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Students Banned From Bringing Pencils To School
mernilio writes "According to UPI: 'A Massachusetts school district superintendent said a memo banning sixth graders from carrying pencils was written without district approval. North Brookfield School District interim Superintendent Gordon Noseworthy said Wendy Scott, one of two sixth-grade teachers at North Brookfield Elementary School, did not get approval from administrators before sending the memo to all sixth-grade parents, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported Thursday. The memo said students would no longer be allowed to bring writing implements to school. It said pencils would be provided for students in class and any students caught with pencils or pens after Nov. 15 would face disciplinary action for having materials 'to build weapons.'"
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Sure, then the district disciplines this teacher for excessive nuttery and everyone goes back to their day to day lives. Several weeks later, some kid stabs another kid with a pencil on the way to school and the victim ends up with a piece of graphite permanently lodged under his skin. Now you have someone with a PERMANENT DISFIGUREMENT because this teacher's sage warning wasn't heeded. That kid becomes a poster child for our schools' failure to keep our children safe, and before you know it we have the TSA moving in and strip-searching the kids to look for pencils before they can enter the school building. Meanwhile, the disciplined teacher goes on to a successful career as a security consultant working with the Department of Homeland Security to help prevent future attacks using graphite-based WMDs (Writing implements of Minor Disturbance). After that, it's only a matter of time before the Department of Education gets absorbed into the DHS.
All of this could have been avoided if we had just taken this warning seriously and immediately banned all sharp writing implements from schools. All pencils and pens should be replaced with nice blunt magic markers. For math classes or other times when frequent erasing is needed, they can use an Etch-a-Sketch (tm). This seems like a minor sacrifice to ensure the safety of our children.
So much so that they'd rather take some dudgeon mongering website's word for what happened than to google the original sources and find out this is a non-story. Well, I don't mind being wet blanket, so I did it for you.
If you must know, a couple of sixth grade teachers got fed up with students playing with toy pens, then losing them and disrupting the class looking for them. So they decided to ban student owned writing instruments altogether, but rather than come right out and tell parents that their kids are badly behaved, they used a pen modified by one of the students to shoot spitballs as an excuse for the ban. Since using a writing instrument as a "weapon" conjures images of students stabbing each other in the eye with a pencil, that naturally garnered a lot more attention than the teachers expected. The acting superintendent stepped in, reversed the policy and wrote a memo explaining everything and suggesting everybody calm down.
But of course the story of a couple of beleaguered teachers being too timid to tell parents they'd raised a mob of brats isn't as much fun for people who like to complain about the nanny state.
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Erm, well, according to the fount of all knowledge, Japan has a murder rate of 0.44 per 100,000, less than one tenth the rate in the US.
Still, never let facts get in the way of good old ideology, what?
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What I'm curious about though, is why the teacher felt this memo was necessary in the first place; TFA doesn't mention this.
Isn't it obvious, they're worried about weapons. If they bring in pencils they have graphite. All they need to do is purify uranium and they can use this to moderate an atomic pile. Next thing they will have weapons-grade plutonium.
At my high school during deer and duck seasons in the fall, there were enough rifles and shotguns in the student parking lot to start a small war. There was also an ethic that said using anything but your fists in a fight was the ultimate cowardly act. Sadly, neither of those is true today. Now, get off my lawn.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
That's nothing.
At 8.5 months gestation I took a deep breath and self-delivered.
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