School Offers Counseling to Kids "Troubled" by Gun-Shaped Pastry
How considerate of them.
By now you've probably heard about the seven-year-old Maryland boy who was suspended for chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun. What you might not have heard about is the school's conscientious effort to ensure that no kids were traumatized by a glimpse at the weaponized Pop-Tart.
From a letter sent home to parents:
During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one was harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom….
If your children express that they are troubled by today's incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week.
To be fair, the phrasing leaves open the possibility that the students would be "troubled" not by the imaginary gun but by the suspension, and by the ensuing realization that they're powerless pawns in a vast, incomprehensible game run by madmen.
[Via Lowering the Bar.]
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I must say it's fotunate nothing like this ever happened while my kids were in school.
Fortunate for the school....because Mr. and Mrs. Almanian wer enot shy about calling bullshit and raising hell when the school went onfull stupid. Which was rare. Fortunately. For them.
Jesus - I finally watched "Idiocracy" this weekend, and we REALLY ARE headed there in a big fucking hurry.
Electrolytes - it's what plants crave.
You want us to put water on the plants? Like outta the toilet?
Oh, yeah, baby - why don't you come back tomorrow...?
Yeah, well, I really don't think we have time for a hand job, Joe.
What if the little kids were traumatized by their view of a brain dead bureaucracy.
school officials are worried that the biggest "trauma" will be kids discovering that their educational overlords are power-mad assholes who will suck the very life from childhood given half the chance. Kids are wondering if a pastry leads to suspension, what will spitballs or running in hallways lead to.
I knew this 40 years ago. It's just WORSE now!
I'd be in jail today for the innocent shit we did in elementary school in the 60's! Which would give me a lot of street cred, but cramp my recess time...
I'd be in jail today for innocent shit we did in elementary school in the 80s. The stupid seems to be rapidly accelerating - at some point in the late 90s the stupid curve went exponential.
So glad you asked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7wYECUvLE0
Kids are wondering if a pastry leads to suspension, what will spitballs or running in hallways lead to.
This. Way to *really* traumatize kids, assholes
John Dillinger carved a bar of soap into a gun and escaped from jail!
This was obviously a copycat crime.
This story makes my sandy vagina hurt.
these are the educators
in charge of your children for most of a day.
filling their minds.
now that's scary .
I wonder what the kids told their parents about this ?
maybe they see thru the bs, as their not stupid
"Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me."
And then the baby made a gun sign and said 'pewpew' so I called the Coast Guard.
Adults have become pussies and seem to assume that everyone else is a pussy as well.
I'm sure those kids are much more traumatized by the fact that they have to live in Brooklyn Park.
Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted.... the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school - even homework completion.
Even the counseling -- or lack thereof -- for pastry-gun incidents.
Doom.
I'm actually little traumatized by a school offering counseling to kids "troubled" by a gun-shaped pastry. My brain sort of seized up and cried in my skull. Who makes these jello beings?! How did they ever become grown and job-worthy?! This is a form of hyper-political sensitivity that has to border on insanity. And yet the story remains focused on a playful kid senselessly disciplined and bizarre counselling emanating from morontown.
Who IS Myrna Phillips? I need a human interest story to collect my disturbed thoughts.
Ich bin ein Pop Tart.
Ein Kinder, Ein Chokolade, Ein furor.
Ein furor F?hrer.
There. FIF the obvious pun.
I hope there are a few kids clever enough to go talk to the counselor about how disturbed they are that such a big deal was made of a total non-incident.
And clever enough to record the conversation.
While no physical threats were made and no one was harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom....
The passive voice is found to be highly traumatic here.
It had to be done. There were no possible other actions that could have been taken.
When we grew up and went to school, there were certain teachers who would hurt the children in any way they could by pouring their derision on everything they did and exposing every weakness however carefully hidden by the kids.
Isn't that one important function of teachers: to teach us not to trust authority by default.
Isn't that a Pink Floyd song?
In the town it was well know when they went home at night, their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives.
Schools don't care about plagiarism. Only important things that are relevant to their education.
"You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!"
We need none of this shit they dare call education!
We don't need no thought control, either.
Our school counselor is available
the sequester, it does nothing.
Now, to be fair, the school changed their tone once this hit the media. They said the kid wasn't suspended for shaping the pastry into a gun. He was suspended for saying "bang bang". Now doesn't that make much more sense...
...er, that's just as dumb as suspending him for shaping the pastry into a gun. Never mind.
The kid was obviously just making the sound of a car backfiring.
For making an imaginary gun, he should have been punished by an imaginary suspension.
The kid was obviously just making the sound of a car backfiring.
Or repeating what he learned in sex ed!
"The kid was obviously just making the sound of a car backfiring."
Even worse. He was glorifying carbon emissions.
Bang, Bang.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxUZUnRwH7s
That song proves exactly why the kid had to be suspended.
Will the counselling consist of explaining to them how they need not fear a gun shaped pop tart? Sadly, before this incident, they innately understood this fact.
It seems that the counselling industry has just discovered a self-perpetual honeypot.
I swear to fucking dog, I'm going to have to go the "back in my day" route here. Riding the bus in elementary school, if we saw a deer, all the boys would start making rifle gestures and shooting sounds en masse. Nobody gave a fucking shit. WTF is wrong with people nowadays?
Oh, right, it's Maryland.
When I was in elementary school (mid-80s), we had free play a couple of times a week during PE. While the girls went off and did whatever it is they did, the boys would generally run to where the trees were outside the school, grab sticks, and start playing war, either having swordfights with the sticks or pretending they were guns pretending to shoot each other. I'd never have made it through school in this environment. Yeesh.
When I was in first grade and we were having swordfights with the sticks, I accidentally got jabbed in the eye. Had to go to the eye doctor, but was fine. Next day I was back swordfighting again. I'm guessing if that happened nowadays, free play would be cancelled for the rest of the year and the kid that accidentally jabbed me in the eye would be expelled.
Just don't get jabbed in the eye swordfighting in the shower.
My parents made my brother and I swords out of cardboard and small wooden dowels so we could play swordfight in the back yard. My grandparents were moonbat lefty pacifists who forbid anything like that, so when we would visit them my brother and I would substitute the cardboard swords with baseball bats and play while they weren't watching....
....that is, up until the day my "baseball-bat" sword accidentally slid down the length of his and cracked him across the skull, leading to a trip to the emergency room.
I'd never have made it through school in this environment. Yeesh.
Half of our generation would not have made it through. Only a quarter of our parents would have made it, and none of our grandparents. We would have been expelled pretty quickly under these rules. And yet, we were not expelled and nothing else happened.
Hell my grandparents used to carry pocket knives around the school house and no one thought twice about it. They used to bring their hunting rifles to school. They had to leave them outside, but that was a practical issue regarding storage space. No one was worried about anyone getting shot.
not that I'd ever want a child of mine in any crazy bullshit school like that, but if it came down to it, I'd send the kid in full camo with a supersoaker full of horse-piss into the 'counselors' office and have him hosed down entirely.
Lockdown by GILMORE.
I think it would be even better if he rode the horse into the office and let it do its thing.
And leave dookie sticks in Mr. Mackey's coffee.
WTF is wrong with people nowadays?
Degreed Educators.
But we had those when I was in elementary school. Our pussy Principal was a PhD, but he had no effect on kids being kids and making shooting gestures at deer.
I'm guessing generational. Your principal was old enough to have understood the notion of kids being kids and got the no harm, no foul theory of recess.
Where "harm" means nothing short of blood or broken bones.
My principle attended some of our bathroom scuffle matches. We were allowed to grapple with no problems from the administration. I could not live as a kid in this current environment. This shit is truly horrifying, and the only way to reverse it is raze every school of education in the country as a warning to the control freak proglodytes what we will not tolerate.
raze every school of education in the country
Hmm, better nuke them from space, just to be sure.
I should clarify - our pussy Principal was a PhD in education. He was one of "those". But he never interfered with kids being, you know, normal.
That has to be one of the worst things to happen to education in a long time.
I remember my high school calculus teacher with a Master's in mathematics and decades of teaching experience telling us she needed to get a teaching certificate to keep her job. Always thought it was because my hometown was on the bleeding edge of progressivism but now I'm not so sure.
Same thing with my biology teacher, her Master's degree and working on her Doctorate wasn't good enough. She left our school system and moved to teach at George Mason University.
First, welcome to the People's Republic of Maryland. We're trying to make California look like Wyoming by making our entire state more like Takoma Park. With any luck we'll have banned shotguns and nasty remarks by 2014, causing the entire Eastern Shore to secede.
When I first read this story in the Washington Post, I was surprised by how not surprised I was, honestly. Teachers, but especially administrators, in this state are the most unabashedly "Progressive" anywhere in the Union. During a conversation at a party I told one teacher that, as a kid, my father told me that I was never allowed to start a fight, but, if a kid started one with me, my father gave me explicit permission to beat the hell out of the kid, so long as it was in self-defense. It was like she was interviewing a serial killer and had just found out he'd been abused as a child.
The Progressive idea that we should treat all violence, competitiveness and aggression, even when it occurs in the context of play or imagination, as some combination of mental illness and moral defect is way more likely to inspire school shootings than just having guns in the house. Violence, competition, and aggression are natural, innate aspects of all humans, and we've devised a thousand different ways to channel those impulses in ways that are both healthy and beneficial to ourselves and others. Typical of the Progressive mindset, they want to ban the release valve to prevent explosions.
The typical progressive mind is terrified of its own inadequacy, both physical and mental, because deep down they know that their mindset doesn't work in reality. The best way to keep those scary things (read: everything) from hurting them is to punish and control through the apparatus of bureaucracy.
Also, see porn bans.
They're absolutely no different the Christian or Muslim fundamentalists.
Except Christian fundamentalists aren't flammable.
Add about 1/2 a gallon of gas and a lit match and retest that hypothesis.
OMG, my dad told me the exact same thing! Too funny. I remember I came home from elementary school and told him a kid had hit me, and I just laughed at him....which kind of intimidated the other kid and he ran away.
I thought my dad was going to burst a blood vessel - "You don't EVER let anyone hit you. If they hit you, you hit them back TWICE as hard!" He was pissed...at me! For not hitting back.
Never forgot that. You do that now, you're suspended, and good luck with the home schooling, mom and dad. Sorry if it puts a crimp in your workday.
Fuck you, school administrations and pussy school boards...
PS We never had any "Sandy Hooks" back then. Just an observation...
My dad's version was "Protect you body, not your pride." Followed with "But kick his ass because I'm responsible for your medical bills and not his!"
Since you live in Maryland (or hail from there), how exactly do the people of your state explain the existence of something as barbaric as a 'fencing' team at Johns Hopkins (sorry about the spelling, Mr. Clemens.)
Yeah, people in the Takoma Park and Garrett Park "nuclear free zones" don't react well when you ask them if they have verified whether the Americium-241 in their smoke detectors was produced in a reactor not involved in any way with the nuclear weapons industry.
Fortunately, my kids are home schooled, but if they were in school, I'd love to coach one of them to go to "trauma counseling" and play it up really big for laughs. My oldest daughter would have been totally down with it.
"And then I saw the crumbly pastry barrel. The raspberry filling was visible. It looked like blood. Oh God, I was so scared!"
If I was a kid, I would go to the guidance counselor for help with the trauma caused by the incident exposing the fact that my safety and developmental wellbeing has been put in the charge of people who's IQ is lower than an orangutan. The utter loss of any shred of faith in humanity at such a low age can be devastating.
The world has gone mucking fad:
http://www.clickondetroit.com/.....index.html
Holy shit, that's even dumber than this one.
Kid wear camo to school here every day.
Hell, they asked one kid I know to wear his U.S. Naval Sea Cadet Corps uniforms (including camo) on several occasions.
That is somewhat dangerous, in some situations.
I almost ran over the local ROTC unit in an unguarded crosswalk a couple years ago. They were wearing that Army digital gray urban camo stuff and, against the background at the time, it worked.
I must not have been the only one. I've seen them lately wearing safety-green reflective loops around their shoulders.
Remember when those LiteBrite boards advertising for Adult Swim shut down the City of Boston for two hours?
1-31-07 never forget
If your children express that they are troubled by today's incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week.
This is a great example of how feminized and Oprahfied this country has become in the last 20 years or so. Never mind that this was a harmless incident to which the school overreacted--they have to go completely over the top in their histrionic emote-fest and try to make kids as emotionally dysfunctional as they are.
Can we just get the Russians to conquer this pozzed-out nation already and put it out of its misery?
I'd rather it be the Swiss or the Kiwis. Kthx.
At the rate we're going, Lichtenstein will be able to conquer us.
Elementary school bureaucrats are not the entire country, dude.
The problem is that these bureaucrats are brainwashing a whole generation of kids into spineless jellyfish.
College professors aren't the entire country either, but their neo-Marxist politics now dominate the national discourse.
most of the kids probably had no clue to what had happened until the school sent home these notices and got the parents to ask their kids questions. Now the kids are probably thinking a gun is something to be scared of. Typical form of indoctrination much like most kids aren't racist until their parents start say bad thing about other people.
According to the linked article it was his brandishing of the pastry that got him suspended, not its mere shape.
While this is still stupid on the part of the school, I would appreciate it if Reason would give up its relatively new habit of misrepresenting the stories it links to. That's Kos-level discourse, fellas.
Would he have been suspended for "brandishing" an unnibbled pastry?
Re: Tulpa,
Then he deserved it, since there's no way to know if the thing was going to fire by accident!
Like running with scissors. Same thing.
The first rule of breakfast is you don't point a Pop Tart at anything you don't intend to destroy.
I thought the kid claimed it was a mountain. If he said bang, bang then it was maybe Mt. Vesuvius.
Sticks and stones, and gun-shaped pastries...
This^ is priceless! Keep those Tuplaisms comin', guy!
I quite literally can't stop laughing! I mean, this has got to be a put-on, right? RIGHT?
The guy at the next cubical just came over to see what was wrong with me. Oh, lord, still giggling...
The brandishing story only came out after it hit national news. The father says he was originally told it merely the shape.
What's sad is that the authorities thought this would actually make their actions look more rational.
As opposed to provoking jokes along the lines of "OK, scumbag, put down the pastry and come out with your hands up!"
The father isn't any more of an objective observer than the school authorities are.
Yeah! It's very possible that the kid actually DID do something frightening and dangerous with a Pop-Tart! You think the father would admit to that? Fools!
Let us suppose, for example, that the toaster pastry in question had raspberry filling, and that a classmate suffered from a severe raspberry allergy. And suppose that what actually happened was that the perp bit the pastry into the shape of a dagger and plunged it into the eye of the victim! A completely conceivable scenerio! Won't you smart-aleks feel stupid if this turns out to have been the case?
I'm going to assume that he is a normal, rational guy by default until proven otherwise. The administration has proven otherwise by this absurd Kafkaesque stupidity. So, yeah, father than administrators.
You know, squirrels, you can filter for unmatched tags so they will show up as normal text if you get off your lazy tails long enough to fix that!!
Not that such means the counselor will be willing to hear such sentiments; I would bet the house that he or she will just go "la-la-la!" with extended index fingers inside each ear.
it was his brandishing of the pastry that got him suspended, not its mere shape.
Because, who knows, that thing could have gone off by accident!
Elementary school bureaucrats are not the entire country, dude.
But they somehow seem to be in a position to remake the country in their own image.
The low time preference voter has to be taught to prefer immediate gratification over their long term interest.
Switched to singular at the last moment.
immediate gratification over their his long term interest.
OPERATOR: 911, what is your emergency?
PRINCIPAL: It's awful - there was a gun-related incident at the school.
OPERATOR: Who is the suspect?
PRINCIPAL: Oh, it's horrible - one of our students nibbled off parts of his pastry to look like a gun, and then he pointed it and [sobbing] went, "bang bang."
OPERATOR: Sir, is this a prank call?
PRINCIPAL: How can you be so insensitive? I think I'm going to need counseling for this traumatic incident!
OPERATOR: OK, we're going to send one of our officers, to, ah, get the evidence. Now, be careful not to destroy any more of the evidence, because it's almost our lunch break...
PRINCIPAL: What?
OPERATOR: I mean, because we need to maintain the integrity of the chain of custody and so on.
PRINCIPAL: Please hurry, I feel terrified!
Okay, now I want to go buy a cookie cutter in the shape of a gun and make gun shaped cookies to sell at the next school bake sale. And if I can't find a gun shaped cookie cutter, I can always cut them out on the shape of an "L" or the state of Maryland, which both are shaped like guns. Let's ban Maryland and the letter "L".
Maybe Idaho, Oklahoma, and Florida, just to be safe.
Maybe Idaho, Oklahoma, and Florida, just to be safe.
Well, to be fair, when I was a child we had a wooden puzzle of the US and I believe that I used all three of these States as a gun (imaginary, of course!!!) at one time or another.
To be fair, the phrasing leaves open the possibility that the students would be "troubled" not by the imaginary gun but by the suspension, and by the ensuing realization that they're powerless pawns in a vast, incomprehensible game run by madmen.
Brilliant.
I too am traumatized...Traumatized by the spineless idiots indoctrinating the next generation of Americans. What the hell will these kids be good for when these liberal cowards finish? Good little government workers collecting from the collective?
Any parents whose children are "troubled" by the unwarranted suspension deserve commendation. Any parents whose children are "troubled" by the poptart "gun" should earn a visit from Social Services because they clearly are causing the children extreme psychological harm.
Fear pedaling is nothing new to kids. We used to shelter under our desks drilling for an "A-Bomb" attack. But after school we rode in the backs of pickup trucks, shot BB guns, made sling shots and used them to lethal perfection, hunted ducks, rabbits, dove and whatever was in season with our young school friends. We learned to drive by the age of 12. Most of us kept a .22 or a 12 ga hanging in the rear window of our unlocked pickup all through high school, as did many of the teachers. We played sports and only expected to be rewarded if we won. The win was the reward.
The country is in a bad place today. I think its going to take a bunch of my old slingshot shooting buddies to make it right.
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People who send their children to government-run schools should be barred from voting.