Boy arrested for writing 'disturbing' story explains the story (with full text of story)

Trust me, tiger, as a writing teacher, grammar and spelling are very important.

But these kinds of assignments encourage young writers to just let spill what's in their heads. You'd be frightened if you ever read through my journals, because I frequently do this as an exercise.

However, I'm a grammar/spelling nazi, so my errors are rare. ;)

Here's an example of what's going on in my brain right now:

this night was nuts. sitting on a hard bench in the junior high gymnasium watching children perform The Fiddler on the Roof what is that? their makeup horrible, but the story sweet and heartbreaking but so much taken out, so much not understood even by the performers and if I had it in me I would stand up and say to that skinny, high-heeled @!$%# who I hate just who in the hell do you think you are? What is wrong with you do you not know the example you are setting for your daughter? Do you not know you are setting up an unrealistic ideal for your son? But I won't. Am I a coward? Am I saving my daughter from the embarrassment of having a mother who says what she is thinking regardless of appropriateness is that even a word and can't I just make up words when I want to? What's wrong with making up words? It wasn't caught by firefox spellchecker, although firefox and spellchecker were both caught, probably because I didn't capitalize them and that's just @!$%#ing ridiculous.

Granted, i'm drunk.

tigerblade:

Wichita Vortex Sutra

:^{)>

tigerblade -

I agree completely. Unfortunately with some students in my county, the reason they are not proficient in English grammar and composition is that the topics simply do not receive due attention in some public schools. After asking one classroom of juniors to identify the subject of a sentence and receiving blank stares in return, it's evident that their teachers have failed to equip them properly with the fundementals of our language.

One school thankfully still understands the importance of this; its students proved to be above average in this area. Not surprisingly, copies of Warriner's were scattered about the classroom where I taught.

The writing is a form of stream of consciousness that the Modernists of the early 20th Century used, though more in the context of their characters than their own lives (Read James Joyce and Virginia Woolf). While the students "essay" was disturbing, I feel his arrest is more so. Are we going to have the police knocking on our doors for our words and thoughts? Granted it was a bit insensitive to write an essay as that so soon after VT, but the reaction is knee-jerk.

Sure? Why not?

Write a poem for your creative writing class that say "Empty your cash/register and give me all your/money or else."

Publish it handing it to a a bank teller.

Jumpin' Jehosophat.

The last line of the essay means "Somebody like you is going to get murdered someday." Say that or words to that effect to the state trooper next time you get pulled over for speeding and see what happens.

Write a "story" about your ex-spouse with that ending and send it to your local magazine and see what happens.

Where's my invite, twin?
Sob!

I'm sending out invites tomorrow when I make my official announcement. I just wanted to be sure this article and thread was posted to the group.

You're more than welcome to join now, if you can't wait!

Glinda:

Here ya go. I'll either open it to comments later or direct comments to Part 2.

Common Sense and Newsvine: Why Can They Not Live Together in Harmony? Part 1

When asked what jobs you wanted I listed "Galactic Overlord"

Why oh why didn't I come up with that when I was given those stupid questionnaires? It would have made life more interesting.

So much for my Allen Ginsberg theory.

Celestina:

If you were h.s. teacher and Marine recruit in your class said:

Common Sense and Newsvine

WTF would you do about it?

Is it just "angst"? Was Cho "angsty," too?

My response. (Sorry, it got too lengthy to be a comment!)

Apparently I'm an Emo Kid which depresses me a bit.
Although it does explain this new bob hairstyle of mine.

Apparently, I am a Sociopath, so that's all right then. "I would make a very cunning serial killer". I always suspected as much...except for how I didn't go through the prerequisite "hurting small animals" stage. Oh, well. I am yet again proving that I will never fulfill my potential. My teachers would feel so vindicated.

I am an INTP, too. Which is supposed to be one of the rarest types...but after all the responses over on my column, and on Claus's, and here...I am starting to wonder if there are more of us out there than I had thought, or if we all just wind up here.

Heh. I'm a braggart. No surprise there.

You scored higher than 99% on Rationality

You scored higher than 99% on Extroversion

You scored higher than 99% on Brutality

You scored higher than 99% on Arrogance

Yikes. Maybe I shouldn't have admitted this.

he was totally within the assignment and has done NOTHING WRONG....

Where did that come from?

THE ASSIGNMENT CONTAINED A MENACING THREAT TO THE TEACHER

Menacing threats are "wrong." As in illegal.

If the kid thought "do a free write" was a license to commit a crime because it was "within the assignment," then he's not only too stupid to be in the Marines, he's too stupid to be in high school. Let's start him over at about Grade 2.

Hey those are really big letters, good for you.

Except

as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first [Cary-Grove High School] shooting.

doesn't threaten anybody. I get from that "I think you are bad enough to drive somebody psycho." In this article which gives a little more background, Lee says:

"At the very last sentence, I said that this teacher's method of teaching could lead to a school shooting," Lee, a senior at Cary-Grove High School, said Wednesday

In context, that makes perfect sense:

Most new/young teachers are laid back, and cooperative with students as feedback and input into the curriculum and atmosphere. My current English teacher is a control freak intent on setting a gap between herself and her students like a 63 year old white male fortune 500 company CEO, and a illegal immigrant. If CG was a private catholic school, I could understand, but wtf is her problem. And baking brownies and rice crispies does not make up for it, way to try and justify yourself as a good teacher while underhandidly looking for complements on your cooking. No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting.

Lee says he wrote it as a joke. I guess it depends what kind of kid you were in high school. I was the rebellious type who didn't attend class but got A's - and I thought most of my teachers were incompetent idiots. I would have thought it was very amusing for somebody (else) to mess with one them and so would alot of kids. It would take just a little extra insensitivity and bravura to actually do it. I would have thought a high school teacher should be more clued-in to that possibility.

If it turns out he has a @!$%#load of guns, ammo and mercenary mags at home, and he has a long history of freaking people out, I'll have to eat my words. Otherwise, he's a bright, normal A-student whose stupid joke backfired.

Right.

My authority is the plain language of the text.

Your authority is the self-serving claim of a semi-literate high school student.

It clearly started out that way. But if you read the text carefully, you can see he ocsillates between fantasy and exposition, between metaphor and empirical observation. He finally winds up expressing genuine grievance and contempt based on a real event before launching into his menacing threat. There is

NO FREAKING WAY

that the authorities could have responded to those words other than to have treated them as a potential authentic threat. If it turns out to be fantasy, hey, drop the charges and scare the @!$%# out of the kid. No biggie. But if they had treated it as fantasy or hyperbole or joke or whatever other naive and dangerous interpretation you people seem to think they should have applied, and it turned out to be an authentic threat . . . . ? What then? Read the title of my essay again:

Common Sense and Newsvine: Why Can They Not Live Together in Harmony?

And you don't need to have have been found to have a garage full of guns to be guilty of making menacing threats.

On top of everything else, he's wrong anyway. Young teachers are far more likely to be blackboard Nazis

So they should've arrested him for a felony? A misdemeanor charge is probably about right. When some angry drunk gets to shoutin' "I kill ya, ya bastard" at closing time, some kind of disorderly conduct charge is the more typical response. That's because most cops and prosecutors most of the time have enough common sense to charge events like that appropriately.

It most certainly does. I don't know if you have been to the other threads, but somewhere I asked what would happen if you said "Don't be surprised if somebody shoots you some day" to a state trooper. Or if the cops heard a loan shark telling the guy who owes money "It'd be a shame if something happened to your family." It's actually a pretty-well settled area of criminal law. Read up on it.

Finally, regarding your "drones in high school" comment in 5.2, you know, you sound eerily like Dylan and Klebold before Columbine.

Maybe because they didn't want to ruin the kid's life with a possible felony but they wanted to impress on him most emphatically that what he did was unacceptably anti-social conduct?

This is exactly what I mean by "common sense." Taking all your arguments together, you think it's got to be either that the kid committed felony terroristic threats for which he deserves two to five years in prison or he was just "doing an assignment" and we should all just laugh it off. Neither one of those outcomes would be particularly sensible or humane.

When the drunk shouts "I'll @!$%#in' kill ya, ya bastard," at closing time, it is likewise unlikely that the threat will actually be carried out. The act is nevertheless criminal based on a couple of different theories.

One is the false alarm thing. The utterance of false threats requires a waste of social resources reaching the determination that the threat is not real, resources that might otherwise go towards real threats;

Two. There is the intimidation factor inherent in the very ambiguity that you and your argumentative allies don't seem to have considered. The very fact of wondering whether a threat is real imposes a a nasty burden of worry on the object of the threat. That's why "I was joking" is not a defense in airport security and that's why most anti-stalking laws and orders of protection cover conduct that might otherwise seem inoffensive.

Kid doesn't have a criminal record yet. He got arrested for disorderly conduct and hasn't been convicted yet. Sheeeeesh. He wants to be a MARINE and you want to get all whiney about a disorcerly conduct charge?

Counseling now might or not be a bad idea, and if the kid agreed to it as a condition of derferred/dismissed charges, that's exactly what will probably happen, but personally, I think the best outcome now would a few months "counseling" a a drill sergeant on Parris Island.

Some general article from wikipedia doesn't give you a law degree.

The state attorney in Illinois will present the applicable local law to the court in support of the charge, the defense attorney will rebut and then a judgment will be rendered.

Your larger point--a general assessment of the way disorderly conduct ordnances are applied--is a perfectly reasonable argument ... if this case ever got to the Supreme Court of the United States, which it won't.

As for the Marines, relax. After this blows over, they'll quietly get him back in.

The forty or so people I know who got arrested for it either could've been arrested for much or serious charges, or, for a half-dozen or so, they were arrested under almost identical circumstances as you describe.

We had a riot in 2004 when the Red Sox beat the Yankees.

Hmmmmmmmmmm ....

If you read the essay, I'm not sure you quite understood some of the implications. There's this:

I'm leaving to join the Marines and I really don't give a [expletive] about my academics, so why does the only class that's complete [expletive], happen to be the only required class…

And this:

Most new/young teachers are laid back, and cooperative with students as feedback and input into the curriculum and atmosphere.

to elaborate on a comment I just left on your part 2, jfxgillis:

It's not a hard lesson to learn that not everything you think needs to be said, and certainly not written and turned in. I think I learned that one about 2 minutes after a teacher picked up a note I was passing in the third grade. A good rule of thumb this kid's obviously never heard of?

don't write anything you don't want to hear read to everyone you know (and don't know).

SIDENOTE:
the 'vine was swimming in articles just a week ago about how everyone except the VT shooter was responsible for what he did because they didn't report behavior very similar to what this kid wrote. why the sudden change of heart?

khakis_on_fire 13.2

The stench of blood has faded, allowing the natural Folly of Man to resume pride of place.

my whole point, jfxgillis, is that you seemingly inferred that he knew he was committing a crime, which i disagree with. YES, it was absolutely stupid of him to write such things in light of the recent events at VT, but I think that perhaps an arrest was a bit much - perhaps counseling, or an expulsion or something if he was threatening people (even in jest) would have been better than an arrest

vote_for_toast 13.4

He probably had the same thought process evident elsewhere on the thread: It can't be a crime because teacher told me to write whatever I want.

Actually, I kinda like the arrest. Scare him straight maybe, then drop the charges. The Marines take him back, then he gets all the counseling he needs at Parris Island.