sweep away your expectations

[erika]

So, when people talk about arming teachers, I always remember Bucky.

Bucky was my high school Advanced Placement chemistry teacher.

(Advanced Placement is a type of class where the student is expected to pay for and take a test at the end of the year that's written and scored by an independent agency, which universities in the United States accept as proof that you have a college level understanding of the beginning level[s] of whatever subject it is. I hope that's comprehensible. It's very similar to International Baccalaureate and also kiiiinda similar to A-levels in Britain, if you squint. I know unis in England were willing to accept me based on the results of my AP tests & grades.)

So, Bucky. Bucky was also quite clearly (in retrospect) either free-falling through mood states and back again, or possibly stable but in a mixed episode for an entire school year, starting sometime in late September and continuing, so I'm told (I dropped the class in February), until the end of that school year in May.

She spent most of the class period (the ones where she bothered to show up) talking about how she was learning how to sky dive, or her relationship problems (in love with a married man! in love with a different guy! broken up with tragically! reunited! spending all of her weekends at their house and not bothering to grade anything!). She often cried.

I had 3 friends who took the same class with me, panda, Claudia——and Alena, of course, to a complete lack of shock and surprise of everyone in our high school who probably thought I was surgically attached to her.

The high school we went to had trimesters instead of semesters. Not really important in the case of an Advanced Placement class which is full-year, except that the year is divided up into three [grading periods]/[opportunities to drop the class] instead of two.

panda dropped the class at the end of the first trimester along with anyone with any degree of common sense. I think we started out with 36 people taking the class total and ended up with something like 12 after the first opportunity to leave came & went. I stayed because Alena was staying and Claudia let me copy her homework. (Seriously, that's about my only reasoning there.)

We were graded on a curve, because the highest scoring person in the class (usually Claudia, as far as I recall) could not get above 50% on her tests due to the fact that they had been written in some magical time when she was actually teaching students chemistry, and Bucky just gave them to us on a schedule whether she'd covered any of the material or not. I believe the second trimester I had a 35% and that earned me an A-.

Uh. To be fair here, I usually was the one who engaged her and encouraged her in her rambles because otherwise she'd try to teach and that was even more painful and incomprehensible.

I don't remember any of the lab sessions. I feel like I've either blocked them out because of sheer terror, OR because all the labs had written instructions and basically required a bunch of honors students to be able to read and follow directions and did not require actual teaching effort on Bucky's part (no demonstrations, of course), they were boring in comparison.

I dropped the class before the third trimester because it was such a farce. Her teaching and rambling, according to reliable sources, did not improve.

So, let's recap. Out of four people, all of whom basically were ONLY taking AP classes by the end of our high school careers, getting good grades, and taking the end of year tests where we received scores high enough to guarantee college credit... myself and panda dropped the class, and the other two, who were extremely motivated beyond anyone else I knew in high school, basically taught themselves AP Chemistry from the textbook.
Claudia, who loves science and went into it as a career and is now getting her Ph.D. in a chemistry/biology field did manage to take the test at the end of the year to get college credit; Alena wisely decided not to and took chemistry in college, during which she told me that finding that she barely understood the basic concepts of 'advanced' chemistry was NOT surprising.

I believe that Claudia, who, again, is now getting her Ph.D. in the related field may actually be the ONLY STUDENT that year who took the test at the end of the year that the class was actually designed for.

In summation:

If you want to arm teachers because of people who are 'dangerously out of control with mental illness' (paraphrasing, not a direct quote from anywhere), you have to account for situations where the teachers themselves are the ones who are "dangerously" out of control and the ADMINISTRATION KNEW AND DID NOTHING ABOUT IT FOR WHATEVER REASON I HAVE NO IDEA.

I want to make the point that neither panda nor I think Bucky would've INTENTIONALLY shot anyone had she in fact been armed with a gun. It just probably would've happened anyway, because she did so many other very inappropriate and quite possibly dangerous things.

(this is expanded from a comment on a discussion from a few weeks ago on thefourthvine's journal)

Comments

[0jack]

This is a great point. I had a teacher who was quite insane. He was huge. 6'8" and 300#, all muscle. He wore dark glasses even indoors. If you did something he didn't like, he would pick you up by the ears. He stuffed students into trash cans—head down—as matter of course. Daily. He put a boy through a window, one of the ones with the metal mesh in it. He was assigned to teach gifted students, as this was the board dumping grounds for shit teachers (we had three weirdos and two molesters in the time I was there). The board and the school knew.

He had a brain tumor, as it turned out, that caused him to go absolutely, violently insane. He never snapped. He just devolved into abusiveness. And they let him.

If he'd had a gun, I have zero doubt he would have used it—on himself, at best.

[erika]

Voldemort had a similar experience with a teacher at the ELEMENTARY SCHOOL we both attended. Jeez. It's like reality gets thrown out the window when we start talking about security theatre.

[dolorosa_12]

This is a really, really good point. My mother told me years ago that her maths teacher was clearly going through some kind of breakdown during the final year of her high school studies (in Australia). I also had not one, but two history teachers during the course of high school who certainly had pretty serious mental health issues - the first was an excellent and inspiring teacher, but had to take leave due to her illness, and the second treated her students horribly.

I'm not saying that mental illness=violence (that's a terrible lie that is far too widespread in society), but that putting guns into the equation is a really bad idea.

Of course, I'm from Australia, and nobody even considers such things. We had one mass shooting (at a major tourist site, of about 30 people) in the mid-'90s, and the then prime minister (a conservative) tightened up the gun laws to such an extent that basically only farmers, police and the military were able to have guns. Guess what - no more mass shootings. At the time when the laws were being changed, things were very tense, and that prime minister had to go around wearing a bullet-proof vest, but pretty much everyone these days applauds him for what he did (even people like me, who hated every other political decision he made).

[erika]

That's what I've heard from Australians who have commented on the situation before and after the shooting in the '90s.

I really wish the USA culture would accept a solution like that here.

[shanaqui]

Yah. I had a chemistry teacher who I knew was being treated by my mother (not her fault; he came up to her at a parent's evening and started talking about his medication, and I was not a stupid kid). He knew I knew. Most of the time this was okay. Sometimes it was not and he would explode, suspecting me of telling everyone, suspecting everyone of being against him.

I would not have liked to see him with a gun.

My school did actually have guns in it. We had a range out back, because we had a cadet force (I was in it). Mum recently told me that once one of her colleagues was talking to her about a patient. This patient was a teenage boy, and he kept talking about how he was going to get a gun from school and kill everyone. He didn't take it seriously at all, and thought it was just delusions. Mum paused and asked what school he went to, and the guy answered that he went to the same school as me.

Cue a lot of panic. They had to figure out how to deal with the confidentiality issue, the police were involved, etc. The kid got kicked out of the CCF, and the guns never went unguarded after that. So it could have been me. The kid was a bit older than me, may even have been one of the guys who taught me to shoot.

It gives me chills to think about.

[erika]

Wow. I read this comment when you posted it and it STILL gives me chills to re-read it and try to imagine what to say in response. Holy shit.