Tag: school

Guns in every school?

There are about 300 million guns in the US, nearly one for every man, woman and child in the country. ABC News has noted that, even if a gun control law were passed tomorrow, those extant guns aren’t going to disappear.

Tom the Mayor, my old FantaCo and YMCA buddy, asks: How do you feel about the NRA’s idea of having guns in every school, you being a parent. I think they are vile and evil.

I’m not keen on the NRA’s idea. I like what Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams had to say: Keep your guns out of my school! Among other things, the armed guards, in schools and elsewhere, are often early targets for would-be mass killers. I worry that having armed guards will accelerate the problem. And the foolish notion of making the teachers into a militia is beyond the scope of the job, when they have been given increasing responsibilities for – ready for it – teaching.

If we have armed guards in every school, where will the money come from? The strains on school budgets NOW are enormous. Now, if the NRA is willing to PAY for all of these people, MAYBE we can talk about it. (Nah, not even then.) Who will these people be, anyway? A police officer, with a level of training in situational behavior, or a rent-a-cop who just knows how to take target practice well?

The fact is I heard that about a third of schools already have armed personnel, according to NBC News. Columbine had at least one armed guard during the massacre at the high school in 1999.

Ultimately, I think that the NRA and other pro-gun advocates have been disingenuous; MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell explains it well. The implication is that more guns will keep everyone safe; clearly untrue. The Fort Hood shootings represent an apt example.

There are about 300 million guns in the US, nearly one for every man, woman, and child in the country. ABC News has noted that, even if a gun control law were passed tomorrow, those extant guns aren’t going to disappear. It would be foolish, though, to do nothing.

I have a friend who grew up in Newtown, Connecticut. and still has friends there. It’s difficult that “this horror happen in such a quiet, ordinary town.” I remember writing about the all-but-forgotten mass murder in MY hometown less than four years ago. I wrote that, on Binghamton’s newspaper’s website, “along with expressions of sympathy, distress about the human condition, requests for more help for the mentally ill, and people on both sides of the gun control issue…” This is why I despair about anything ever-changing; every gun tragedy generates the same damn conversation.

And it’s ONLY because six-year-old children were many of the victims that I have any hope that that, maybe, just maybe, things WILL be different this time.

And though you didn’t ask, I figure I’ll sound off on another topic: violent video games. I’m not a gamer, but I listened to the whole podcast when Chris (Lefty) and Kelly Brown discussed certain hazards they have faced;…how video games nearly shattered their marriage and the lessons learned… . This was all very good.

Lefty also discusses the tragedy in Newton, CT, and what it means for video games. He believes that the video games that simulate killing other people are, or should be, kept away from small children. I’m not convinced this is actually happening. I remember going to the mall some years ago and my 12-year-old niece was playing some game I can only describe as gruesome. She’s turned out all right, but I’m not convinced that’s true of all the teenagers who surely get to play them. This adult gamer notes that kids have been playing “cowboys and Indians” or “army men” for decades with no ill effect. I myself had a Johnny Seven OMA (One Man Army), and I grew up to be a pacifist. But playing war just wasn’t that graphic. If kids have seen 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence via movies, TV shows, music videos, and video games, is it likely that at least some of them might be negatively impacted?

Jaquandor asked a few questions. I’ll take the first one here, and the others down the road:

I see the question’s already asked, but: Guns. What on Earth to do about them?

I was going to ask Superman to take a giant magnet and collect them all.

Seriously, limiting the type of guns and the sometimes magazines they use would be a start. Some communities have gun buybacks, which I favor. I know those Second Amendment folks think the Constitution is absolute, but as I said recently, Amendment 2 is no more absolute than the First Amendment. We limit certain types of speech to maintain a safer society, but we can’t with guns?

There’s that recent shooting in, roughly, your neck of the woods, in Webster, NY, just outside Rochester. Coincidentally, that’s where my wife was born, and where my best friend from college grew up. Four firefighters shot, two fatally, responding to a house fire, set deliberately so some schmuck could shoot the responders, and so he could burn down as much of the neighborhood as possible, with at least seven houses ultimately destroyed. One of the guns he used was the same type of high-powered weapon used on children and teachers in Newtown, CT. MORE guns would not have solved that situation either.

T is for the Trip Through Time, and Teachers

Nine of us went from K-9 together: Carol, Lois, Karen, Diane, Irene, Bill, Bernie, David, and me.

I grew up in Binghamton, NY, and when it was time for me to go to kindergarten, I was supposed to go to Oak Street Elementary School, based on where I lived. But both of my parents worked outside the home, and there would be no one home at lunchtime.

It was determined that we would instead go to Daniel S. Dickinson School so that we could go to my maternal grandmother’s house at lunchtime. She was only a half dozen blocks from my home. Incidentally, I don’t think Oak Street was any closer to MY house than Dickinson. The school was named for a 19th Century US Senator, as well as the first president of the city of Binghamton in 1834.

One of the peculiar things about schools in Binghamton at the time was that they would start in September AND February. Those of us born in December to March, maybe a month earlier or later, began school in February. The February class was always far smaller than the September class. One’s first semester was the B semester, the second the A semester. So when I went to school in February, I’d be in kindergarten B, e.g.

Dickinson was a K-9 (kindergarten through 9th grade) school, located on Starr Avenue at the west end of Dickinson Street, appropriately. The K-6 kids entered on the south side of the building, and the 7-9 children on the north side. It had clocks with Roman numerals, including the 4 shown as IIII, rather than IV.

Kindergarten: my teacher was Miss Cady. She was my mother’s teacher as well, which should indicate her vintage. I remember taking naps on a yellow rug; on one occasion, I actually fell asleep, and woke up to an empty room!

First through fourth grade: I don’t remember this stretch as well, because every single teacher we had in the B semester was gone by the A semester in September. I don’t know if they moved away or what, though at least one had gone on maternity leave, since she came back and taught my sister Leslie.

Fifth grade: Miss Marie Oberlik. She was of a certain age. She lived only three short blocks from the school and I walked by it almost every day. She taught us to count to 10 in Russian, which I can still do. I got 100 in the spelling final.

Sixth grade: Mr. Paul Peca. I’ve written about him. By that year, we had only 16 students in that class.

Additionally, we had:

Music: Mrs. Joseph from grades 3-9. We had these ancient blue books, which I was quite fond of. I loved them so much, in fact, that I found a book with a similar roster of songs a couple of years ago called America Sings, and bought copies for Leslie and me. Her husband was our 9th-grade biology teacher.

Gym: Mr. Lewis from grades 3-8. Every semester we had to do marching around the gym until it met his high expectations. (Column left march!) Then we could do something fun like softball or volleyball. Later on, perhaps as a result of a presidential fitness initiative, we were supposed to do certain activities, such as climbing ropes, which I was particularly bad at.

In 7th grade, kids from Oak Street, and from the Catholic school next door, entered our school. Mr. John Frenchko was the English teacher in 7B, 7A, and 9B; he was also the school’s assistant principal. Miss Gertrude Kane, who has the same first name as my mother, taught English 8B, 8A, and 9A. She had blue hair. She liked doing accents, and I foolishly let her know that I didn’t think she was particularly good at it. In the three marking periods, my grade went from A to B (after I made my comment) to C. I got a 90 on the final, yet got a C as a final grade.

By the end of 9th grade, we somehow had, again, only 16 students in the class. Nine of us went from K-9 together: Carol, Lois, Karen, Diane, Irene, Bill, Bernie, David, and me; if I had gone to Oak Street, obviously that would be untrue. Indeed, all of us except David, who stayed an extra semester so he could play basketball, graduated from high school together. They’ll all be turning 60 soon, and I’m likely to mention two or three of them in the coming months.

The school song:

Hail, Daniel Dickinson
Pride of our fair Binghamton
May we ‘ere our praises sing
With loyal hearts and true
May all our words and deeds
‘ere uphold thy glory
Guide us our whole lives through
Hail, Daniel Dickinson.

ABC Wednesday – Round 11

I do/do not understand

You know that Bill Cosby story about making a wood shop item with one leg too long, so one trims that leg, and THREE legs are too long? That was me.

A bit ago, Chris wrote What should I expect others to know and understand? It was based, initially, on a comment she made on Facebook, though her article took its own direction, as articles often do. She also mentioned a piece, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, from the CIA.

“How can you not know that?” How often have you said those words, either out loud, or silently, in your mind? How often have others said that about you?

The struggle is that we have developed a wide range of opinions about what one OUGHT to know.

I know the Speaker of the House’s skin color (orange) but not Snooki’s real name; she’s on some apparently popular show called Jersey Shore. Depending on who you’re asking, X or Y is IMPORTANT to know, and Y or X, not so much.

I had a colleague who used to infuriate me. Ask her for advice, and, almost inevitably, she’d say, “Oh, that’s EASY.” Well, it was obviously NOT easy for me, which why I was asking; at the same time, she diminished her own gift.

It would be immodest, but probably true, to suggest that I happen to know a boatload of factoid type of stuff – though not about astronomy, botany, or cars, e.g. Conversely, I’ve always been lousy about physical stuff.

You know those two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects? There would be tests asking which one of the four objects is like the original. Of course, the examples would be turned on their axes. I simply could not “see” it easily at all. Some people look at architects’ drawings or floor plans and can visualize what the finished structure will look like; they are just lines on paper to me.

There were these exams called the Iowa tests that I took in sixth grade. I did really well in math and reading and the like. But on a 100 scale, I got a 13 in mechanical aptitude. You should have seen – or better still, NOT seen – the stuff I made in shop. You know that Bill Cosby story about making a woodshop item with one leg too long, so one trims that leg, and THREE legs are too long? That was me. Honestly, I blew up more ceramic items in the kiln than the rest of the class combined.

One learns to compensate, though. Accepting that one just can’t be good at everything helps a LOT.

Although, I will always remember this: I was in 7th-grade art, and I did some pieces. My father visited the classroom, and he expressed surprise (shock) that I received a grade as high as a B in the marking period. The teacher responded that I had done as well as I could, which was certainly true.

(I will have come back to this. Didn’t go where I was thinking it would, at all…)

Snow Days

It was so much easier the year the wife and the daughter went to the same school district a couple years back.

As an itinerant teacher, my wife works in two different school districts. My daughter goes to school in another. The thing that would be most disruptive involves snow days.

Oh, not snow days for me. I got to leave early on a Valentine’s Day storm a few years ago – and a good thing, too, since the buses stopped running shortly thereafter – but generally, I work every day, regardless of the weather.

If wife’s school districts and daughter’s school district are all open or all closed, it’s no problem. If wife’s districts are closed but daughter’s is open, not an issue. But if either of my wife’s districts are open and my daughter’s is closed, that would mean that I would have to take a vacation day off.

The other situation involves snow days not taken. If there are no, or fewer snow days used than scheduled, there may be extra days off and that may mean me taking off in May because it DIDN’T snow. It was so much easier the year the wife and the daughter were in the same school district a couple of years back.

An interesting thing they are considering in Ohio: telecommuting to class. If they did something like that around here, it would help the students not miss so much class because of the elements. I’m not sure, though, how such a program would relieve a parent working outside from missing work, or in the alternative, dragging their children to work in a blizzard.

Jingle Bells – the Fab Four

Running for Office QUESTIONS

For some reason, the city of Albany holds its school board vote in November, rather than in May, when most other locations do. In fact, the school BUDGET IS voted upon in May, along with the library board and the library budget.

Anyway, someone called me up a few months ago and asked me if I wanted to run for school board. Last year, someone I knew told me that “people” were discussing having me run, but I never got a call. This year, I got a call from a local official who I knew before he was elected to his office. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

It’s not that it’s an unpaid position that takes a lot of time. It’s more that school boards are handcuffed by No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top. Moreover, in the city Albany, the nine or ten charter schools, which are far less transparent financially than they ought to be, are paid for out of the school budget. In other words, I don’t know how to make the situation better, or even maintain the status quo.

A few years ago, I was also asked to run for the library board; THAT position I thought about for a while before declining for time reasons. Someday, I might run for that.

1. Have you ever thought of running for political office?
2. Have people requested that you run?
3. Have you run? For what office(s)?
4. Have you served in elected office?

I was in student government in high school, college, and grad school, but it’ll be a while before I try again.

There were more than a half dozen countywide positions for which there was no opposition candidate, only the Democrat. That is distressing, but I’m still not running.

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