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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “I Was Held At Gunpoint By A Bullied Kid”
Jesus Christ, everything about this is painful.
deputychairman replied to your post “I Was Held At Gunpoint By A Bullied Kid”
Dude. What a terrifying story, both the gun part and the awful neglected classroom environment
It was a bad time.
To be fair to the school, the year before us, my sister’s class of 96, was dominated from about 4th grade onwards by a strong-minded clique of straight-A female jocks, with my sister near the helm. (Her record for the 400m hurdles adorned the gym wall for at least 20 years. She still bears the scars: hurdles are brutal.) Small rural districts like that are very subject to the vagaries of demographic variation, and strong personalities. They couldn’t have understood what a festering cesspool of awful the Class of 97 really was. (97 later went on to throw a firecracker down a toilet, call in innumerable bomb threats, and set a classroom on fire, after I left.) The surrounding years were mostly good kids who mostly did the best they could with the school’s limited resources and tax base. They added on a big auditorium not long after I left, and separated middle school out into its own buildings and stopped treating 5th graders like little kids, and added all kinds of security measures…
And I went to private school for high school. My three sisters all thrived at that central school, and my mother taught there– which is possibly why I’m so aware of what had been going on behind the scenes. She had been very close with my 4th grade teacher, and so had been in on their earnest and well-informed attempts to gerrymander the 5th grade class lists into something that might be survivable. (For the record my 4th grade year was fucking awesome, there were only 18 of us in that section and 12 of us were girls, and this was before they started doing state-mandated standardized testing for the entire 4th grade year. I really started to blossom in 4th grade, so it was extra awful when I had to grow a shell in 5th.)
But. As a consolation, I searched on the teacher’s name, which I do remember very clearly, and she’s not on Facebook but one of those sketchy White Pages “Find Anyone” sites threw up a photo that I totally recognize as her, only old (she’d be a little over 70 now), and in the photo she’s holding a small child and looking happy, clearly it’s a grandkid, and it tied her to an address in FL. So she got out of it ok in the end, I guess. I would love to hear what she thinks about all of this now; it would be fantastic if some of these #walkupnotout dumbasses interviewed her. (Though, to be fair, she might think that just because she talked a shooter down, anyone could; you never know how something will strike someone.)
I can’t find the boy. He might have spelled it Jarod or Jerrod or Jarred or Jerad or something, the only results I get with his first name as I remember it, plus his last name which I know I have right, are ancestry.com results from the eighteenth century. It’s perfectly likely he’s succumbed to the opiate epidemic, though; at least one of my worst bullies did a couple years back and I know it’s swept through that demographic like wildfire.
My mother would know whether he graduated; she started teaching there in ‘92.
(Your picture was not posted)
sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “I Was Held At Gunpoint By A Bullied Kid”
Jesus Christ, everything about this is painful.
deputychairman replied to your post “I Was Held At Gunpoint By A Bullied Kid”
Dude. What a terrifying story, both the gun part and the awful neglected classroom environment
It was a bad time.
To be fair to the school, the year before us, my sister’s class of 96, was dominated from about 4th grade onwards by a strong-minded clique of straight-A female jocks, with my sister near the helm. (Her record for the 400m hurdles adorned the gym wall for at least 20 years. She still bears the scars: hurdles are brutal.) Small rural districts like that are very subject to the vagaries of demographic variation, and strong personalities. They couldn’t have understood what a festering cesspool of awful the Class of 97 really was. (97 later went on to throw a firecracker down a toilet, call in innumerable bomb threats, and set a classroom on fire, after I left.) The surrounding years were mostly good kids who mostly did the best they could with the school’s limited resources and tax base. They added on a big auditorium not long after I left, and separated middle school out into its own buildings and stopped treating 5th graders like little kids, and added all kinds of security measures…
And I went to private school for high school. My three sisters all thrived at that central school, and my mother taught there– which is possibly why I’m so aware of what had been going on behind the scenes. She had been very close with my 4th grade teacher, and so had been in on their earnest and well-informed attempts to gerrymander the 5th grade class lists into something that might be survivable. (For the record my 4th grade year was fucking awesome, there were only 18 of us in that section and 12 of us were girls, and this was before they started doing state-mandated standardized testing for the entire 4th grade year. I really started to blossom in 4th grade, so it was extra awful when I had to grow a shell in 5th.)
But. As a consolation, I searched on the teacher’s name, which I do remember very clearly, and she’s not on Facebook but one of those sketchy White Pages “Find Anyone” sites threw up a photo that I totally recognize as her, only old (she’d be a little over 70 now), and in the photo she’s holding a small child and looking happy, clearly it’s a grandkid, and it tied her to an address in FL. So she got out of it ok in the end, I guess. I would love to hear what she thinks about all of this now; it would be fantastic if some of these #walkupnotout dumbasses interviewed her. (Though, to be fair, she might think that just because she talked a shooter down, anyone could; you never know how something will strike someone.)
I can’t find the boy. He might have spelled it Jarod or Jerrod or Jarred or Jerad or something, the only results I get with his first name as I remember it, plus his last name which I know I have right, are ancestry.com results from the eighteenth century. It’s perfectly likely he’s succumbed to the opiate epidemic, though; at least one of my worst bullies did a couple years back and I know it’s swept through that demographic like wildfire.
My mother would know whether he graduated; she started teaching there in ‘92.
(Your picture was not posted)
