save your sanity for later.

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)