Back at the ranch: This charming episode occurred in a classroom on the suburban campus where I taught for lo! those not-very-many years. Thank goodness I managed to get an editorial job at the university’s main campus, and then to retire.
Actually, back in the Day, we didn’t feel too much concern about potential violence in the classroom. It’s kinda grown like fungus over the years, though. Today, I wouldn’t go into a classroom without a pistol stashed in my briefcase.
Interestingly, one day when I was teaching I discovered a woman student in one of my upper-division courses was doing exactly that. She openly admitted — in the classroom, in front of 30 classmates — that she was carrying a gun and that she wouldn’t come onto the campus without one. Even more interestingly, not a student in the room so much as blinked.
At any rate: that assertion above is to say, in truth, “I wouldn’t go into a classroom.” Period. I should risk my life to remind a bunch of students, for the 177th time, that a complete sentence contains a subject and a verb?
You do have to figure it’s not surprising that students don’t know the basics of their own language, if that’s what they have to contend with whenever they go onto a campus. Which came first? The ignoramus or the lunatic?
I spend a lot of time on Reddit these days and recently someone, presumably very young, asked if it were true that students had gun racks in their trucks in the 70’s, brought their guns to high school, and no one had a problem with it? Why, yes, they did, because school shootings didn’t happen back then. Shocking, isn’t it?
We had just as many guns in the 70’s as we do now, but it apparently never occurred to students to use them on their fellow students and teachers. What happened? The Internet? Social Media? Are people are becoming dumber and more violent? Any theories?
Yea, verily: high-school students had gun racks in their trucks — so did every other truck driver.
To my knowledge, my high-school classmates did not bring guns to school. That’s because there was no such thing as gun violence in K-12 schools. Or, for that matter, in colleges — not to speak of. As more hair-raising incidents occurred and hit the national media, though, more students began carrying self-defensive weapons. No question of that!
What happened? Indeed…. A plague of media-fired craziness? Endless violence in TV, movies, and other media? I dunno…when I was a kid, we had Westerns and crime movies and comic books, shoot-em-ups in every theater. Newspapers and TV reported (constantly!) on robberies and rapes and murder. Nobody seemed to translate that fiction and reportage into daily life or into fantasies of distorted real life. So what was operating there? Couldn’t tell ya.
Maybe the question is “what is operating HERE?” Again: this ole’ lady couldn’t tell ya. Can ordinary people not tell the difference between fantasy and reality? Are their lives so filled with fear and hate that they feel justified in swaggering around with a gun? Or so scared they must have a pistol under every pillow?
Frankly, I suspect that latter proposition is the most accurate one.
Life has become SCARY in America. Who would not take precautions to defend themselves, in these times and in this place?
I carried when I taught in the evenings at a university!
Hafta admit: I thought about it, too!
Ultimately decided agin’ it. First: the classrooms were full of students who were carrying: in fact, I didn’t need to be armed to the teeth. Just make friends with the other residents of the classroom.
Our campus had a good and well armed troop of Campus Cops. All you had to do to summon them was push a button.
Can you imagine we’re ACTUALLY CARRYING ON THIS CONVERSATION? Hevvin help us…what planet have we landed on?????