Jess once said that she sometimes wonders if I teach in war torn Kosovo as opposed to just a low income area in Philadelphia. As I watch the news more and more, I suddenly realize how wrong of a comparison she made.
When my students have beef with each other, yes they fight. Sometimes they fight unfairly, but the beef is typically mutual. They fight over boys, over rumors, over stuff that happened on the block where they live. At my school they rarely bring in heavy artillary, they're more creative. They wear lots of rings instead of brass knuckles.
http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation_world/16318936.html Never do they stock pile weapons in their homes, make lists, and prepare to come to school to kill several people at once.
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/national/12653486.html
My kids may not listen, they may occasionally make me want to throw myself off the roof of my building, but they are not mass murders. :)
So I feel as though I am not crazy for staying the hell away from the suburban school system. Those middle class suburban kids are freaking scary.
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I'm not sure what it is about suburban public schools that drives kids to homicide. I wonder, though, if maybe the media just gives more coverage to these incidents, because they seem so outlandish. If something violent happens in the city, the media shrugs. If something violent happens in Bucks County...you get the idea.
I'm still not sure I could teach where you do, though. Not to say I'd be much better off in the burbs. I'll just teach at a college. There's no violence there.
Oh wait...
Woah there. There no way the media shrugs at violence in the city's schools. It's probably covered too much, in all honesty. In Philly, the last several "big" incidents -- fires at West Philly, teacher assault at Germantown, general insanity at University City, students beaten outside Masterman -- were on the front and inside pages for days, sometimes weeks. I can assure you that if there was a homicide, Columbine-style or not, at a public school in a major city, the media would be camped there and it would likely make national news.
i'm thinking what jess might be referring to with the term 'violent' are the day to day things we hear about from ali - kids getting jumped in the hallways, etc.
That didn't happen to us out in bucks. It just seems that if something goes wrong in suburbia - it REALLY goes wrong. They don't have their little squabbles or standoffs like they do in the city (which might ultimately keep the peace in preventing these larger situations.)
Overall - to the suburban, city schools come off rougher than what we experienced - also, in the catholic school system.
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