We grandparents love to hear about the cute and adorable things our grandchildren are up to. Here’s the latest news about Iliana:
Tomorrow, she gets to wear pajamas to school because her class filled up a “good behaviour” jar. The final fill-up was because the class did really well during the lockdown drill today. She explained to us that a real lockdown is when a person with a weapon comes into the school to kill you. They hid for the drill and the principal acted as the threat person. She said if she gets outside she’s supposed to sprint away because they’ll be trying to kill her. She said that the teachers weren’t talking about killing, but the kids figured it out. She and her friends were playing a game called “lockdown drill” after this and acting it out again.
Wow. That sounds like such a fun game. We didn’t have games like that when I was a kid.
Although we did play the “nuclear war” game where we hid under our desks waiting for the bright flash that would incinerate us. That was fun.
I am guessing you also pledged allegiance to a flag which stands for a republic with ‘liberty and justice for all.’ More subtle, but possibly an even more twisted game.
At least you didn’t forget the nuclear war duck and cover drills.
We had those also.
We lived in an area near an ICBM missile assembly factory, a plutonium producing reactor complex, and a Trident nuclear submarine base.
We knew that if there was a nuclear war, we were going to be hit hard.
The roads out of the area were all labeled “evacuation route”.
After the nuclear bombs dropped, the survivors were supposed to go home and assemble survival supplies and canned food for the trip on the evacuation routes into the mountains, after our parents got home.
There were no plans in case our parents didn’t make it home because they were vaporized by the nuclear bombs.
We played cowboys with cap pistol where we killed our friends multiple times practically every day. “Bang! Bang! Gotch you.” “No you didn’t. You missed.”
And yes, nuke drills, right after watching “Duck and Cover with Bert the Turtle”. The tune goes “dum-dum-diddle-dum-dum”.
Good demonstration (and need) for the therapeutic benefit of play.
PZ wrote: Although we did play the “nuclear war” game where we hid under our desks waiting for the bright flash that would incinerate us. That was fun.
Yes, we remember the instructions: Sit down, tuck your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.
Remember, 2nd amendment fanatics are always shooting their mouths off. OOPS, that’s not right, they want to shoot your mouth off! Welcome to school, here’s your bulletproof backpack and good luck!
Don’t forget the kitty-litter pans in the restrooms for soaking up massive blood spills!
I too remember doing drop drills during the 1960s in school. I especially remember that when under the desks, we had to put one hand over our neck, to protect it in case of nuclear attack. I thought that was strange.
Now I realize that it was to protect our neck from debris when the school building would possibly collapse onto us, but everyone felt better about us having that protection.
It’s like we always have to be scared of something.
It’s like how people for millennia were scared of the elves and fairies. But then after WWII we switched to being scared of outer space aliens. And now we have compromised by being scared of aliens from the Caribbean, even if they have been US citizens for longer than the Trump family has lived here. (1898 vs 1905).
Republicans: “There, see? Kids are so much happier when we get ’em used to the idea of regular school shootings! Even liberals like PZ have to agree!”
I have absolutely no idea why the USA still has any teachers left. Between the crappy pay, the worsening student behaviour, the political threats and gun violence, I would do anything but be a teacher in the USA and being a teacher has been my dream job since I was 18.
Snarky @7: “Don’t forget the kitty-litter pans in the restrooms for soaking up massive blood spills!”
The tampons will also come in handy for that.
And no other country has kids preparing to be shot on their classroom. They should be using that time for gender reassignment surgery…
I don’t know why anyone would want to be a teacher, either.
Don’t forget the Onion article about how in America we are helpless against the threats to our children that every other country on the planet has solved.
Yep, that’s still my favorite Onion headline: ‘Nothing we can do about it,’ says only country where this happens regularly
Fortunately the only violent monster I had to face when I was in primary school was Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.
I just can’t imagine where my lifelong political grievances were formed.
raven@3
Me too. we lived in the middle of a ring of Titan missile silos, a big AFB, and Hughes Missile (now Raytheon) and we figured we were definitely a first strike target. They still tested the air raid sirens every saturday at 1 pm until the 70’s.
We didn’t have duck and cover drills in the UK as far as I know, and it wasn’t done when I was in school in Princeton, NJ for a couple of terms in the late sixties. I was eight and, at that point, was not aware that nuclear war was a possibility.
Huh. Growing up in Canada in the 1960s all we had were boring old fire drllls: Bell rings, orderly file out the doors, stand around for 5 minutes (stay in your lines!) then file back inside and back to work.
[related]
Some people do want to be teachers: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/30/texas-scheme-teachers-cheating-scandal
My dad was with the U2 program, and we lived on a top secret Air Force base in Texas. Mom sarcastically picked the commissary as our nuclear shelter place. She pick it because she said that was where the food was. She held no illusion that we would be targeted in the first round. As an adult I was a school principal as part of my career. Columbine changed things for schools. They issued me a single small can of pepper spray. I am so happy to be retired!
I remember a cop telling us students that strangers offering a ride in their car would hurt you, and that you should write their license plate number on the sidewalk with a stone. This was back when most kids walked to school.
I grew up where we were surrounded by three petroleum refineries, a steel mill, a glassworks factory, a chemical factory, and an ammunition factory. There was easy access to the Mississippi, which flowed right behind my house.
We all knew that our area would be a major target.
We had a myth that if the flames burning on the stacks of the refineries ever burned out, we were all going to die.
At my friend’s house, her older sister would entertain us by turning on the water in the basement sink and lighting it on fire with a match. I heard that their entire neighborhood was bought by Shell oil after their house blew up because of a gas leak from the refinery across the street.
I got out of there when I escaped to college at 16, but I wonder whether that environment is the origin of my chronic illnesses.
re John Morales @20: Of course it was Texas. Florida probably has a similar scheme.
Kind of makes me, not sure if its curious, or sick, as to how many of those where a different sort of predator, i.e. religious and/or political nuts trying to circumvent the test to be able to push their personal ideology on other people’s children…
You missed out the important bit about Canadian school fire drills: they always schedule them for days with twenty-below weather, and don’t give you time to grab your jacket on the way out. I guess they figured you couldn’t possibly die in some future fire if hypothermia had long since had its way with you …
PZ @13
And yet, we still do it, despite everything. To quote the old (not) long-out-of-print science fiction writer “we must be crazy.”
It really makes me 100% glad I don’t go to school anymore; no such drills has ever occurred when I was going to school.
And remember this one?
“An armed society is a polite society…”
Not coincidentally, a local Arizona Republican candidate was just arrested for pulling his gun outside a school during a road rage incident and then lying to the police about what happened (he claimed it was the people in the other car who pulled first when he was the only one with a gun).
The school officials heard the altercation and put the school into lockdown as a result, delaying the kids’ departure at the end of the school day.
Nope. My family never took part in one, and my older sister started school in 1963. Fire drills were the only safety measure, and I used to walk half-a-mile to school on my own from the age of six. We did live in a village, but even there it would be unthinkable today.
@29 taciturn
I remember when back during covid some shit head republican Florida state legislator gore plugged by a prius driver after the legislator started a road rage incident by ramming the guy and firing his pistol wildly.
I know it’s unseemly to take pleasure at the death of others, but I can’t help but giggle at the idea of some second amendment florida hog politician getting airholed by a coexist prius driver standing his ground. Like it’s something you would expect to see in a comedy movie.
@ 19 Trickster Goddess
You effete city folk. Sounds exciting. We did not have any of that. Well, we did have a hand-held brass bell.
On the other hand, for two or three years, I got to start a school fire every day from October/November to about Easter. I never did manage to burn down the school!
In Grade School, I was in the one of the last of the one-room, rural, school houses in Ontario and usually the first person there most mornings. IF I got a good fire going and all went well the ink melted in a couple of hours and we could get to work.
@16: Don’t forget about Eggwina! (Or that Thatcher declared her father was a “greengrocer”, ignoring that he owned a chain of grocers, was the mayor and an alderman in one of the last rotten boroughs, etc. etc. etc.)
Generally: Anyone complaining about the poor quality of American education should consider how much time and how many resources, out of the shortest school year in the G20, are devoted to safety drills largely unnecessary in the rest of the world.
The thing that has always intrigued me (in a rather dark way, it must be said) is why schools? Why do so many of these unhinged murder-folk choose a school? Obviously there are plenty of other mass shooting incidents in the USA, so the answer might just be that, statistically speaking, schools aren’t more likely than anywhere else to suffer one of these attacks. But clearly a certain number of these attackers do choose schools specifically as the setting for their crime – why? Is it because murdering children is a more taboo thing than murdering adults? Is it because that will give them greater infamy and renown in the public eye? Is it because they know they are less likely to be opposed and brought down? Or is there something in these people’s minds that hearks back to their own school experiences and has cemented school as somewhere they hated and wanted revenge against?
I honestly don’t know the answer here. If the last one, is there something peculiarly toxic about the culture of American schools that breeds such murderous resentment in such a number of those who undertake it? Or is that kind of resentment common everywhere else and it’s only Americans (and a statistically insignificant number of others) who have a special extra cultural factor that turns that kind of resentment into a plan for murderous revenge? I suppose one could simply chalk it up to greater availability of guns, but it seems unlikely to me that there are hundreds of would-be mass murderers in other countries champing at the bit for this kind of infamy, who are stopped and defused purely through lack of access to weaponry. Surely if the desire was that strong they would act out in other ways that would leave a record? Perhaps not ways with such a death toll, but in some way that leaves a trace, surely?
We can see such cultural factors in other places. Israeli society, for instance, seems to be blighted by such deep and widespread dehumanisation of Palestinians that murdering them is commonplace and normalised. The same could be said for the colonists in most if not all settler-colonial enterprises. Is it that Americans have somehow managed to dehumanise their fellow citizens to such an extent that they have effectively adopted a settler-colonial mindset with regard to themselves? Or something like it, anyway? What is the psychology here?
Growin up in (Western) Germany in the 1980s, we didn’t have duck and cover drills. However, there were air siren tests once a year or so. I very vividly remember how the first of such tests during my tenure as pupil frightened the shit out of me — it was known and “business as usual” for the grown ups, but for a six year old who had recently learned from his grandmothers about air raids (both my grandmothers were survivors of massive air strikes during WW2) I was absolutely convinced I’ll die now any minute.
School shootings and drills for them? No topic at all until much later. We’ve had one in 2009. In its aftermath my father, then a teacher for 35 years, received for the first time instructions what to do in case of such an event (basically: “lock the door, wait for police”)
@cartomancer 34: I’m no psychologist, but I think a lot of wingnuts hate children for their potential to grow into different people. Way too many people out there seem to think children are the property of the parents and see them as tools for expanding their influence. Consequently, any youngsters with differing politics aren’t people in their eyes, but tools of propaganda being manipulated.
Of course with all the complaints about “woke” schools and accurate history being described as “critical race theory,” I’m sure there’s a segment who believe that by shooting up enough schools, they can end schools.
In the 70s, we had tornado drills. Fresh in everyone’s minds was the time a few years earlier that a tornado had touched down on the same school. The tornado happened on a Sunday, so no one was injured. But the shards of glass impaled in tiles showed that we should avoid those areas in case of another twister.
This is going to be a long screed; sorry. But it’s something I’ve considered for a long time, and my own experience might provide things for others to consider.
I worked in public schools for over thirty years; not as a teacher, but as a childcare worker in school-age childcare programs. It was only in the later years, when I was in charge of a program in a school where we were often the only ones in the building, that school shootings became something I seriously planned responses to. Which door would I send the kids out, if a shooter came in right now? What could I throw at them? Could I slow them down enough when I ran toward them to give the kids and young staff time to get out before I died? Not pleasant things to think about. But not hero fantasies, either. Just a responsibility of my job as a caretaker.
This really accelerated after we had been put in lockdown by the local police, when there was — supposedly — an armed and dangerous person in a house across the street from our school. The police used our building as basically a wall between them and the ‘shooter’, with me, my kids, and a couple of college-aged staff members, inside. Luckily, the principal also happened to be there that day, so I could mostly stay with the kids, and she was more or less the liaison with the actual danger that day: the cops. I made sure the kids never saw them. I never told the kids why we were spending the entire afternoon in the gym. They had no idea what was going on all around us, and neither did I, really. The cops were jerks to me, ordering me back into the gym when, a couple of times, I went to try and find out what was going on. Parents were not allowed to come and pick up their children, as the streets were blocked off.
(It turns out that the person was not armed at all; that someone ‘swatted’ them [though if that term existed at the time, I had not heard it]. At least, that’s what I heard. The police never said anything officially, probably because it would make them look stupid.)
It lasted three hours, with the cops doing who knows what, but occasionally walking through the school in their black uniforms with their hands on their guns. Afterwards, a couple of parents blamed me for not calling them to explain what was going on, even though the cops — for no reason I could think of — told me specifically not to call anyone. I was also too busy with the kids and scared staff to take the time to call anyone. I was even mentioned, by name, in an apology letter the superintendent sent out to parents the next day, who said my program should have done more to inform the parents. Can’t blame the cops, don’t ya know, but gotta blame somebody. I personally didn’t care, but my staff did, as did most of the parents (which probably helped me not to care about it.)
The thing is, even though it turned out to be nothing, I didn’t know it at the time, and it was three hours of me actively rehearsing in my mind what I would do if, at any moment, someone came in shooting; whether a cop, a crazy person, or both. I was responsible for the safety of all these people. Up until then, even though school shootings were already commonplace, I knew that they were still very rare statistically, so hadn’t thought about it too much.
Active shooters are different from other threats. It’s unlike the helplessness of nuclear war, where even as kids in the 60s we all knew the whole duck and cover thing was ridiculous, and the fallout shelter in our school’s basement could only support a tiny fraction of any of the people who might in some scenario get there. All the Civil defense nonsense was just to make us feel like we had agency against total, complete, absolute annihilation. It’s also unlike fires, or storms, or other natural disasters, where things are at least predictable enough that training and drills actually make a lot of sense and are simple enough to plan and practice. This training and the drills are also effective; they save lives.
School shooters are unpredictable. What weapons they have; where they’ll go; when they show up (during recess? at lunchtime? when kids are arriving or leaving?); what they’ll attempt (ignore blocked doors or try to force them open?). Planning for what to do with an active shooter is a terrible thing to contemplate. For years, we as school staff and students were trained and drilled to hide in our rooms, under our desks, with the doors locked (though most schools don’t have locks on their classroom doors [nor funds to install them], and most also have windows in those doors), in case of an active shooter in the building. That training always seemed stupid to me, as though we were being told too become, almost literally, sitting ducks for someone whose grandiose and insane goal was to kill as many ducks as he could. Especially as I worked in a building that, for fire safety reasons, had been built only one story tall, with fire exit doors in nearly every room. I knew that I would not follow that training if I had kids anywhere near a door to get out of.
I found out that the reason for this ‘safety’ method was based on planning for what to do if there was gang violence outside a building and there was the potential for crossfire. I learned this when, as a school-board member in my small town, we were discussing new ways to respond to shooters, rather than just hiding in our rooms waiting for the cops (whom we all know may never do anything to help us (see Columbine and Uvalde). I got really angry finding out that the folks who had supposedly thought this through and had come up with best practices to keep us all safe had not actually done much thinking at all, and, in my view, had for years caused schools to be much less safe. Cartomancer @ 34 asked, Why schools? I think that one big reason is that potential shooters learned that the kill rate, specifically because of the stupid lockdown rules and training, would be higher in schools than elsewhere. And that thinking was right. Now, many schools use something called ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate). In the weird American way of doing things, this method was come up with by a private company that charges for training and materials. Is it based on actual evidence of effective tools for real situations? I don’t know. Is it just another way to give us a false sense of agency? I don’t know. But it at least seems, in some ways, better to me than just waiting to die.
I’m at best ambivalent about training children to follow regimented rules and procedures when dealing with unpredictable situations. I know it works with high levels of training for adults, but asking all the kids in America, even pre-schools in some places, to contemplate and rehearse all this shit is questionable to me: first, kids will be so scared if it actually happens, that rare (once or twice a year?), complex training, except for following adult directions, will probably go out the window. Worse, this training is very psychologically harmful in itself, especially for something that, realistically, is extremely unlikely for a given school. Having drills with people, whom otherwise are respected adults, acting out the role of the shooter seems especially harmful to young minds.
And, of course, it’s ragingly irresponsible and not even sane to have to do this when we could do much better by getting rid of the guns that make high kill-rates so easy, and by spending a lot more time and resources on teaching empathy (it can — in fact, has to be — taught), and helping those who feel frustrated and powerless in a culture that sees aggression and violence as first, good, and admirable options for ‘winners’, and not the last resorts of crazy, desperate losers, as these statistically rare but still too common, almost invariably young men, actually end up becoming.
Yes, it’s odd that we never had “duck-and-cover” or similar drills in the UK, although we’d certainly have been targeted in the event of WW3. I don’t know – maybe our politicians were realistic about anything much surviving on a medium-sized island, other than those like themselves, with access to nuclear-hardened bunkers.
Also, my understanding is that a majority of school shooters are former students of that school Nowadays, they’ve gone through any training the schools do about active shooters. So, they’ve learned how to ‘game’ that training, and have also had the idea of shooting up a school, and the ‘power’ of those shooters, shown to them.
We had tornado drills at least once a year while I was in elementary school. When we heard a siren, we were all supposed to file out into the halls and sit with our backs to the wall, well away from any windows. I always wondered what good would come of this if a tornado happened to hit the school (it was destroyed by a tornado once, back in May of 1978–I wasn’t even born yet! Mom and Dad told us about the duck-and-cover drills they did in school in the ’50s, and after reading Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (even before, honestly), I wondered what good anyone thought that would do. It was a bunch of adults trying to make other adults feel better about situations that they couldn’t control. I had suspicions that adults had no idea what they were doing when I was little, and I still feel the same.
Good question.
At least they know the children are going to be easy targets. Unlikely to be armed and at a disadvantage fighting back against an armed adult.
The other frequent targets are the shopping malls.
It is wherever people are most concentrated.
Ring around the rosy
Pocket full of posy
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down.
In the mid-70s I briefly knew a fellow who had resigned from the Air Force Academy…something that was difficult to do. While driving around San Francisco one day…we are all new to the city…he told us that part of their education was to go to different bases every weekend for various war game exercises.. He said what most people think of happening in a nuclear war is one bomb on a city. In fact, there would be multiple warheads targeting different strategies areas of the city. For example, there would be at least one bomb for downtown SF, one or more on each of the two bridges, bombs for the major road junctures, Twin Peaks because of a communications tower there, the wharf area south of downtown, and so on. Sobering.
About 99% of the time, if you’re sheltering in the interior of a solid structure, like a house or school building, you’re almost certainly going to be fine, even if a tornado scores a direct hit on the building.
The most powerful F5 tornadoes make up less than 1% of all tornadoes and have the power to scour homes, office and school buildings down to their foundation slab, as happened in Jarrell, Texas in 1997, not long after I moved to Central Texas, but they’re so infrequent that unless you know you’re in the path of an F5 monster, you’re always better off sheltering in place rather than attempting to outrun a tornado and getting caught in the open.
Poor Iliana and so many other stories and people here. How impossibly sad that, and I can’t think of any greater, such an evil should become a children’s game.
cartomancer@34:
Oh, that’s easy. The people who snap and do stuff that will destroy their lives (jail or death pretty much guaranteed in this instance) are among those who have lost any hope of a life worth living, for whatever reason. Of course, the vast majority of no-hopers have a conscience, so they either do nothing or they just kill themselves, but the few with severe narcissistic or psychopathic tendencies generally try to take other people with them. Sometimes people they see as possessions (see: family annihilators), sometimes just random folks (see: pilot suicides, or the Las Vegas shooter), but often people they see as somehow to blame for their circumstances (see: disgruntled employee showing up to work one day with a shotgun instead of a briefcase; the term “going postal” arose from a series of incidents of postal workers snapping).
These days, a lot of people lose hope quite young, which might have something to do with student loan debt, disappearing middle class jobs, and housing unaffordability, and the resulting prospect of working hard and getting good grades just so they can spend the rest of their lives asking “Do you want fries with that?” or peeing in bottles in delivery vans while tens of grand in the hole and living out of a car. They have good reason to see the system as having failed them; and at that stage of their lives, school is the face of the system that they see nearly every single day, where they go to be graded and attend Career Day and all that stuff. The same system that, after testing them, may grant them a diploma or even a fairly highfalutin’ degree but will then probably consign them to unskilled labor under miserable conditions anyway.
So the conscience-impaired ones, when they decide to give up and to give the system a bloody nose along the way, target the school, and more specifically students they are jealous of, staff who are part of “the system”, or just indiscriminately. This seems to peak in high school, then falls off steeply in the university years. The ones who still wait until they are working adults rather than students to snap are generally ones who landed a somewhat precarious position in the middle class, only to suffer some major setback, such as a job loss or a deal falling through. In one instance of pilot suicide I seem to recall it was unpayable gambling debts built up, in most others of that sort having career problems looming. One instance was a FedEx guy on a cargo plane who tried to axe-murder the rest of the flight crew, but was subdued or killed. The rest were varying degrees of badly injured but managed to land the plane. Other instances ended less fortunately, and many were passenger aircraft.
The prevalence of latent potential spree killers is probably the same in most societies, but some, especially the US, subject more of the population to the sort of desperation and hopelessness that can “activate” them, so get a high per-capita rate of actual attacks. The US is also the only developed country to subject a significant fraction of its high-school-age youth to this, so it gets almost all of the school shootings in particular. Not quite all though — there was one in Canada, at a university, and there have probably been a handful of others outside of the US.
The degree to which people are acculturated to consider violent potential solutions to problems is also way higher in the US, with its gun culture and near-worship of the action movie genre. This might increase spree killings at the expense of plain suicides.
@laugengebaecl
There are still no active shooter drills in German schools. We do our fire drills and I as a teacher do have some training, but that’s mostly because I did crisis team training. Actually, some of the few measures that were implemented after those two school shootings that we had are being rolled back: No more door knobs instead of handles, because in case of a fire we’d be dead before the firefighters get the door open.
“Huh. Growing up in Canada in the 1960s all we had were boring old fire drllls: Bell rings, orderly file out the doors, stand around for 5 minutes (stay in your lines!) then file back inside and back to work.”
In the Midwest in the 60s, we had fire drills, duck-and-cover, and tornado drills.