Could someone please tell me, a child of the 90s, what the heck that was supposed to do? If you’re too close to ground zero, you’re gonna get vaporized. If the shockwave blows the building apart, I don’t see huddling under a desk doing any good.
Then again, I’ve never been able to take such things that seriously. There’s a requirement for the Emergency Preparedness merit badge that calls for discussion of emergencies that can include “15. Nuclear power plant emergency.” Now, I’m pretty sure that when I got this merit badge a decade ago it was just “Nuclear emergency” and they didn’t have anything about a power plant. I, along with everyone else I knew who got that merit badge thought the idea somewhat ridiculous. Remember, too young for the Cold War, born after Three Mile Island, and really too young for Chernobyl as well.
I heard this on the news this am and knew there’d be a thread about it.
My own personal suspicion is that the teachers had ‘cleared’ this w/an administrator (my sister, the elementary education teacher, wouldn’t offer kleenex to a snot dripping child w/o permission from the administration, and school trips are no exception. you don’t deviate from the schedule w/o permission, this certainly would have been a deviation).
have difficulty believing that any rational adult thought this would be ok. and to the poster that suggested that if kids had done it they’d be in teh pokey by now, you betcha, and facing adult felony charges, as well, IMHO.
and to the poster whose teacher did this years ago and laughed at the girl who took it seriously and was crying about it - shit, apparently stupid teachers have always been with us.
sadly, apparently the Donner party aren’t part of the curiculum any more.
One of my favorite restaurant gags is to suggest to the host/hostess at a busy restaurant to intersperce among the real call outs for people: “Donner, party of 10…” then some real ones (“Smith, party of 3, Jones, party of 7”) then “Donner, party of 8…” etc. to see if anyone notices.
We’ve told that to a variety of young persons employed as hosts/hostesses and unfortunately have to explain the joke often as not.
For Asterion: Speaking as someone who grew up in the shadow of both NYC (Nuke target #3, after DC, and Cheyenne Mountain), and in the lee of Indian Point, we had both kinds of drills growing up. Duck and Cover, and Emergency Evac.
What you really need to teach kids is the groin punch. I’ve seen youngsters perpetrate this, and it drops a full-grown man instantly. Actually, you don’t need to teach it to them; they seem to know it instinctively. Just teach them when to use it.
I have never liked practical jokes for just these reasons; making someone think something horrible has happened is never funny, in my opinion (see: Shannen Doherty’s miserable show, “I killed your mother - ha ha! Made you look!”)
To me, a child of the 70s, it was probably just a way to give the kids something to do instead of panicing. I know not wanting to panic the masses was a big thing among TPTB in the 30s & 40s, just look at what passed for tornado preparedness at the time. Authorities were adverse to issuing tornado warnings because they felt that it would incite panic, they reasoned that the effect of panicing masses would be worse than the tornado itself.
Pardon a Yankee-libby WAG here? Maybe this was an outgrowth of some kind of old-time fire-and-brimstone emotional whoopass brought on by hate and fear of the modern secular world, and perhaps some elements of a) fantasized military-type training as a response to that world and b) the powerless feeling of a group of teachers who, just briefly, got to experience power?
My stereotype of traditional southern white culture is that reverence for one’s elders, the military, and God inform nearly everydamnthing folks do, and that there is a great temptation to overapply those principles at the expense of others.
I thought that was supposed to be the barrel-equivalent of throwing explosives into a river–the fish all die and float up to the top, whereupon you collect them all easily. No?
(I hereby do not endorse throwing explosives into rivers, or shooting fish in a barrel.)
well, it seems to me that you either hit a fish or miss. If you hit a fish, you’ve (probably) killed it. if you miss, you’ve put a hole in the barrel from which the water will escape and then the fish are left waterless.
Even if you kill the fish with the pressure wave as you suggest, the bullet is probably not actually going to hit them, so you are not technically speaking shooting them.
This has never struck me as a great analogy, since I think actually hitting a fish swimming around in a barrel with a bullet would be pretty tough. “Shooting apples in a barrel” would be better.
I see a few posts above saying it’s just a bunch of teachers involved and asking why nobody checked with an administrator. Isn’t a Vice-Principal an administrator? One such individual was involved, according to the linked report.
When I first heard this story, I was only slightly annoyed because I assumed this was some kind of drill for which the students had been trained, but it was not. In the schools own press release they refer to it no less than five or six times as a prank. They justify themselves by saying that the teacher “made comments about this coming prank on several occasions that week.” So basically, the students should have known better than to be scared. If a gunman ever does decide to show up at that scool, those teachers can look forward to many students who are not willing to fall for the same “prank” again.