Your puny prison cannot hold mighty Thor!
Today I found this. It’s funny how many of the first ammendment cases surrounding religious liberties occur in prison. In Div School I actually got mail from prisoners who had found Jesus and were reading every Bible they could get their hands on. Personally, I’d rather share a cell with someone who had found Odin than found Jesus. I’m really curious about this case involving a vampire. If anyone finds anything else on these cases, please forward them.
Murder
Yesterday was the first day back from Christmas vacation. Our vice-principal of discipline stopped me in the hallway to tell me:
“Hey Mr. L, did you hear one of your kids shot their stepfather over the break?”
I had not, in fact, heard that.
“Yeah, and you know you were the only teacher whose class he hadn’t dropped. That was until I suspended him and he got overcut. . . . Darn, what was his name . . . Tall, skinny kid. Dreadlocks.”
This described about half of my male students. I didn’t like the irreverent tone of this conversation, but I went with the vice-principal and did a Google search for the story.
It turned out the student had shot his step-father in the head while he napped, fled the scene, and then turned himself in to police later that night.
“You see?” said the vice-principal, “Isn’t that deep?”
In some ways, this is not deep at all. Since coming to Atlanta I have taught nearly 600 extremely troubled kids. Guns are plentiful in this city. This was probably not the first murderer I have had in my class and will probably not be the last.
What disturbed me was not the shock of the murder but the ghoulish fascination with it by the faculty. I have been guilty of this behavior myself and to some extent its simply human nature. The death of a friend or family member is a tragedy but a death in the school or work environment is an opportunity for “street cred.”
Still, I would think that teachers should be held to a higher standard. There were rumors that the student had been schitzophrenic and war stories about how many honor-students were either shot or else murderers themselves. The old axiom was dragged out that “it’s always the quiet ones.”
Although I was hardly surprised by this discussion, I was disappointed. As teachers, there should be some effort to interpret the situation. The murder was viewed as a force of nature rather than a preventable human action. I have yet to hear a word of sympathy for the victim or for my teenage former student who has confessed to first degree murder in a very conservative state. By reducing him to unknowable other we don’t have to ask questions about what went wrong.
