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The Covid-19 has driven many people 14k, solid gold, crazy. Now, I have thought those in charge of teaching our children were crazy long before the Rona came from China, but they have gone over the top bigly. A twelve year old boy was suspended from school because he showed his Airsoft Zombie Hunter pistol, a toy gun, during e-learning. Oh, and that’s just the beginning.
Those of us with a working brain cell or two, know for darn certain that boys and girls are different and learn differently. Most girls, but not all, can sit at a desk and quietly raise their hands. I couldn’t, and still cannot, sit still at a desk. Most boys, but not all, cannot sit still. Even The Atlantic has noticed this difference:
According to the book Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies That Work and Why, boys are kept back in schools at twice the rate of girls. Boys get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls. Boys are diagnosed with learning disorders and attention problems at nearly four times the rate of girls. They do less homework and get a greater proportion of the low grades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school, and make up only 43 percent of college students. Furthermore, boys are nearly three times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Considering 11 percent of U.S. children—6.4 million in all—have been diagnosed with a ADHD, that’s a lot of boys bouncing around U.S. classrooms.
Plus, many, not all, boys love guns. With their index finger as the barrel and thumb as the hammer, boys start the pew pew life as soon as they can. After that, anything can become a gun or rifle. I remember the sheer terror I felt at the middle school parent orientation for my son. The Dean of Discipline was explaining that any weapon or facsimile thereof would be grounds for suspension. I asked if that meant a drawing. The Dean said, “What part of facsimile don’t you understand, Mrs. Williams?” I ran home as fast as I could and had a strict talk with my boy.
That’s why reading the story of seventh grader Isaiah Elliott made me angry and nauseated. Young Mister Elliott has ADHD and his IEP (Individualized Education Plan) is on file with the Grand Mountain School, Colorado Springs, El Paso County, Colorado. The other day, during virtual art class, Isaiah, picked up his Zombie Hunter Airsoft pistol and moved it. His mother received an email from the school after class ended:
After the class concluded, Elliott said that she received an email from her son’s art teacher in which the teacher said that Isaiah had been “extremely distracted,” during the lesson.
The teacher wrote that there had been “a very serious issue with waving around a toy gun,” which she had reported to the school’s vice principal, according to Elliott.
Soon after getting the email, Elliott said that she received a call from Grand Mountain School Vice Principal Keri Lindaman informing her that she had called school resource officers from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office to conduct a health and wellness check on Isaiah at the family’s home.
The cops showed up at the Elliotts’ home.
After the vice principal’s call, Elliott said that she told her husband, Curtis Elliott, who had briefly left their home, to “turn around and go straight home.”
“I had to logically think out, ‘How do I protect my son, what do I have him do [when] playing with a toy in the privacy of your own home is a threat?’” Elliott said.
When the El Paso County Sheriff’s officers arrived at the family home, they showed her husband footage from the incident that they had seen in the vice principal’s office and which was recorded on their body cameras.
Oh, I forgot to mention a couple of things. Isaiah is black and the family is a military family. That’s just piling on. Here is Isaiah’s brave mother describing the incident to KOAA:
A five day suspension, and the cops called. Isaiah’s Mom is right to be worried after Tamir Rice, a twelve year old Cleveland child was killed for playing with a toy gun. The cops explained to Isaiah that if it happens again he could be charged with interfering with an educational institution. I bet Mrs. Elliott can see the steam coming out of my ears all the way in Colorado Springs. I am fuming.
Our boys face ever increasing discrimination for being male. Black males face even more discrimination. Isaiah with ADHD faces even more discrimination.
Schools are a toxic stew. If you thought you could avoid that stew with virtual learning, you were very wrong. Fortunately, for young Isaiah, his mother will not be sending him back to that toxic stew. He is wait listed for a charter school. Keep at it, Mom.
Featured Image: Sam/Flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Wyldkat says: Remembering the things I drew in the margins of some of my notebooks, I am very very glad I grew up in the 70’s/80’s. Never mind the cast list of The Legion of Superheroes, and observe the various swords and knifes bracketing the semi-automatic – and is that a revolver in that corner?
Kidding aside, I am still trying to figure out how Elliotts’ actions could be perceived as threatening. It was a *toy* gun, any dang fool could tell, and he was at home. There is no way he could have inflicted harm on anyone.
Oh, right, we must now hate guns and demand that all guns, real or fake, be removed. *snort*
NTSOG says: I attended a school with a military cadet corps right in the middle of Melbourne, the capital of Victoria in the 1960s. We were issued with Lee Enfield .303 rifles from the school armory with which we drilled on the school grounds and kept in our care in our lockers. Sometimes we took our rifles home on public transport and no one worried about it – most older adults had lived through the WW II and had become used to seeing soldiers, both Australian and US, in the streets. I remember a demonstration by an officer in regard to safety: he fired a blank round, having placed a tin can on the muzzle and pointed the rifle skyward. A hole was blown through the can – we were very impressed. We also drilled with Bren light machine guns on the school playing field. There was also a .22 LR rifle range on top of one of the school buildings as target shooting was a valued activity. On camp at a military base we fired both the Lee Enfields and the Bren guns on the range. I don’t believe any of us have become mass murderers or have developed psychiatric issues due to being trained to use firearms. Nowadays though I have to be extremely careful about transporting my firearms lest some sensitive petal ring the Police and demand I be arrested as a potential criminal psychopath.
Toni Williams says: NTSOG- sensitive petal. I love it.
TW
talgus says: they are recording everything (without your approval, your house and contents are in view on the interface camera) So. police the area. set up a sterile area for learning.
BTW: this should be a tax deductible expense as they stopped in in person learning and required your children to attend online.
You know, you can put just about any image in as a background on a Zoom call. Probably wouldn’t help when the kid is moving their toy gun, but at least would hide anything racked on the wall of their room.
If I still had children in public school, I would be tempted to use this one… https://i.pinimg.com/736x/6a/8b/da/6a8bdad92010c2d0b376742672a3be89.jpg?b=t But then, I do live in a State where the Reich doesn’t quite have full control (yet).
Penrod says: Excellent. Some close friends’ two girls grew up with a house full of Class 3 weapons -mostly submachine guns and machine guns, with the odd mortar and anti-aircraft gun- and have in their late 30s not slaughtered anyone so far as I know.
The younger gave a Senior (High) school speech I was pleased to attend in which she gave a wonderful slide presentation of the several days we had spent at a machine gun collectors shoot during which roughly 225 people went through 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition.
I’ve always been mildly sorry for the poor Senior who gave the next speech, about walking through the woods and getting his foot wet in the creek.
John C. says: Someone needs to start suing the pants off of some of these self-important twits. There is no way whatsoever that a child could hurt anyone on the other end of a television conference, even if it was a real gun, which everyone seems to have acknowledged this wasn’t. It was not on school grounds, and I can think of no way it could have been legally defined as such. When the sheriff’s department showed up, they should have had a warrant, or told they were not welcome in the home. When they showed the footage, the parents should have said, “So?” If the sheriff’s deputies said anything else, they should have been given the name and number of the family’s lawyer, as should the school when they decided to suspend the boy for something that WAS NOT THEIR JURISDICTION. If they get away with these outrages, they will keep doing them.
GWB says: something that WAS NOT THEIR JURISDICTION
Except it has been made their jurisdiction. School teachers are one of those groups of people required by law to report suspicion of abuse and such. (Note “suspicion“!) So, if the kid had a real gun he was handling during the class, they are required to report (child endangerment in that scenario).
I don’t think we want them blowing off signs of problems (remember Parkland, FL). But we’d certainly like them exercising good judgment. And we’d really like it if our teachers all demonstrated good judgment – instead of progressive fear and Safetyism.
Scott says: In work with El Paso County Sheriffs on a regular basis, and beyond the aversion to doing much of anything (not surprising given todays climate), to say that the average deputy is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier would be an understatement. To be sure there are some good, and some exceptional deputies, but on average, they are one of the most self-serving and useless departments I’ve come across…
GWB says: That certainly doesn’t help matters, does it? Because we would hope that our police could also exercise sound judgment.
Of course, all of that assumes that you have citizens who can make sound judgments……..
(Shame. I really enjoyed living in Colorado Springs lo these mumble years ago. [Before Powerline was anything but an extreme eastern edge to the town.])
Penrod says: I remember a saner time in which my 1st grade teacher expressed her extreme disappointment that I had forgotten to bring my three real Civil War cavalry sabers BACK to school for use in our class skit.
I was crushed.
Of course that was around 1959. Some shake their heads at the awful freedoms people suffered under in those days and tell me we are so much more enlightened today.
And again, in high school, say around 1970, when my friend lent his real Thompson M1a1 Thompson submachine gun -a deactivated war trophy to be sure- for use in the school play. Just imagine doing that today. How many people would be jailed if not preemptively shot?
NTSOG says: G’day Penrod, I suspect the calibre of people teaching in the post-war period made a great difference. Aside for my immediate family, many of whom served in WW II, there were many senior teachers at my school who had seen active service. I remember the director of music who had served with the Chindits raiding behind Japanese lines in Burma, 1943-’44. He was not a man to suffer fools but had the respect of all the lads.
Penrod says: I remember doing some volunteer work in the school archives many years later where I came across a school recruiting pamphlet from the 1920s.
The title page photo was a target’s eye view of the rifle team.
Imagine that today.
Cameron says: As it is set up right now, the majority of the school system views boys as defective girls with dangly bits. And since it’s easier to slap a label on them like ADHD on them instead of actually teach this will happen.
I hope that young man gets into that charter school and soon.
GWB says: Or gets homeschooled. It’s really ideal for military families, allowing continuity and familiarity that just isn’t possible otherwise – even in the DoD school system.
F.D.R. in Hell says: Five-will-get-you-10, these Liberal inverts will work to get A CHRISTMAS STORY censored from holiday screening on television. You know, a snapshot of America and the holidays from the 1940s, must not be allowed to live in the minds of 21st Century proles.
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