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The Unprotected Class

6/8/2022

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Picture
One evening during the holiday season back in my teaching days, I boarded an elevator in a nearby shopping mall. Just before the door closed, a couple of teen-agers, one of whom was a student of mine, raced aboard. 

"Mrs. Lacey!" he exclaimed, obviously shocked to see me there. Speechless for a moment, he finally managed, "I didn't know teachers ever went shopping!" 

I told him it was actually quite common.  The point is that kids who, in their logical brain, know better sometimes find it hard to believe their teachers have a life outside the classroom. To them, teachers are a breed apart. 

By the time they become adults most have given up these childish ways.

Not some of our legislators, however. If they were fully formed adults, we wouldn't be seeing banners like the one in the photo above.  Either they cling to childish beliefs (teachers are in charge and all-powerful) ... or they've never been in a classroom ... or they're dangerously untethered from reality.

Arming teachers is what a former colleague of mine, a psychologist charged with diagnosing learning disabilities,  would have whimsically designated JPD: Just Plain Dumb.

Think about what's involved when you arm a front-line teacher. First, there's this thorny issue: w
here are classroom teachers to keep their weapons? Mass murderers don't announce in advance the time and place of an impending attack.  Teachers teach on their feet. They move around the room. To pretend that teachers can be the first line of defense means they must spend the day with a gun holstered on a hip.

Never mind the unfriendliness of greeting your students looking like one half of Bonnie and Clyde. Never mind the annoyance of having to strap on and wear all day a lethal accouterment you hope you never need, barely know how to use, and that makes you feel like an imposter. Never mind that armed instructors make the school look like a war zone. 
Even if competent with the pistol (and how likely is that?), a teacher can be disarmed, too inexperienced to  shoot straight, or shocked into paralysis in a  crisis.

If you're not wearing a holster ... what then? Do you put the gun in a locked desk drawer? An unreachable shelf in a cupboard? A secret compartment in an innocuous looking dictionary?

You can see where we're going with this. A gun that's hidden away is not only  useless in an armed attack; finding, seizing and using it is a temptation for an upset student short on self control. Arming teachers, no matter the location of the gun, is about as effective as spitting on forest fire.

And where's the body armor for the teacher and, for that matter, for the kids? Finally, what's a lowly pistol going to do in a short-lived gunfight with an AR-15?

I know politicians of all political stripes like to think that baby steps--background checks, raising the age at which an aspiring gunman can purchase an assault weapon, red flag laws--are "progress." I suppose they are ... but not much.

The fact remains: An assault rifle is a weapon of war. Its only purpose is to kill large numbers of people in a short period of time. Allowing civilians to purchase them is lunacy.  There's a term often used when referring to groups that are discriminated against due to innate characteristics.  Age is one such characteristic.  In this country, we now have one very large unprotected class. They're called school children. 








 




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Another School Shooting; How Many More?

5/25/2022

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The pending reversal of Roe v Wade doesn’t personally affect me, long past child-bearing age, but it affects others near and dear. Over the years, I had come to believe that young women who came along behind me were living in a kinder, more welcoming world than the one I grew up in. The “kinder” hope dissipated over the last five years, but I continued to believe women would enjoy the bodily autonomy recognized in the Roe v Wade decision of 1973.
 
A little history: My first impressions of what the world thought of me and everyone else of my gender were formed in the 1950’s. In the heart of the Midwest, girls wore dresses to school, boys wore blue jeans; girls played violins, boys played trumpets; middle school girls took cooking and sewing, boys took woodworking and “shop;” boys played Little League on grassy fields, girls were relegated to playing ball (often with the neighborhood boys) in the streets. In the world created by adults, we were pigeon-holed by gender. It seems like another lifetime now—or it did until I realized one of the most powerful institutions in our country is bent on dragging us back to those dim days. 
 
With the reversal of Roe v Wade on the horizon, we’ve already had more than a glimpse of what many states, seeking to deny women the right to make their own decisions in the most intimate arena of their lives, have in store for their hapless inhabitants. 
 
Basically, Roe v Wade guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion prior to the viability of the fetus. During the first trimester, the decision to terminate a pregnancy is the woman’s alone. During the second trimester, states can impose regulations, but cannot completely outlaw the procedure. During the third trimester, the fetus being viable, states can regulate or outlaw abortion except when it’s necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.   
 
If the court overturns Roe, states will be free to regulate access to abortions without federal guidelines. Five or six justices (John Roberts’ vote is uncertain as of now) will unleash states to do as they see fit. If you’ve followed developments at all, you’ve seen the extremes to which some are prepared to go, at the extreme, banning abortion with no exceptions, even in cases of rape, incest or threats to the life of the mother.
 
Why?
 
Most of the folks who call for those extreme restrictions are not “pro-life,” as they claim. If they were, they would support life-affirming programs in the fields of childcare, health care, education, and nutrition. They would have long since passed measures banning assault weapons, extended magazines, ghost guns and more. As I write—on Tuesday, May 24, 2022—19 children and two teachers are mowed down in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. 
 
Republicans aren’t pro-life at all. They’re pro-birth. They care about children until they’re born; after that, those kids are on their own. 

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The GOP and "The Least Among Us"                                                           ________________________________________________________________

5/1/2018

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In case we had any doubts, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has demonstrated once again that the Republicans really are the party of unbridled greed and pure hypocrisy. He did this when he fired Rev. Patrick Conroy, a Jesuit priest who has served seven years as chaplain of the House of Representatives after complaining to the priest that some of his prayers in the House were too political. And thus, Ryan confirmed that justice and mercy has no place in the politicos’ hallowed halls.
 
The speaker found particularly offensive the prayer Conroy offered during the tax cut debate when he prayed that legislators would “guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”
 
Shortly thereafter, Conroy says, Ryan approached him to say, “Padre, you just got to stay out of politics.”
 
At various times since, however, Conroy has offered prayers that legislators would act with decency and compassion for their fellow human beings. The ideas espoused are classic New Testament fare, notions like …
 
  • helping “the least among us”
  • serving “other people in their need . . . those who work but still struggle to make ends meet”
  • being “mindful of those whom they represent who possess little or no power”
  • acting to “fulfill the hopes of those who long for peace and security for their children”
 
Having had enough of all that, Ryan demanded Conroy’s resignation. 
 
“Only in this perverted time could a priest lose his job after committing the sin of crying out for justice for the poor,” writes Dana Milbank, columnist for The Washington Post. “But then, look around: Everywhere are the signs of a rising kleptocracy. The $1.5 billion tax cut did make winners of corporations and the wealthy.”
 
And Paul Ryan? His dismissal of the chaplain shows, as a prosecutor would say, consciousness of guilt.
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Guns, Anyone?                                                                                     ________________________________________________________________

3/11/2018

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I write on an iMac, a MacBook, an iPad or an iPhone. In other words, I'm all Apple all the time--and all because in the mid-eighties Apple offered sweet deals for educators on their newly launched line of computers for the computer illiterate. Suddenly hordes of liberal arts types, who thought we'd never go near anything as mysterious and intimidating as a computer, were carpooling to the Ed Center to purchase our very own high-tech gadgets.  As they say, the rest is history. I can't tell you, because I've lost count, how many subsequent iterations of these devices I've purchased.

The point is ... Apple made a smart move. Not only did they get the jump on the educator market, but those educators (as Apple well knew) had a captive sphere of influence with the students in their classrooms, and Apple got a good head start on that market as well.

Now, we learn that the National Rifle Association is pushing its agenda by providing grants to high schools to promote "shooting sports," thus apparently stoking the supply of future customers for the gun manufacturers the NRA represents. This is nothing new. Started in 1992, the program is funded by local Friends of NRA chapters. Half the proceeds go to local grants and the other half, to the national organization. 

From 2010 through 2016, about 500 schools received more than $7.3 million under the program. Broward County, Florida, the home of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,  where the latest school massacre occurred, has announced that it will no longer accept NRA money. The  alleged shooter had been on a school rifle team that received NRA funding.

Other schools are poised to follow suit. Be proactive. Does your local school district still accept NRA  money? Are you okay with that?  

  
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A Letter to Donald: Arm the Teachers? Really?                                              _______________________________________________________________

2/24/2018

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Dear Donald …
 
9:00 a.m., PST. Mar. 22,2018: Today, in the aftermath of the slaughter of 14 high school students and 3 faculty members, you made an impassioned pitch to a group of state officials meeting in the White House. There you peddled the idea of arming teachers as a way of “hardening” schools against assault rifle-toting intruders bent on murderous mayhem.
 
As you spoke, you created a fantastical scenario in which Gen. John Kelly was teaching history and saved students by blowing away such a gunman with a weapon conveniently at hand. Your justification for it is that it’s “much less expensive” than hiring armed guards … “and it looks better.”  It looks better? I guess you meant, “less like a prison.” But Donald, how many “John Kellys,” with years of training in the use of lethal weapons, do you think there are in the teaching profession? This idea is ludicrous. Save kids' lives on the cheap? NO!
 
I worked in public high schools for more than 30 years, first as a teacher, then as a counselor. Let me tell you about the typical high-school teachers day:
 
She arrives, occasionally before daybreak, to prepare. She’s thinking about things like why her students didn’t perform better on the test she graded the night before, what she can do to help the girl in 1st period whose mother died a few days earlier, how she’s going to deal with the 4th- period troublemaker bent on new and ingenious ways of disrupting the class, whether the lesson plans that looked so good last night are going to work as well as she wants for her struggling 6th- period students.
 
Arriving at her room, she arranges her papers for the day, makes a couple of changes on her 3rd- period seating chart, and jots a few last-minute notes before she goes to the office to check her mailbox where she picks up a slip asking her to call a parent before second period. On the way back to her room she calls the parent and schedules a conference for immediately after school.
 
The rest of her day is punctuated by bells, students shuffling in, students shuffling out, taking attendance, asking questions, answering questions, returning papers, lecturing, supervising group work, monitoring behavior and attention spans, reading non-verbal cues from 35 (sometimes more) students to assess engagement and understanding, deciding mid-stream how to modify her plans based on the reactions of her students, helping students who’ve been absent get caught up … and on and on and on.
 
A teacher is expected to be an information provider, disciplinarian, assessor of achievement, administrator, role model, facilitator, and surrogate parent. Adding “gun-toting first responder” to the mix makes no sense.
 
According to teachthought, a website providing resources and training for instructors, a teacher often makes more than 1,500 decisions a day. That sounds impossible, I know, but presumably it includes things like deciding in the middle of a lecture to move and stand near a disruptive student (a sure-fire way to stop undesirable behavior) instead of calling him out or deciding to review a concept students don’t seem to have grasped instead of moving on as planned—in other words the kinds of decisions teachers make instinctively on the fly.
 
Speaking to a group a few days after the massacre of 17 people at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, you opined that allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons would deter further attacks and “solve the problem instantly.”
 
No, Donald, it wouldn’t. Teachers are trained to teach. They’re frequently in motion, walking about the room as they lecture, assisting science students with lab work, roaming the art room to offer feedback here and there. They’re focused on two things: their students and their subject matter--and the interface between the two. Teachers aren’t standing in the front of the classroom, eyes on the door, arms at the ready.
 
To think that a teacher, even with training, is our best deterrence and a realistic defense against an armed intruder in the chaos of automatic gunfire and frightened students shows an appalling disconnect from the real world, Donald.

Listen to those Parkland students. They're thoughtful, articulate, poised, and remarkably mature. You might do well to emulate them. Enough said.

(Signed)
​The Vocal Voter

 
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Why Children Die                                                                                  _______________________________________________________________

2/15/2018

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“Children lose their lives because politicians are afraid to lose their seats.”
 
Thus Mike Barnicle, journalist and political commentator appearing today on Morning Joe,  explains why, after decades of carnage, Congress refuses to enact sensible gun legislation that would reduce the easy access to guns.
 
Thus 17 people, mostly teen-agers, alive yesterday, lie dead today after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
 
The sick nature of our politics is nowhere more apparent than in the devastating failure of Congress to pass legislation that will reduce the routine slaughter of the innocent. The road to the D.C. swamp is squishy with wads of greenbacks, and using the ruse of political action committees (PACs), wealthy donors, whether individuals or groups, have virtually no legal limits on the amount of money they can give to support the candidate of their choice.
 
Thus the National Rifle Association (NRA), a shill for the gun manufacturers, pours millions into PACs to help elect legislators who are only too willing to risk the lives of others in return for their spots in our legislative chambers.
 
In nine months, we’ll have another general election. All the representatives and about a third of senators will be up for re-election. There are undoubtedly some in those groups who support sensible gun legislation. But support isn’t enough. Perhaps for this current cycle, we should all become single-issue voters. Overwhelming numbers of us support some form of stricter gun control. It’s time we band together to vote for candidates who will do the right thing, regardless of party.
 
Children lose their lives because the legislators their parents and grandparents expect to protect them value their own careers above the lives of our children. There is no greater depravity. 

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    Thoughts for Our Time

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