About 26 years ago, I had a student teacher. She was bright and worked hard. With student teaching, the cooperating teacher (me) models for him or her and eventually he or she takes over. That is the simple version. You are not always in the room. To a degree, the student teacher has to sink or swim.
Well, my student teacher was doing a pretty good job with my classes. They weren’t easy – different mixes of juniors and seniors. It was a variety like all groups of people – happy, sad, mad, melancholy, driven, and on and on. Her student teaching had all gone well to a certain point. This point was when students made video dramas. You had your dramas based on Shakespeare or Aesop’s fables and a crime story or two, plus the romance. It was always an interesting mix. I was usually in and out of the room, just checking to see how it was going. I caught the end of one of the videos. The video has puppets mad of doctor’s wooden tongue depressors or giant Popsicle sticks. They were perfect caricatures of all the people in the class. They had elaborate facial features – eyes, noses and mouths. Clothes made out of cloth. It must have taken days to create them. I was beyond impressed. They were wicked cool and wicked realistic. They were great impersonations. The screen went suddenly dark and then brightened again. That is when the shooting started.
Needless to say, a BB gun pistol hits the screen and blows all the Popsicle people apart. I stood watching – Jesus, this was disturbing and there was going to be a lot of meetings and paperwork. No one said a word. I walked up, took the tape out, and stood by the door. I tossed the two students who made the tape out to the principal. Of course, one said, “It wasn’t that bad.” After I sent them packing, the student teacher and I tried to do emotional triage. Some of the kids were visibly shaken with ashen faces.
The class finally ended, and I checked in with my student teacher. She was horrified and apologizing. I said, “They did it not you.” Believe it or not, she went on to be a great teacher. I brought the tape to the office and spent the rest of my day meeting with the police and administration going over and over what happened. It all ended with the two kids getting expelled; it seems one of them liked to kill pets as well. I agreed with them being expelled – the more I learned the less of wanted to learn. Of course, Columbine happened that spring. I don’t think it would have been that, but I thought expelling them was right choice.