About teacher Gary McDonald telling some of his students he felt like lining them up against a wall and shooting them (Thursday article, “Student says teacher threatened shooting”): It’s a figure of speech, for crying out loud. Adolescents are natural anarchist savages. It’s the nature of the beast. Civilizing them is the most difficult and frustrating job the species must challenge and we foist entirely too much of it on our school teachers. So maybe he lost his cool. I haven’t heard he ever posed real evidence of a threat.
So a young student was bored. So what? Also the nature of the beast. We all got bored with the classics. Tough. That’s what school is – tough. Also necessary for survival. And if this survival training is sometimes the occasion for tears, they are nothing compared to the tears of trying to fend for a decent life with an inadequate education.
As for an investigation consisting of asking the kids what the teacher said: Didn’t they do that in puritan times when they burned the witches implicated by this kind of testimony?
As a guest lecturer, I have faced classrooms of teens who would rather be doing something else. I often thought that someone has to teach these chicks to forage before they fly away or they’re going to starve. Perhaps patience, if preferable, is not the most important skill for those who are to teach them.
Harold R. Pettus
Everett
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