How about ten days in jail for writing a horror story when the assignment was to write a horror story? This was post-Columbine, but pre-9/11 and long before Cho.
One of the victims in a Law & Order episode is named after one of my college English instructors. She was flattered when she found out. The lady doesn’t watch that show.
Perhaps no specific threats but this article (if the link doesn’t work, go to the main page and search for Allen Lee, second link “details revealed”) has more detail on the text.
Then he says the essay was all a joke.
Well, while I’m not exactly in favor of arresting people for stuff like this, there are topics you can’t joke about without the risk of getting in big trouble. Bombs on airplanes and school shootings are way up on that list.
If the quote is accurate (that’s a BIG if, considering the reliability of news these days) he did make a comment directly to the teacher implying that she was inspiring a school shooter. I’m not sure that’s a comment you can let lie.
Well, I could agree with that except I think I heard that the context was a fictitious school (stated so in the essay). Do I think he did it to get a rise out of them? Yes; upon hearing the contents, this doesn’t sound like a straight case of creative censorship. I still think it was indirect enough that she could have taken other steps to determine his real intent; having him arrested was over the top as a first response to the issue.
To continue this thinking -
I’d love to see what the teacher and administration would do if some enterprising student took a story from a modern collection of horror fiction (I’m specifying modern for two reasons: Less likely that the teacher will be familiar with the work in question; and in general my impression is that more of the violence is on-screen, so to speak, with more modern horror fiction.) and submitted that as his/her work. And then let the school try to explain that Stephen King, Donald Westlake, or Alan Dean Foster are actually writing threatening works, and need to be arrested.
Zoe, I don’t disagree with your counter examples - teachers and other students do have rights, themselves, and deserve to be protected if there’s a reason to believe that there’s a threat.
I just don’t see this case, or the one with the singing of the common fracture song, shows any objective reason to believe that there’s any risk from the student in question. I also think that arrest shouldn’t be the first step when dealing with someone who is presenting potential mental instability issues. If there’s a clear, obvious threat - I’ve got no problem with starting with arrest. For that matter, a previous criminal or disciplinary history should be considered when making the evaluation of what to do with a student who’s raised flags like this: Forex, if you got something disturbing and vaguely threatening from the would-be arsonist, that should be a slam-dunk, I’ll admit. But in the absence of that kind of record, this response to Lee’s essay/assignment is still over the top.
I know you’re not arguing that it is a reasonable response, Zoe, I’m just using your comments for a bit more of a springboard for my own thoughts.
On preview: Thanks for the link, Cheesesteak. I see your point about topics that should be off-limits in some cases, but I really don’t see those quotes as actually meeting the Shouting-Fire-in-a-crowded-theatre standard. The two clauses that I find most disturbing are first, an alleged description of a dream, and secondly are immediately put into a counter-to-reality category. Given some of my own dreams, however, I have to say that the description is pretty tame.
If you’re going to criminalize, or even have mandatory consequences for dreams, I guess I need to get locked up, for suicidal ideation. Even though I’ve said I have no plans to act on such ideas.
Cormac McCarthy should have been arrested years ago. Or at least maybe the police should take a look in his basement.
I grew up in a “sleepy little town,” and my father was a policeman there while I was growing up. People in small towns tend to have a “takes-a-village” attitude toward raising kids. It’s possible that slapping the cuffs on the kid was intended to “scare the bejeebers out of him”, which is a couple of notches above “give him a good talking-to” but less severe than “haul his ass into court,” all in the interest of “teachin’ him a good lesson.” That’s small-town parlance, and back before there was the Internet or overpprotective parents or 32-death campus killing sprees, it was one of the myriad community parenting strategies available. Unfortunately, this isn’t the 1960s and no community can afford to have Andy Taylor on the payroll, let alone Barney Fife. I think this was just a community policing/parenting tactic gone wrong.
What the fuck is going on in schools today, where that kind of shit is acceptable?
The excerpts from the article that Cheesesteak linked to would freak me the fuck out as a teacher reading it. One of the annoying things we’re dealing with in this age is people acting as if everything up to an actual act of violence is an overreaction. That’s all fine and dandy from the safety of the SDMB, but what if your son or daughter is in the classroom? What if the teacher is your husband or wife? What if it’s your kid writing this kind of stuff? You think a student, given the option to write about anything whatsoever, who chooses to write about the teacher inspiring a school shooting, necrophilia, stabbing people, and dreaming about shooting people, is exercising good sense?
I guess I’m a fuddy duddy. I graduated high school at the end of the 80s. I had three really fun English classes where we were encouraged to free write. I wrote about girls, computers, music… even translated dialogue The Tempest into modern day language. I might have had a “fuck” in there. Even if it was on my mind, I would never write about stabbing people, or having sex with corpses, or dreaming of shooting people. Obviously he didn’t give a shit about what the teacher thought of him, but did it ever occur to him that other people might see this essay? Would his parents be cool learning what their son was writing given the freedom to write on any topic? I went to an inner-city school and taught at one, in communities where violence and drugs were real. People might write about the feelings about losing someone they cared about, even being involved in some shady activities, but necrophilia and shooting up schools was kind of off the charts. Guess it’s a new day now.
Again, I can’t speak for the logic of what the police did, but I fully support the school’s response. I wonder how many parents would be at the school door if their kids came home and told them, “Hey, guess what this kid wrote in class today,” and nothing was done?
This kid is supposed to be one of the smarter ones in the school. Doesn’t seem like he exercised very good judgment at all here.
In the context of the VA Tech shootings having just happened, I agree that this kid was just using poor judgement. How can the teacher not know what he’s like after a whole year? I never saw anyone say that he had a history of this kind of writing. I would have put two and two together and thought that I had a smart-ass on my hands. I would have gone to the parents or the kid and done some investigating. I mean, I don’t find the subject matter to be a good choice, but he didn’t do anything illegal and has rights that allow him to write things that are off-putting to others.
Now that the details are coming out, while the school may still be overreacting, the kid’s essay was almost deliberately provocative.
I’d have given it a flunking grade, called him & his parents in for a talk, and hopefully that would have settled it.
Whew! This sounds much like I’ve hear of his THE ROAD (which I haven’t yet read). Is that still in print?
Btw, though, in spite of the page saying it was inspired by a true Texas crime, I get distinct Gein-vibes.
I don’t know that it is acceptable. I just don’t believe it’s criminal, nor threatening.
I don’t read much modern horror, but the little I have read leaves me thinking that his piece really isn’t that shocking. Compared to any of the Hannibal Lechter books, for example, it’s pretty tame. If this were junior high, that would definitely be too much, I think. But senior in HS? I really don’t think it’s crossing the line.
What that may say about modern culture is somethign else.
We don’t know what the teacher-student interaction has been like over the year, at all. Judging from the student’s writing, I’d say it wasn’t very good.
I’m sure this relationship isn’t the first to go sour between a teacher and a student. But obviously it broke down somewhere. The teacher didn’t feel comfortable confronting the student, and we don’t know the interaction between the parents and the school.
I’d say this was beyond poor judgment. Here’s a kid, doing well in school, with a career aspiration to join the Marines, and he deposits this turd? That in itself is disturbing. In a field like the military, where they’re very concerned about people’s mental stability, this represents a choice of epically stupid proportions. If he was planning to head to college and get a creative writing degree, maybe I’d get it. (Ironically, this means I would probably not get het up over Cho as a high school student. But if all he ever wrote about was creepy murder stuff, then maybe I’d think something was up.
Bottom line, the kid either needs help or his ass kicked. How you could submit a paper like that and not expect a shitstorm defies logic. Which would make him very poor at judging situations, stupid, or unstable. Not the sort of fellow you’d want lugging an M16 around.
Even if he did the assignment as he was asked to? Unless she specified subject matter, she would have no right to flunk him.
No one ever said 17 year olds were brilliant decision-makers. I don’t know what the teacher-student relationship was either, but I would hope she has a feel for who the straight “A” kid in class is. There have been no reports that he’s ever exhibited weird behavior. I think she freaked because of the short span of time between VA Tech and this issue. Had it been another day, she probably would have talked to the kid herself.
For the record: Around where I live, there are violent gang members who are straight A students. One was even validictorian.
I should probably provide a cite.
-fRL-
I’m sorry, but this is how white people always operate after they’ve been “attacked” by minorities. If Cho happened to be Arab or African-American, you’d hear reports of those students being arrested as well. And, if you think otherwise, you’re kidding yourself.
- Honesty
Nah, everyone knows white people don’t get named “Cho”. 
Well, the school shooting aspect right after VA Tech seems almost deliberately provocative, but come on. Violent stories are absolutely embedded in our culture, not only in novels, which are arguably on the decline (in popularity), but in TV and movies, as well. We, as a society, take violence to a high art, and callousness (Silence of the Lambs), gruesomeness (Seven), and vengefulness (Kill Bill) are oft-viewed and well-understood tools used to construct this artistic violence.
If a high school kid writes hyper-violent stories, of course there’s a tiny possibility he’s mentally unstable. But really, it seems much more likely he’s looking up to the Quentin Tarentinos of the story-telling world and trying to enter the fray himself, with stuff that probably seems juvenile by comparison, but hey, ya gotta start somewhere. Sick, twisted themes are not really strange anymore; they’re pretty mainstream nowadays, they’re Hollywood, baby.
(whether or not this is a good thing is a different debate, of course)
I’m just glad Stephen King is out of high school. I would assume his essays were beyond the pale. I’d also assume he got poor grades on his crappy finishes…
On top of old smokey
All covered with sand
I shot my poor teacher
with a red rubber band
I shot her with pleasure
I shot her with pride
I couldn’t have missed her, she’s 40ft wide!
I yanked that out of my head from at least as far back as kindergarten.
Great green gobs of grimy greasy gopher guts
Mutilated monkey meat, dirty little birdies’ feet
Great green gobs of grimy greasy gopher guts
And I forgot my spoon!
So they gave me a ham sandwich with boogers on top
Monkey vomit and camel snot
Parakeet eye balls dipped in doo.
Yummy Yummy Yummy its good for you.
What for dinner? Horse manure
where’d you find it? In the sewer
I’m looking over my dead dog Rover
That I ran over with the mower
One leg is missing, the other is gone
The third leg is scattered all over the lawn
No use explaining, the one remaining
Is lying by the cellar door
I’m looking over my dead dog Rover
That I overlooked before!