The Golden Rules Days
School administrators have lost their minds. Their ‘zero tolerance’ rules defy logic and common sense.
First you have 16-year-old Florida student who is facing a criminal trial over using common household products on a remote section of the school grounds to see what would happen. What happened was school administrators lost their collective minds, and people are asking: “How could an otherwise model student be expelled and charged with a felony over an experiment that didn’t hurt anyone?”
What she did was hazardous, because it involved toilet bowl cleaner which is usually hydrochloric acid. It can cause chemical burns. When you drop in a wad of aluminum foil a reaction takes place which produces aluminum chloride salt and hydrogen gas. The reaction is exothermic and generates heat which causes the gas to expand. If you use a small plastic bottle for the experiment and cap it after dropping in the foil, the pressure of the expanding gas may cause a rupture, like a tire blowing out. The remaining acid may react with the humidity in the air and produce white fumes that look like smoke. It isn’t anywhere as impressive as what happens when you drop a Mentos into a two-liter container of Diet Coke.
An educator would have required the student to write a research paper explaining what happened during the reaction she experimented with, and explaining the dangers of the acid and the hydrogen gas. She would be required to use actual books, not the Internet for her research.
This was a teaching moment and she learned how stupid some adults really are.
Then you have the case of a Chicago teacher: “Doug Bartlett, a veteran teacher with an upstanding record of 17 years, has filed a lawsuit against the school district of Chicago for suspending him without pay after giving a lesson on gardening tools to his second grade students.”
Mr Bartlett apparently had ‘weaponized’ pliers and wrenches in the locked tool box, that he used to demonstrate things to the class. The kids had no access to the tools, and didn’t even get to touch them, but their mere presence was enough for the administrators to suspend him without pay.
Update: Mr Bartlett was giving a mandated class on “garden-variety” not “gardening” tools, and one of the tools he selected was a pocket knife.
3 comments
In the case of the teacher, one of the “tools” was a pocket knife. That was what he was suspended for, not the gardening tools. The story you linked to was misleading in that regard, it made it seem like he was suspended for showing kids gardening trowels and such, but a quick Google turned up the pocket knife detail. Apparently a parent complained that teacher had a pocket knife when one of her other kids had been expelled for having a pocket knife, and at that point, policy kicked in.
Given the current climate regarding knives in schools, Mr. Bartlett displayed poor judgement and the short unpaid suspension probably was the closest thing to a slap on the wrist allowed by the law regarding weapons in schools. On the other hand, the 16 year old displayed poor judgement too, but has the excuse of being 16. I performed somewhat similar experiments when I was her age, but was at least smart enough to do them in our back yard or driveway, where all I risked was the possibility of burning down the neighborhood :).
My late father used to say that if he had been born in a later generation, he would never have survived as a schoolteacher. As it was, in his own time, he won awards. I believe the intervening change in the nature of school administrations points to a dim future for our nation’s youth. YMMV.
I’m going to assume that the confusion about the teacher was caused by the use of the expression “garden variety tools” in the complaint his attorney filed. That makes his case even stronger. If the curriculum mandates that he teach about common tools and their uses, he would have to talk about pocket knives, because they are one of the most ubiquitous tools in the world. There was a time when students were almost required to have a ‘pen knife’ to sharpen pencils and make quills.
The fact that the tools were kept in a locked tool box on a high shelf meant they were not accessible to students.
I don’t see how you can suspend a teacher for fulfilling the requirements of the curriculum, Badtux, but that will be left up to the court.
Yeah, Steve, it was a different world. When I was in school it was assumed that every boy had a pocket knife. No one ever used one when it came to a fight – that was something that only happened in cities.