Pow

Author's Note: One of the things on the master rubric that I needed to check of  was to analyze a two nonfiction articles on the same topic and be able to understand what both perspectives are. I chose to do a piece that on electronic news paper article that I found about a first grade boy that got suspended for pointing his finger like a gun and saying 'pow' out at recess. 

On December 21st, 2012 a student attending first grade at Silver Spring Elementary School, was suspended for pointing his finger, as if it was a gun, while at recess and saying ‘pow’. The attorney for the family, Robin Ficker, is fighting hard against the school to get this matter completely removed from the boy’s school record. They will make an appeal in court on Wednesday for more time to continue to discuss this issue. I found this a rather interesting topic because this incident did not seem like an usual act for a grade school boy. Having a brother in third grade  who has fantasies involving guns, this was nothing alarming to me. However, there have been points in my life I have seen him get so involved in this fantasy that he feels he is actually living it. Therefore, I  could empathize both perspectives, the school and the family’s attorney, on this issue, so I decided to do a little research and look at two different perspectives.

A post by Alexandra Petri on the Washington Post suggested that students, more specifically the boy, should not be punished for these imaginary actions, that the parents and/or teachers should be. Her position being that students/children will only play or imagine violent things that they have heard or seen before. I agree with her perspective more because, you can’t hold a six year old accountable for imagining things at school that he does at home --  where he is not corrected. I feel that if anyone should be responsible for the inappropriate action, it should be the parent. Now, with that being said, I don’t feel that for the rest of his life his parents should be responsible, however, until this child can fully understand the impact of his actions and how much they can affect him in the long run, the parents should be taking the responsibility.

Another post I found that corresponds with this opinion was written by a man named Stogie. In his blog post he suggested that the schools is in the wrong in this scenario. That they completely over reacted to what this little boys intentions really were. That the school was trying to say that guns are ‘evil and terrible and that a child should never ever pretend to shoot a gun or should he be arrested as a potential terrorist.’ Now, although his exact wording is a little extreme, he is exactly right. It is not only the parents fault because they are allowing their child to be exposed to a violent environment, however it is also the schools responsibility because they told him that guns were wrong. When you harshly enforce certain rules of the school, the first thing that students are going to try to do is push the envelope and see what they can get away with and how long they can get away with it for. Let’s take swearing for example, the swearing at our school is not necessarily out – of – control but it is definitely bad. One of the reasons that may be is, because teachers so often call people out and make a big deal when people do swear. If teachers and adults with authority would not make such a big deal out of it , after a while, students would see that it is no longer bothering the teachers, and maybe the amount of swearing would go down.  I agree with what Stogie’s overall idea is, that the school was too harsh on him especially for being a first grader.

After some more research on the topic, I came to the conclusion that this little boy did nothing wrong in the end. I find it hard though to blame the parents for this because ever since the first couple of cartoons came out there has been violence on television; from Bugs Bunny to Transformers. Therefore, it is very difficult for parents to raise their children in an environment without any guns, especially a boy. That would mean no armed force games, no guns, no star wars, etc. In the end I feel as though the school was totally out of line with this first grade boy and was definitely too harsh on him.

Sources:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gXfk5CAimIkc-7JW3eiP__5Qu6pHMI_eIKQ1wsnzHDI/edit