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"An eighth-grade language arts teacher from Maryland has been placed on administrative leave after school officials learned he allegedly authored two books containing questionable content under a pseudonym.
Local network WBOC News reports that the investigation concerns two books published by McLaw under the nom de plume “Dr. K.S. Voltaer,” and one is about a fictional, futuristic school shooting that goes down in history as being the largest ever in the United States.
http://rt.com/usa/182964-teacher-leave-shooting-book/"
This is lunacy. School administrators are terrified there will be another Columbine or Sandy Hook and are overreacting, or are they. What could they do to prevent one. Nothing, nil, zero. No need to ask yourself 'why', say thank you to the traitorous NRA , the propaganda arm of the small arms manufacturing industry, for blocking any form of gun control. They have successfully infected the country with The American Disease™ almost unfettered access to weapons of war that kill with brutal efficiency. Sadly there appears to be no cure.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: The preceding paragraph was not up to our standards. The comments to this story are spot on. You expect better than this and we let you down. There are so many comments referring to this paragraph, we cannot just delete it, hence the strike-through. More to follow.]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Saturday August 30 2014, @01:25PM
Agreed completely. The way the summary was written just begs for a gun control flame war and almost guarantees that there will be little discussion about the actual topic, which really has absolutely nothing to do with the editorializing at all.
Shame on both the submitter and editor, that was incredibly lame. This is a first amendment issue, not second amendment.
OK, now on to the actual topic -- considering that Nobots had cannibalism, necrophilia, and billions dead, and Mars, Ho! has hookers, drug abuse, and thousands dead, I guess I'll never have a job teaching school. Not that I'd want to (I'm retired).
Odd how the neither the submitter nor the school doesn't seem to care care about freedom of speech.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday August 30 2014, @05:28PM
Another issue is that this is yet another story about school officials being stupidly overbearing. Yes, they should be rebuked and their bad decisions and rules rolled back. They should probably be fired, but a demotion is likely the most they'll suffer.
But it's not big news. School officials are not the brightest people. They like to simplify their world no matter what that does to others, and are likely to go for extreme blanket bans with no nuance or flex. They'd probably love to have a computer do a search of everything for the word "gun", and give them a list. If that list includes a third of the books in the library and half the students, so be it. They'd get busy going through the list, without considering if the whole thing is really good idea. Huckleberry Finn is a regular on banned book lists, for the "n" word. They need constant oversight.
Also, schools are all too attractive to the sort of person who enjoys abusing power to make others' lives harder, and they're petty enough to take this out on children. They'd buy a dog to bully if they couldn't worm their way into a school district.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 30 2014, @06:38PM
This. The story here isn't about guns but about the people in charge of schools. I worked in a school for a few years: the bright teachers left after a couple of years, the average joes stuck around, and the dumbest of the PE/wood shop/special ed crowd became administrators. There were no administrators at our school with academic backgrounds, and nearby schools who did have more academic backgrounds got the ones who were the bottom of the barrel. It's a low-prestige job that doesn't attract the best and brightest.
That's the paradox with schools: we demand that they make our kids smarter, but we don't treat the teachers and administrators in a way that would attract smart people to the job. It's not just pay; pay is only a symptom. It's a fundamental disdain for education that I haven't seen in Europe or Japan, and it makes teaching (and administration) an undesirable job that attracts undesirables who do stupid things like blanket-banning materials that mention guns.