School Stages Attempted Murder on Teacher as Lesson
A bunch of kids walked into what looked like a grisly attempted murder scene when they arrived at school last week. There was blood all over, and their teacher’s head had been bandaged.
The kids – some as young as five – freaked. And the school says no biggie.
After all – it was just a test. The kids were being set up for an in-school CSI-type lesson. But considering it took a week for the school to actually tell the kids that part – instead telling them they needed to help them solve the crime – parents are spitting mad.
Their kids thought their safe place had been broken into and their teacher abused for four whole days. The parent of one autistic child in particular says it would have been nice if they’d been warned – they still can’t convince their child that this was just a school lesson. Not all of the children were autistic, but some were as young as five – at an age when they’re too young to watch CSI on TV, nevermind have it in their classroom.
Do you think the school went too far?
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My daughter took a “mystery solving” class in an after school program and they did something similar, but they staged an escape/robbery of a bird from a cage in a make believe living room in one of the classrooms. The kids were totally into it and never felt unsafe. Seems to me like these teachers went overboard.
Um, that sounds outright crazy, actually.
This might fly in a high school or even a middle school, but primary seems a bit young to me. That’s just too much to spring on most small children. When I was in kindergarten, they staged a ‘bear break in’, and set out clues like a torn backpack, a few paw prints painted on the floor and tables, little pieces of hair, etc. Fun, educational, and not scary!
Great, straight from Blue’s Clues to CSI. Perfect.
That is completely insane. I’d be very upset if my kids were subjected to this!
I agree that this could be very traumatic for young children. I wonder if they ran this idea by the school board what the outcome was. I imagine that there will be some heated discussions in future meetings! There is so much violence in the world today, we do not need to bring this into an elementary school as a lesson IMO.
Heck, I didn’t even let my daughter watch cartoons with violence in them! I would be one of the irate parents in the meetings. Poor choice of lessons for these children.
Ah, yes. In kindergarten, we did a search for a gingerbread man with funny little clues and what not. Fun, good amount of mystery. This is waaay too much for elementary schoolers. In higher grades, this could almost be fun.
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I know many adults who would be traumatized by this scenario, nevermind children. My initial response to this is disgust, not only do the children have the violation of their ‘safe place’ but they have learned the lesson of deception. In the event they are confronted with an actual emergency, they now have cynicism and doubt that the emergency is authentic. It is a sad state of the education system that this is acceptable, what was the lesson that they wished these students to learn?
Somebody would be getting BlTCH slapped over this if my kid was there.
@fionna — you say that these children have “learned the lesson of deception,” but is that not a valuable thing to learn? maybe now when they discover that santa claus is really just mom and dad spoiling them, they won’t be so traumatized. yes, i agree that this school went overboard, violence is not something to be taken lightly, but i don’t think that kids learning skepticism and cynicism is necessarily a negative as you seem to imply. we need to be urging our children to ask questions, not sheltering them from the (sad to say it, but its true) violent, gritty, and disillusioned reality in which our society exists.