Shooting Fish in a Barrel by Grumpy Old Teacher

Originally posted at: https://grumpyoldteacher.com/2019/03/22/shooting-fish-in-a-barrel/?fbclid=IwAR1-wIrB-kLmTaUDkPgh45nHWSWNXhGeLC5YPHg5Hk-_r4HDGvk7dLIsfNY

This post must come with a language warning. But the image is really funny.

Active-Shooter Training at Your Local Public School

From Indiana and the no-one-can-make-this-up file, we get the story of ALICE training where the trainers asked teachers to cower under a table for the purpose of shooting them with plastic pellets.

Hmm, GOT wonders if he could try that with his next Geometry lesson when the students don’t want to bother. “Okay, kids, let me show you how you need to use the Pythagorean Theorem to work out the area of a hexagon. If you don’t want to bother, I’ll shoot plastic pellets at you.”

Fight back: that was the lesson for teachers.

GOT wonders what would have happened to the teacher who did. That hypothetical teacher probably would have been tasered and put into handcuffs.

Listen to that fish. If teachers would only fight back, the AR-15s, bump stocks, multiple magazines, and body armor would be no match for them. Killers would cry, throw down their weapons, and run away.

At least, that’s what the trainers say.

Sigh, there will have to be training. There will always be no end to “professional development,” especially that which is led by people who have no clue.

You know what? You know who I want to come and train my colleagues and me?

Teachers. Teachers from Marjory Stoneman-Douglas, teachers from Sandy Hook, and teachers from Columbine High School who actually went through it.

They are the ones who can tell me what they did on that day of apocalypse, when irrational hatred and murder arrived on their campus. They can tell me what to do because they have been in the situation and have had a chance to reflect on what saved lives and what did not.

As for abusive law enforcement, with no training–nay, no understanding of trauma and its destructive effects–they should not be trainers.

Aren’t they the ones telling us teachers need to carry guns because we cannot rely upon them?!

Postscript: GOT does not indict all or most law enforcement officers who do a difficult job everyday.

But just as GOT is not an expert in law enforcement, they are not experts in education and schools. GOT will not tell them how to do their jobs and asks respectfully that they do not assume they know what our jobs should be.

Update: A link to a news story that gives added context to the story.