Indiscipline

When I was in grade school, I suffered a small trauma. It was a private school, and as one of the perks of an outrageous tuition, one of the P.E. activities (weather permitting) was swimming. My bassinet had once been thrown into the stream as part of several attempts to give me away as a babe, but I floated to safety using relatively underdeveloped swimming skills. They were not enough, however, to give the appearance I was a strong swimmer, and I required some additional tutelage before I could join the rest of the kids and pee in the big pool.

A sixth grade class in Tennessee didn’t fare so well.

On the last night of a trip, teachers convinced the kids a gunman was on the loose and conducted what they intended to be a learning experience as for five minutes the children hid under desks and on the floor in the dark. They were told it was not a drill, and several children were crying and pleading for their lives as a teacher disguised in a hooded sweatshirt tried to access the locked room. Afterwards, the ruse was revealed and discussions were had with the children if the situation had be real.

Parents were less than enthusiastic, and the school principal, while declining to say if any the staff would face disciplinary action, did admit the situation "involved poor judgment."

Shit, that’s the understatement of the year.

Other than soiling a perfectly good pair of pants in the process, that’s one of the reasons you don’t do those kind of “drills”. That may work with a bunch of 11 year olds, but other places not so much. Tell some people on a plane you’ve got some boxcutters and see how long it takes before you’re sporting a broken collarbone and escorted out the door at 35,000 feet. Or tell a bunch of Hell’s Angels you’re a narc. But totally screwing with some kids like that is hardcore. Even when they would do fire drills, if you didn’t see smoke or fire you didn’t panic but followed the procedures. It would have been real different if they did torch a classroom just for authenticity…

I feel they ought to document these kids in a cross between Seven Up and the subjects of the Milgrim experiment, because there’s got to be some kind of result to those actions.