Students and writing

Gttim of Notes from Atlanta links to a story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about a student who had a diary she'd brought to school with her confiscated by a teacher, who subequently read the diary. In there was a fictional story in which a teen dreams of killing a teacher. The girl ended up being expelled from school.

It reminded me of an experience I had in my 12th grade Creative Writing class. I posted about this also in notes over on gttim's site, but thought it was worth posting here as well.

We were given an assignment to write a story using the line "suddenly, everything was peaceful." Most of the students wrote a bit of fluff about being out on a picnic and bunnies hopping buy and "suddenly...." (I kid you not!) Apparently they'd thought "peaceful" was the key word in the required phrase. I, however, focused on the "suddenly" aspect.

My story was about a guy, fighting in a war, who had come to the end of his rope and decided to let the enemy kill him rather than face going on any longer. After a rather graphic description of the bullet tearing through his body, he dies, and it was there that I used the requisite line. After the readings were done, my teacher looked at me for a bit, and then sent me to the school shrink.

This was in 1982. At the time, it was humiliating to have a teacher send you to the counselor, because it meant they thought you were either a REAL trouble maker, or they were VERY worried about you. I managed to get through a single hour-long session and apparently convinced the woman I was fine - just imaginative - and that was the end of it.

Looking back, I have to say it's a good thing I went to school when I did. I'd HATE to think what a teacher would make of such a story today. Oh, and for anyone wondering - I've never been in a war or had anyone close to me have to go fight. I've only touched maybe 3 guns in my life and am deathly afraid of them. The story was just the first thing that came to mind where the peacefullness would truly be sudden. It certainly wasn't the warning sign of a psycho in the making....

The case in the Atlanta paper makes me really angry, though. The girl maybe wasn't very wise to have brought her diary to school, and obviously she shouldn't have been reading it in class rather than doing whatever the teacher wanted. If I were a teacher, under those circumstances, I might well have taken the diary away, also. From there, though, I have some serious problems with the teacher's actions.

The appropriate thing to have done would have been to either return the diary to the student at the end of the class period, or, if the teacher felt it was enough of a potential distraction that it wouldn't be a good idea to give it back to the student right away, she could have told the girl she was taking the diary to the Principal's office, where the student could pick it up after school.

Rather than do either of these reasonable things, however, the teacher takes the diary home and proceeds to read it. It was during the reading that the teacher found the story in question, and after she communicated the contents of the diary to the school officials, the girl was suspended and told she would have a meeting during which it would be determined if she would be expelled or not.

The inital determination, made on October 22nd, was that the girl would be expelled. Shortly after the decision was made, the student wrote an article that was published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about her experience and her intention to continue writing, if perhaps a bit more carefully. Since then, the story has hit the news, and the school has decided to rescind the expulsion while they study the situation further.

Hopefully, the school will come to its senses and allow the student to return. The teacher was, in my opinion, seriously out of line to take the student's journal home and read it, and the school overreacted in it's response. Unfortuantely, that kind of overreaction is becoming almost commonplace in this new age of zero tolerance, and undoubtedly, it will only lead to students stiffeling their own creativity in the hopes that they won't stand out enough to be considered a threat.