Twitter Syllogism: The Horror of Our Current Human Condition

         
         
                    21st Century Logic Concerning the Florida Murder Rampage


Thesis:   "The Adults need to pay attention to what kids say and watch for unstable behavior."

Ant-Thesis: "And then do what when they see that behavior?  That’s what’s frustrating." (these came from Twitter)

Synthesis: "Exactly"


We are punched in the spiritual solar plexus, yet again.

More young lives are ended.  Many more young lives are permanently damaged.



There is nothing more heart-breaking than looking into the eyes of young people who have been so psychologically lambasted by the deeds of a peer and one wonders just how resilient they might be.

Can these kids work back from this, given how toxic our schools and our society has become.

Knowing that a grounded individual has the capacities to withstand an existential beating is some comfort, but how many of today's young people have those capacities?

• Are they challenged enough?
• Are they centered with faith?
• Are they supported with a loving set of parents, or are they societal talking points and engineering projects meant to justify pet policies.  

Everyone wants a simple solution to a societal problem - ban all guns, lock up lunatics, more laws, more state-funding, Zero tolerance, lock-downs and fire drills. 

Yet we live in age where every human being can be brought to court for anything, let alone venturing an opinion that a youngster might be a threat to others.

Today's high school student uses a computer, but fewer students are good readers and writers: "While more words were recorded, with more precision, by laptop typists, more ended up being less: regardless of whether a quiz on the material immediately followed the lecture or took place after a week, the pen-and-paper students performed better. The act of typing effectively turns the note-taker into a transcription zombie, while the imperfect recordings of the pencil-pusher reflect and excite a process of integration, creating more textured and effective modes of recall."

In fact, Silicon Valley elites send their own children to anti-technology schools, where traditional pen and paper education frees young people to be challenged. 

Though many states, like Illinois refuse,  to mandate guidance counsellor's most schools are captive to CYA guidance mandates shielding children from challenges

• 11 percent of children aged 4-17 have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lives.
• ADD, or attention deficit disorder, is a type of ADHD. Depending on symptoms, three types of ADHD have been identified: Predominantly Inattentive Type ADHD is also sometimes called attention deficit disorder (ADD). ... Hyperactivity and impulsivity are mild in this type.
• Boys are three times more likely to be diagnosed as ADD/ADHD than girls
• Guidance Councellors madate strategies like 'seating arrangemenst in classrooms, or more evidence based interventions (EBIs) and tailor-making assignmenst and tests to suit the individual student -splitting and fragmenting assignments, or eliminating them altogether. 

With all of these mandated policies, why are school shootings so monstrously common?

The only sane answer to this dilemma is to hire more grief counsellors, because until we shed our experimental notions about people and play pretend at every turn, there will be more such horrors.

We do what we want all of the time and then ring our hands.   We ban books, dumb down lessons and teach to the tests.  Moby Dick is taught via a graphic novel (comic book) in Evanston.  Why not just watch the movie version?

Kids get excused from physical education for any reason.  

Kids quit sports: "Three out of four American families with school-aged children have at least one playing an organized sport — a total of about 45 million kids. By age 15, as many as 80 percent of these youngsters have quit, according to the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine.May 4, 2014"

To do what exactly?

Young people want to be challenged.

Young people want to believe.

Young people want to be loved, protected and challenged to be what human beings should be. 

Do our schools work for that?  This sick kid in Florida chose his school for his slaughter.  He knew school, schedule, policy and outcomes. Think about that. 

Kids want to succeed. Old teaching taught kids how to fail, do it over and achieve.  Kids can read Shakespeare, Milton, Melville and Conrad, but are given happy-meal units of instruction in English classes, like this :

 Times have changed. In sixth-grade teacher Jennifer DeFeo’s social studies class at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Jefferson City, Missouri, the textbook is a graphic novel, the centerpiece of the Zombie-Based Learning program, in which students learn geography by tracking the undead after a zombie apocalypse. She has used graphic novels in literacy classes to build vocabulary via context clues, which can be hard for some readers using prose books.

Old school teaching worked very well - at one time.