Teachers Stage Fake Virginia-Tech-Style Attack as "Learning Experience":
No, it's not The Onion; it actually happened. Wow.
Teachers Stage Fake Virginia-Tech-Style Attack as "Learning Experience":
No, it's not The Onion; it actually happened. Wow.
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Anyhow, maybe the guidance counselors were trying to drum up some business to justify their inflated salaries in a slow time of year.
Whatever....
Regarding inflated salaries, the median salary for guidance counselors in Virginia is $54,000; not a pittance, but hardly a princely sum either.
I did go through one air raid drill as a kid (may even have been 6th grade), during the 1970s, but it was clearly labelled as a drill. Not that I thought lining up and then exiting the school was a good response to Soviet planes attacking the school -- highly improbable to begin with.
The problem with turning our kids into docile, go-along-to-get-along, non-competitive hothouse flowers is that eventually they'll have to deal with people who aren't playing along.
But by then, of course, they'll also have been taught that weakness is a virtue, and that they are to blame for the dysfunctional behavior of others.
My family tends to train kids to be the former -- but having the latter handy can be very useful. And I, personally, thank the families of these kids for training them for our exploitation.
That would teach kids how to deal with the effects of a real fire.
/sarcasm.
Hillarious.
Don't forget human doormats, prison b**ches and obsequious lapdogs -- the world needs those, too.
Mediocrity rules!
Parents reacted pretty much the same then.
My guess is those morons just recruited several dozen new folks to the NRA and the CCW way of thinking.
I don't know. It just seems to me to be wrong to do this to kids. Am I missing something?
On the bright side most of those students now realize tha their teachers are bunch of idiotic fruitcakes that shouldn't be trusted to wipe their own arse.
So there's a positive in everything.
Let the lawsuits .... begin!
At the sixth grade level one thing may be taken as sure, that at least some of the kids now realize what utter schmucks their teachers are. Next,will they wonder about teachers in general, in line with the idea of the expansion of young minds. There may be more learned in this then the school bargained for.
After several instaces, though, we pretty much got our responses down as rote. Which was probably the point.
My quarrel would not be with the drill itself, but with whatever responses it was trying to instill.
Given how many corpses tend to be found under desks or other spurious hiding places after school massacres, training students to react as ready-made victims for the slaughter seems to me counterproductive.
Let me happily record my first-ever agreement with Mr. Aubrey.
The sadistic asst. principal should be on the job market, like, yesterday.
That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Imagine the teacher who *doesn't* do the utmost to protect the kids, then finds out it's a hoax, and has his/her guilty feelings spotlighted. You could quite seriously get a suicide out of this.
There are rules against that kind of experimenting on human subjects in the university setting; I don't see why it should be okay because some dumbass assistant principal decided to go off on a lark.
1) Telling the students this was "real" seems to defeat the whole purpose of drills - i.e., students are being trained that emergencies are "fake" unless their teachers tell them they are "real." I thought the whole point of drills was to make the desired responses so routine that in the event of the "real thing", the students would act like it was a drill and respond correctly without panic. Telling them it is "real" would seem to incite fear and panic for no useful purpose.
2) This event, from the news report, seems to have terrified some of the students. Given the rarity of school shootings, even if telling them the event was "real" served some useful training purpose (which I highly doubt, see #1), doesn't the price of unnecessarily terrifying students make this exercise a very bad idea?
3) Given the VT incident and other such, teaching the students to cower under the desks does not seem to be very sound. At least not in all circumstances.
For many, it seems the animal instinct of fight or flight has become cower and cry.
somebody dies.
who would be responsible then? Obviously, gun violence all too common in America.
reminds me of the time when the boyfriends of the next door neighbors girls decided that shooting my front door with a paintball gun was a smart thing. Not thinking of course of the impact that the sight would have on a cop driving by or me and my 12 gauge.
dumb is dumb
It's fine if the kids know that, say, 10% of teachers are idiots? Twenty percent?
I would think that teachers who were interested in the process of education would object to having morons like these clowns in the same profession, much less the same building.
I suppose the "best practices" could be tested to some degree with paint ball guns or the like.
Fight or flight seems like the menu - with flight being the distinctly preferred action.
Escape and evasion can be taught, and was taught to fliers.
I suppose there could be rope ladders on 2d floor window sills, windows that open (or could be broken out), doors that lock (or do not open without a key or key card).
For lawyers on the 22d floor, what about having a gun or two and a flak vest or two? What would the Swiss do? I suppose if there were a few National Guard or Reserve folks on the floor, with flak vests, helmets and weapons, trained to use them, the fight option might get a bit more credible.
Giving typical 10-15 per hour security guards weapons sounds more risky and less effective than training (or offering to train) a few citizen-soldiers, as in Switz.
At VA Tech there was at least one Army vet (mech eng. prof) who might theoretically have done some good with a weapon, flak vest and helmet. VA Tech only took say 9 minutes, so chance of saving a life was remote.
Most of the 6th graders I know have more sense than these so-called educators.
Oh please. Older people have been saying this kind of drivel for thousands of years. Somebody probably said it about you.
In general, the young adults who are getting shot at on my behalf in Iraq and Afghanistan are damned impressive, and they had to come from somewhere. But just a year or two ago many of them were "modern kids." How does that square with your theory?
We'll never know. But you don't need a weapon, flak vest, helmet, and military training to stop a mass murderer like Cho. A weapon alone can be sufficient.
And it's quite a bit better than nothing. Honestly, it's hard to imagine how the situation at Virginia Tech could have been worse than it was.
You may be right about security guards being more risky and less effective with weapons than trained citizen soldiers. I've never seen the data. But we do know that concealed-carry licensees generally have an excellent safety record.
It was a drill, yet not a drill, as businessmen who declined to participate were 'arrested' anyway..
Having gone to elementary school, high school, and college in Switzerland, I never encountered so much as a fire drill. Although many of my teachers were soldiers or even officers (one college professor was a Colonel, who once lectured in his parade uniform because he didn't have time to change, earning some ridicule), they most assuredly did not pack heat while teaching.
As the massacre in the Zug parliament a few years ago showed, mad gunmen don't have a much harder time in Switzerland than elsewhere.
Well, maybe not doo-doo, but this administrator in particular and others of his ilk have become quite useless in the big picture of education. (And doo-doo is composed of waste products, so...ok, yeah, that analogy works.)
The big problem with our schools today is that administrators have stopped being teachers and have morphed into useless bureaucrats and politicians, with the same disconnect from the real world inherent in those two groups. Enact a rule saying that administrators must teach, and we'd go a long way towards solving that problem.
(The next step in that progresion would be to enact a similar rule saying that legislators must be regular citizens.)
Worse still! Bureaucrats with tenure. Don't know how they do things in Tenn. but in NY they'd probably have to suspend the AP for at least 2 years (at full pay) while the disciplinary process grinds on. The outcome would not be certain by any means. To try that on several educators would likely be more than any but the bigger school districts could afford.
Telling the teachers they screwed up bigtime is for not turning in the attendance sheets for a month. Or lesson plans, or whatever.
Or for spending more time on George Washington than Noam Chomsky.
For this....?