Reminds me of the time I set fire to my High School. Um, yeah. Okay, I didn't really set fire to the school. I just set a piece of paper on fire, and tried to throw it out the window and let it burn itself out. You see, I went to Cody High in Detroit and there were bars on the windows. So the fire was contained between the metal bars and the glass window. 10 seconds and the paper would have burned itself out. 5 seconds into that, Mr. Taylor, the Dean of students catches us. I say us, because there were 4 other guys in my study hall crew. I was the only white guy.
So we went to the Deans office to explain what happened. Two of my friends tell me to just blame the other kid that we hated. It was like the same type of scenario with the present day bully girls. The two guys start explaining how its the third guy and they look to me for confirmation. I break down and say it was me, and the third guy was innocent. Mr. Taylor (also a black guy) DID NOT believe me. He thought I was being coerced by the 2 black guys, and he would not allow me to take the fall for them. So we all faced explusion because he could not get a straight answer out of any of us, and he wouldn't believe me.
I wrote a long note to Mr. Bradford, the pricipal, on what I had done. Fully confessing to everything and was ready to accept my punishment.
I've got to admit it was a supremely stupid move on my part three months before graduation to do what I did. But I felt cleansed after writing the apology, and awaited my punishment. I never heard another word on it.
I brought that story up, to basically say, teachers and principals have a very tough job and its very easy for us to pick apart their bad judgements. People make mistakes. The sad part about people in the Education profession, we tend to hear more about their mistakes then their acheivements.
Yes, the principal and the counselor were ultimately wrong at Talawanda Middle School, but if you were in that situation, what would you do?
I'd probably do the same thing they did.
Now that the girl is expelled, they should put her in another school and get on with life. Fighting to get her back in Talawanda will do nothing but open up a loop hole for other expelled students to crawl back through..
My mother nearly had fits when I told her I was going to homeschool the children. I think she envisioned some kind of religious breakdown that involved me wearing calico and throwing out my make-up. She works in a public school. After some of the events at her school the last few years, she calls me at least once a week to say "I'm SO glad you're not sending the boys to school".
She can't decide which bothers her more, crazily incompetent administrators or seriously deranged students. The combination of the two has changed her school from a pleasent elementary school into a war-zone where no one is safe almost overnight. She's retiring early. She only got through this year (which was necessary for her pension) because my father goes to work with her sometimes. Think about that. She's a grown woman and my father has to accompany her to work sometimes. Is that the kind of environment you'd want children in?
I got bullied when I was a 14-year-old kid in high school in Chicago in 1948. I was in this woodworking shop class when these incidents came to a head.
One day I was walking down the aisle. In one hand, I had a wood item that I had been machining. In the other hand was a claw hammer.
There was this big, mean guy who I guess was some sort of minor leader of the school wiseguys. He blocked me in the aisle, grinning down at me. I shifted to one side, he shifted to block me. Back and forth. Then I lost my temper and went upside his head with the hammer. Luckily for him, and me too, that it was the flat side and not the claw side that he took in his face.
I don't know what happened next. Someone said he slugged me and knocked me out. But when I got off the floor, there he was, sitting with blood coming out of where I got him. They tell me it took a few stitches to close it.
For the next few days, this and that kind of trouble. My mom had to come to the high school and both of us got lectured by the principle. The other fellow's wiseguy buddies threatened what they would do to me the first time they caught me alone in one of the dark recesses of some of the badly-lighted hallways. But nothing ever happened, and the wiseguys left me alone ever after.
(Two of the wiseguys were brothers who joined the Chicago Police Department in later years. Both were convicted and jailed in that city's Summerdale police burglary scandal in the late 1950s.)
And one thing I noticed. The rest of my years at that high school, walking down the hallways nobody got closer to me than about 36 inches. I thought about that for a while, then got out a tape measure and checked it out. Thirty-six inches is about the length of an extended male arm with a claw hammer at one end.
I've been around the world, loved a lot, lived a lot, studied a lot, laughed a lot. But one thing I never, ever forget was the lessons learned on that most instructive day, the day of the hammer:
1) Don't try to fuck over anyone. You never know when or for what provocation they might turn around and hurt you.
2) Don't let anyone fuck over you.
3) If you can't avoid it, and they corner you, make sure the force you use is proportional to the threat, and sufficient to guarantee you will never have to apply it again.
In the 56 years since that day, I've come to regard the rest of the world and the rest of the human race as an extension the mean streets and sometimes meaner schools of the Chicago I knew as a kid.
I had an experience similar to Arnold's at my high school. After I did my "deed", I was never touched again.
And I too believe in the principles that Arnold posits.
I must say, as someone who was also frequently the subject of bullying--and I got it more than most kids, because we moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I was constantly in new schools and constantly 'the new kid' who everyone felt free to pick on because I had no place in the pecking order, and a prime target for any bully.
When it comes to the bully, relating to him, appealing to his sense of humanity, his sense of decency, his sense of guilt, his sense of common values, etc. are all worthless, for those things only work with a civilized person. Bullies are not civilized people. They are cowards who crave power above all.
I eventually learend that there is absolutely no way you can mollify a bully short of either beating the shit out of him or, at minimum, scaring the shit out of him.
On the latter point, it reminds me of something that Kissinger once advised Richard Nixon to do when dealing with the Soviets: "Make them think you're crazy and just might do anything."
Anyway, these are lessons that I, too, have carried throughout my life. At one point, when I was in my teens and early 20s and highly idealistic, I forgot those lessons, but as I aged I remembered them again.
"Don't fight back"
Tell me about it. I'm Israeli:)
I know a doctor. Neighbor, friend of the family. Has six kids. Always smiles. Never visibly angry. One of the nicest guys you could possibly meet. My father says he's a good doctor, and my father HATES doctors.
Turns out he's also a colonel in the reserves. I had no idea. He was one of the commanders at Jenin. So he came back from a bloody battle and finds that he's suspected by most of the world of war crimes. Boy, was he ever MAD. I mean, REALLY PISSED OFF.
In a sane and civilized society, we could and would still deal with bullies the way Arnold Harris did.
And conversely, if we could and would deal with bullies the way Arnold Harris did, we would still be living in a sane and civilized society.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves living in a society where the "enlightened" approach is to coddle or makes excuses for the bullies, and to excoriate or punish those who would defend themselves from bullies.
Unfortunately, we are now living in The Crazy Years.
And in my unyielding opinion, any school officials responsible for framing or enforcing such a policy are subhuman slime.
They are even lower than the bullies they excuse or defend.
And zero tolerance policies of any sort are an abomination. I'll give you one guess how I think any school officials who are hand-in-glove with zero tolerance ought to be dealt with.
Paul
it's good to know that you can look at some one, determine that he is a bully and deserving of being hit on the head with a claw hammer. Thats the kind of moral judgement that makes you worthy of a state supreme court at least. Personally I don't think that anything is as black and white as all that. Bullies are people too, they are generally bullied or have serious problems of their own.
I'm not saying that is an excuse, but it is an explanation. There is never an excuse for bullying somone and Arnold is dead right to do what he did. But that was a one on one situation and under no circumstances can it be correctly related to some kind of policy decision.
Ru, Murders, Rapists and Thieves are people too and often have serious problems. So what? It is their actions that matter, not their background. Thinking like that only encourages more bullying and drives the bullied to extreme measures.
I'm glad you agree that Arnold was right to do what he did. I'm not trying to generalize from his situation to a "policy decision," as if I were a policy wonk, or a talking head on TV.
I think part of the dysfunction in our society today stems from trying to deal with every human situation in a dead, flat, rationalistic, generalizing fashion, as if one-on-one human situations were nothing more than grist for the mill of making "policy decisions." And as if one-size-fits-all "policy decisions" could be applied mechanically and without a sense of judgment to individual human situations.
In short, I think the problem with "zero tolerance" policies is precisely that they are black and white, they do not allow for the intervention of human judgment in individual situations— and thus they inevitably lead, as in the situation in the news story, to those in authority punishing the innocent while letting bullies off the hook.
I do think that in a sane and functional society, yes, there would be more of the kind of self-defense Arnold practiced than there is in our society today. And a lot less bullying.
And I do think that a society which informally allowed people to defend themselves, without penalty, against bullies would be a more sane and functional society than the one we live in today.
But note, I say "informally." Not as a matter of "policy decisions"— informally. One of the sicknesses of our society today is that we try to reduce more and more of life to a matter of "policy decisions," leaving less and less scope for the ordinary, everyday exercise of informal human judgment.
Bullies are people too, they are generally bullied or have serious problems of their own.
Well, if you to want to stick up for the bullies, that's your lookout. Me, I'll save my sympathies for those innocent souls who are victimized and sometimes driven to self-defense— not for the bullies, and not for those subhuman zero-tolerance school officials who punish the innocent while letting the bullies off scot-free.
The only thing that begets more violence than violence is injustice. They think they're protecting themselves against lawsuits and damaging scrutiny as have other schools where bullied kids pushed too far have struck back indiscriminately. All they accomplish is the further deterioration of education in this country.
Homeschooling is the only alternative when schools protect themselves before protecting their students.
Reminds me of the time I set fire to my High School. Um, yeah. Okay, I didn't really set fire to the school. I just set a piece of paper on fire, and tried to throw it out the window and let it burn itself out. You see, I went to Cody High in Detroit and there were bars on the windows. So the fire was contained between the metal bars and the glass window. 10 seconds and the paper would have burned itself out. 5 seconds into that, Mr. Taylor, the Dean of students catches us. I say us, because there were 4 other guys in my study hall crew. I was the only white guy.
So we went to the Deans office to explain what happened. Two of my friends tell me to just blame the other kid that we hated. It was like the same type of scenario with the present day bully girls. The two guys start explaining how its the third guy and they look to me for confirmation. I break down and say it was me, and the third guy was innocent. Mr. Taylor (also a black guy) DID NOT believe me. He thought I was being coerced by the 2 black guys, and he would not allow me to take the fall for them. So we all faced explusion because he could not get a straight answer out of any of us, and he wouldn't believe me.
I wrote a long note to Mr. Bradford, the pricipal, on what I had done. Fully confessing to everything and was ready to accept my punishment.
I've got to admit it was a supremely stupid move on my part three months before graduation to do what I did. But I felt cleansed after writing the apology, and awaited my punishment. I never heard another word on it.
I brought that story up, to basically say, teachers and principals have a very tough job and its very easy for us to pick apart their bad judgements. People make mistakes. The sad part about people in the Education profession, we tend to hear more about their mistakes then their acheivements.
Yes, the principal and the counselor were ultimately wrong at Talawanda Middle School, but if you were in that situation, what would you do?
I'd probably do the same thing they did.
Now that the girl is expelled, they should put her in another school and get on with life. Fighting to get her back in Talawanda will do nothing but open up a loop hole for other expelled students to crawl back through..
I'm so disgusted by this, I don't even know where to begin expressing it.
I hope none of these knob-gobbling morons have kids of their own, because they clearly have no business being around children.
My mother nearly had fits when I told her I was going to homeschool the children. I think she envisioned some kind of religious breakdown that involved me wearing calico and throwing out my make-up. She works in a public school. After some of the events at her school the last few years, she calls me at least once a week to say "I'm SO glad you're not sending the boys to school".
She can't decide which bothers her more, crazily incompetent administrators or seriously deranged students. The combination of the two has changed her school from a pleasent elementary school into a war-zone where no one is safe almost overnight. She's retiring early. She only got through this year (which was necessary for her pension) because my father goes to work with her sometimes. Think about that. She's a grown woman and my father has to accompany her to work sometimes. Is that the kind of environment you'd want children in?
I got bullied when I was a 14-year-old kid in high school in Chicago in 1948. I was in this woodworking shop class when these incidents came to a head.
One day I was walking down the aisle. In one hand, I had a wood item that I had been machining. In the other hand was a claw hammer.
There was this big, mean guy who I guess was some sort of minor leader of the school wiseguys. He blocked me in the aisle, grinning down at me. I shifted to one side, he shifted to block me. Back and forth. Then I lost my temper and went upside his head with the hammer. Luckily for him, and me too, that it was the flat side and not the claw side that he took in his face.
I don't know what happened next. Someone said he slugged me and knocked me out. But when I got off the floor, there he was, sitting with blood coming out of where I got him. They tell me it took a few stitches to close it.
For the next few days, this and that kind of trouble. My mom had to come to the high school and both of us got lectured by the principle. The other fellow's wiseguy buddies threatened what they would do to me the first time they caught me alone in one of the dark recesses of some of the badly-lighted hallways. But nothing ever happened, and the wiseguys left me alone ever after.
(Two of the wiseguys were brothers who joined the Chicago Police Department in later years. Both were convicted and jailed in that city's Summerdale police burglary scandal in the late 1950s.)
And one thing I noticed. The rest of my years at that high school, walking down the hallways nobody got closer to me than about 36 inches. I thought about that for a while, then got out a tape measure and checked it out. Thirty-six inches is about the length of an extended male arm with a claw hammer at one end.
I've been around the world, loved a lot, lived a lot, studied a lot, laughed a lot. But one thing I never, ever forget was the lessons learned on that most instructive day, the day of the hammer:
1) Don't try to fuck over anyone. You never know when or for what provocation they might turn around and hurt you.
2) Don't let anyone fuck over you.
3) If you can't avoid it, and they corner you, make sure the force you use is proportional to the threat, and sufficient to guarantee you will never have to apply it again.
In the 56 years since that day, I've come to regard the rest of the world and the rest of the human race as an extension the mean streets and sometimes meaner schools of the Chicago I knew as a kid.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I had an experience similar to Arnold's at my high school. After I did my "deed", I was never touched again.
And I too believe in the principles that Arnold posits.
I must say, as someone who was also frequently the subject of bullying--and I got it more than most kids, because we moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I was constantly in new schools and constantly 'the new kid' who everyone felt free to pick on because I had no place in the pecking order, and a prime target for any bully.
When it comes to the bully, relating to him, appealing to his sense of humanity, his sense of decency, his sense of guilt, his sense of common values, etc. are all worthless, for those things only work with a civilized person. Bullies are not civilized people. They are cowards who crave power above all.
I eventually learend that there is absolutely no way you can mollify a bully short of either beating the shit out of him or, at minimum, scaring the shit out of him.
On the latter point, it reminds me of something that Kissinger once advised Richard Nixon to do when dealing with the Soviets: "Make them think you're crazy and just might do anything."
Anyway, these are lessons that I, too, have carried throughout my life. At one point, when I was in my teens and early 20s and highly idealistic, I forgot those lessons, but as I aged I remembered them again.
"Don't fight back"
Tell me about it. I'm Israeli:)
I know a doctor. Neighbor, friend of the family. Has six kids. Always smiles. Never visibly angry. One of the nicest guys you could possibly meet. My father says he's a good doctor, and my father HATES doctors.
Turns out he's also a colonel in the reserves. I had no idea. He was one of the commanders at Jenin. So he came back from a bloody battle and finds that he's suspected by most of the world of war crimes. Boy, was he ever MAD. I mean, REALLY PISSED OFF.
Arnold:
Good for you.
In a sane and civilized society, we could and would still deal with bullies the way Arnold Harris did.
And conversely, if we could and would deal with bullies the way Arnold Harris did, we would still be living in a sane and civilized society.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves living in a society where the "enlightened" approach is to coddle or makes excuses for the bullies, and to excoriate or punish those who would defend themselves from bullies.
Unfortunately, we are now living in The Crazy Years.
And in my unyielding opinion, any school officials responsible for framing or enforcing such a policy are subhuman slime.
They are even lower than the bullies they excuse or defend.
And zero tolerance policies of any sort are an abomination. I'll give you one guess how I think any school officials who are hand-in-glove with zero tolerance ought to be dealt with.
Paul
it's good to know that you can look at some one, determine that he is a bully and deserving of being hit on the head with a claw hammer. Thats the kind of moral judgement that makes you worthy of a state supreme court at least. Personally I don't think that anything is as black and white as all that. Bullies are people too, they are generally bullied or have serious problems of their own.
I'm not saying that is an excuse, but it is an explanation. There is never an excuse for bullying somone and Arnold is dead right to do what he did. But that was a one on one situation and under no circumstances can it be correctly related to some kind of policy decision.
Ru, Murders, Rapists and Thieves are people too and often have serious problems. So what? It is their actions that matter, not their background. Thinking like that only encourages more bullying and drives the bullied to extreme measures.
Ru:
I'm glad you agree that Arnold was right to do what he did. I'm not trying to generalize from his situation to a "policy decision," as if I were a policy wonk, or a talking head on TV.
I think part of the dysfunction in our society today stems from trying to deal with every human situation in a dead, flat, rationalistic, generalizing fashion, as if one-on-one human situations were nothing more than grist for the mill of making "policy decisions." And as if one-size-fits-all "policy decisions" could be applied mechanically and without a sense of judgment to individual human situations.
In short, I think the problem with "zero tolerance" policies is precisely that they are black and white, they do not allow for the intervention of human judgment in individual situations— and thus they inevitably lead, as in the situation in the news story, to those in authority punishing the innocent while letting bullies off the hook.
I do think that in a sane and functional society, yes, there would be more of the kind of self-defense Arnold practiced than there is in our society today. And a lot less bullying.
And I do think that a society which informally allowed people to defend themselves, without penalty, against bullies would be a more sane and functional society than the one we live in today.
But note, I say "informally." Not as a matter of "policy decisions"— informally. One of the sicknesses of our society today is that we try to reduce more and more of life to a matter of "policy decisions," leaving less and less scope for the ordinary, everyday exercise of informal human judgment.
Bullies are people too, they are generally bullied or have serious problems of their own.
Well, if you to want to stick up for the bullies, that's your lookout. Me, I'll save my sympathies for those innocent souls who are victimized and sometimes driven to self-defense— not for the bullies, and not for those subhuman zero-tolerance school officials who punish the innocent while letting the bullies off scot-free.
The only thing that begets more violence than violence is injustice. They think they're protecting themselves against lawsuits and damaging scrutiny as have other schools where bullied kids pushed too far have struck back indiscriminately. All they accomplish is the further deterioration of education in this country.
Homeschooling is the only alternative when schools protect themselves before protecting their students.