I can speak to Shanna Peeples’
The Danger of Arming Teachers
Betsy DeVos’ ideas ignore the reality of working in schools
with a great deal of experience and authority. I am a 74 year old USA born Jewish atheist, now retired. In my working career (which covered many fields) I mostly worked in education, ranging from preschool through ten years at the University of Oregon.
In the 1970s, I taught at the second most dangerous high school in Seattle. I am sure it hardly compared to say the most dangerous high school in Chicago (where I was born) or the most dangerous high school in New York City to which I had a peculiar experience as a high school student. I won’t explain except that I am white and my first girl friend was a black girl born in Harlem and her black parents wanted to get her out of Harlem and encouraged her to get romantically involved with a white boy attending a school near NYC because she was attracted to gang bangers and drug dealers and figured better a white boy with a few prospects.
Anyway, I became a high school teacher in the most diverse school in Seattle (indeed, all of Washington state) in a time when diversity was not popular and upwardly mobile black students were moving into a white school where the white students beat up the black students and then the black Panthers took over the school with rifles to protect their people.
If you think I make this up, here is a taste of the time.
I had a gang leader, drug dealer arrested right out of my class. I was very young and being around such dangerous students kind of rubbed off on me. On one occasion I had the opportunity to murder a very irritating but not really dangerous student who was clowning around an accidentally got his neck in a noose. It was a close call. I was very tempted. It would have been the perfect crime.
Later, after I got laid off by a levy failure in Seattle, I got a job at a very pleasant school near Portland, OR, where I helped team teach an alternative school for sophisticated students who were bored by regular education, a program intended to prepare students for the future instead of the past, which schools have always done. The program was called
ALTERNATIVE FUTURES.
The students in our program had freedom none of the other students in the school had. The could work on projects of their own choosing, leave the closed campus, and so on. We taught organic gardening, the students made presentations to the local city council, based on a census of the small town where the school was located (Tigard, Oregon), started the first recycling center in the state of Oregon. We screened the students carefully. One year a bunch of little psychopaths fooled us and took over our program, engaging in usual teenage hijunks such as drugs, sex, and the things all teenagers are interested in but put our whole program in danger. However, by the end of the three period a day program most of the bad kids(who were actually quite intelligent and energetic had grown up enough that I was sure they either became constructive members of society or at least successful criminals running Mafia gangs or big time politicians like Donald Trump . . .
Which takes me to the point of this senile rant. One of the students never grew up. A couple of years after she graduated (after I had moved on to the University of Oregon as an instructor) and was waiting for a bus, she gave me a ride home. Her name was Mindi Rahier. I was not very happy to see Mindi because she had been the laziest, homeliest kid in Alternative Futures. She never finished any of her projects. But when she gave me a ride home she had blossomed into an attractive “babe” and told me she had a good job and had married a wonderful man.
I thought
Some kids blossom late. In fact that describes me as I had flunked out of college and been homeless and spent a couple days in jail for stealing food though I eventually got married, fathered a child, and ended with a Masters in Education from the University of Washington.
A year or two later, Mindi murdered her husband. She had an extracurricular lover, and was the black widow who planned the orchestrated the crime.It was an easy conviction, even for a murder trial. The cops got a wire tap on her phone and got hours of recordings of Mindi and boy friend gloating about the murder.
She was sentenced to life in prison. I moved from Oregon to Washington state and then did something really stupid.
I should add that Mindi became a model prisoner at the Oregon State prison for women. Many of the other prisoners were illiterate drug dealers. gang leader molls, whores and the like. Nothing like life behind bars to focus one’s mind.
Eventually Mindi was released from prison, I can’t remember if her sentence was commuted or she was released on parole for good behavior. I blogged about her. I had moved to another state, and I had always been polite to Mindi. Unfortunately, the brother of the man who she had murdered posted a comment about how he was going to finish the job the state failed to to.
Justice is not always fair. If forty years in prison sufficient punishment for murder? I had figured out (being better at hacking the Internet in those days) where Mindi lived after release and that she was working at a winery.
I sent everything I had to the Oregon state patrol and the Sheriff of the country where she was living. They never replied (quite properly). Mindi seemed to disappear. Either the brother in law killed her. Or she went into the protection program for released murderers.
As you can tell, I am kind of a sociopath myself. Or merely senile. So I don’t much care. If you go around murdering people you don’t have much grounds for complaint if a relative takes you out, do you. On the other hand, spending 40 years in prison is plenty of punishment.
As Shanna Peoples (much more intelligent and perceptive than I am) ca point out education is always focusing on the past. It’s quite possible the 21st Century may be the last Century for Homo sapiens.
Shanna, today’s education should focus on Homo sapiens from committing species suicide. By the end of the 21st Century. I won’t know how it turns out.

