via c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com
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