From Minnesota's KARE Channel 11 news comes this little gem:
David Gibbons, 14, was changing classes in his Crosby, Minn. high school when he was attacked by another student playing a game called “sack tapping.” David’s mother, Christy Gibbons, said it wasn’t until hours later that they realized something was wrong. "One o'clock in the morning he woke me up and told me he was in excruciating pain," she said.
David was taken to St. Joseph's Hospital in Brainerd, Minn. where surgeons removed his right testicle.
And David is not the only student who has suffered the consequences of the “sack tapping” game.
"It's just gotten way out of control," said Dr. Scott Wheeler, a urologist in Brainerd, Minn. who says he performs three to four surgeries a year on boys with ruptured testicles and other complications as a result of “sack tapping.”
The Associated Press reports on a NJ case:A 17-year-old high school student from Haddon Township admitted in family court Thursday that he defecated in a classmate's soda during an auto-shop class.
Prosecutors dropped an aggravated assault charge in exchange for the boy's guilty plea to a charge of tampering with a food product.
Authorities say the victim sipped the soda, then spit it out as his classmates laughed on March 29.
A judge ordered the boy to serve probation, serve 200 hours of community service, write a letter to the victim to apologize -- and to write a 1,000-word report on why it's unhealthy to ingest fecal matter. (This assumes the student in question is able to write coherently and to correctly use such big words as "ingest" and "fecal." -- M.W.)
From WorldNet Daily comes this:
Oneida Middle School officials say their district-wide police in the Schenectady Public School District bans any bandanas or other apparel – including beads – that can be associated with street gangs.
The result? The suspension of 13-year-old middle schooler Raymond Hosier, who chose to wear the rosary as a symbol of his faith and in honor of a deceased brother and uncle.
And, finally, from Andrew Breitbart's biggovernment.com comes this piece de resistence from reporter Bob McCarty:
There’s nothing wrong with the fact Debra Blessman kept secret from her students the name of the film she would require them to watch and analyze during finals week at Francis Howell High School. Today, however, the teacher might be wishing she had not kept her superiors in the St. Charles, Mo., school district in the dark about it. She planned to base final exams on the Michael Moore film, "Sicko".
Apparently, however, Blessman did not expect any of her students to raise objections about the film. But one did.
On the morning of May 11, soon after learning about the film’s selection as the basis for the final exam in Blessman’s class, 18-year-old senior Celeste Finkenbine went straight to one of the school’s principals to raise her objections. Why? Because, based on her experiences with Blessman this semester and during a class three years earlier, Finkenbine didn’t think she would get very far pleading her case with the teacher she describes as a liberal.
Unlike the vast majority of her classmates, Finkenbine is a politically-active conservative who spends many Saturday afternoons attending anti-socialism rallies. When she’s not in school or holding a sign on a street corner, you’re likely to find her working at a local nursing home in preparation for what she hopes will be a career as a geriatric physician.When I contacted Dr. Renee Shuster, superintendent of the Francis Howell School District, she admitted the movie is not part of any district curriculum and that the teacher did not follow the process for having the film approved in advance. She also said that Finkenbine had been offered an alternative assignment that involves reading and analyzing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 7,000-word essay, “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
It’s somewhat ironic that Finkenbine’s alternative assignment relates to Dr. King, because it was during a recent class discussion that King’s name came up and, according to Finkenbine, her teacher laid her liberal cards out on the table.
Finkenbine said that, after she compared her participation in Tea Party rallies with the civil disobedience in which Dr. King participated, Blessman responded to her by saying, “Well, we all know you’re a ‘teabagger.’”
Afterward, Finkenbine recalled, the teacher started laughing and everyone in the class started laughing about Blessman’s use of the derogatory term, prompting the student to think, “Wow! Did she really just say that?” (FYI, a "teabagger" refers to a person who engages in a form of oral sex too X-rated to describe on Wordly World. -- M.W.)
Having heard this account of life in Blessman’s classroom, I contacted Dr. Shuster again.
In addition to wanting to find out how district officials would deal with the teacher for using a film that was not approved in advance, I wanted to know how they would address Finkenbine’s allegation that the teacher called her a “teabagger” in front of the class.
Schuster responded by e-mail, saying, “We would address this through the teacher evaluation process which hopefully leads to improvement but can lead to termination.”
Unfortunately, it appears all of the other students in Blessman’s class ended up having to watch and analyze “Sicko”.
Soooo. There you have it. Physical injury, potential physical injury, religious persecution, and political persecution topped off with a pejorative. Somewhere in all of this students are supposed to be receiving an education, the quality of which is indeterminate at this time.
Soldier on, those of you who teach your own. Your kids may never get to Harvard, but odds are they'll make it to high school graduation with all their body parts and worldviews intact.
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