School puts the kibosh on rubber bands
Rubbery weapons stretch school’s patience
They aren’t classified as dangerous weapons (yet) but rubber bands are now a controlled item.
Young Middle Magnet School of Mathematics, Science & Technology in Tampa, perhaps stretched beyond its limit, has banned the band. In a December newsletter, the Buffalo Bulletin, administrators warned parents and students.
“There have been recent incidences of students at our school using rubber bands as a method of projecting objects at other people. The students refer to some of the projectile objects as “wasps.’ Occasionally, students are using their fingers to project the wasps. These activities have resulted in injured students.
“Rubber bands are not permitted at school. If students are in possession of rubber bands for any reason they will be subject to consequences that may include out of school suspension. When rubber bands are required for classroom use, they will be provided and collected.”
The first question that comes to mind is … never mind. That one can’t be worded politely. The second question is how in the world can a school justify suspension from school for possessing a rubber band? It’s a rubber band, not a drug, not a knife, not a gun.
Okay, assume for a moment that the wasp fights have reached a point where something actually does need to be done about them. How about punishing the students who are using the rubber bands improperly? Because the school has chosen to ignore the unwanted behavior and take the idiot’s road of banning the implement, the behavior itself is not being addressed.
The problem is not rubber bands. The problem is kids using them in a manner the school doesn’t like.
The next news item from this school will quite likely be a banning of ball point pens as the students switch from wasps to spit balls.
(Tip credit to Don Pattee, Henry Cate, Joanne Jacobs)
Jim, don’t be too quick to pass judgement on this decision.
I’m sure, if you take the time to contact the school, they’ll be able to give you hundreds of examples of people being murdered by rubber bands.
The only question I have is, like knives, do they have to be a minimum of 3 inces long before they are considered a weapon
and is it three inches drawn or relaxed
now with rubber bands taken out of the picture…what are they going to do about those that launch “the projectile” using their fingers…!
What about all the kids that need the bands for their braces? My GAWD …. their mouths are virtual wasps nests!
Is an elastic hair band a BIG rubber band? How is a ponitail supposed to be reined in?
MY God !!! The kids have weapons everywhere !!!
IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF AN ARMED INSURRECTION?
Although I’m not a teacher at this school, I don’t hold this as such a travesty of justice. Our kids make the wasps and shoot them with rubber bands as well. One of them nearly put out a substitute’s eye. It may not be lethal, but it is dangerous. She ended up having to wear a bandage on her eye for a month, which meant that she could not drive during that time. You certainly wouldn’t be laughing if your kid’s eye got put out by one of those wasps!
The wasps flicked by students’ fingers don’t get the same projectile speed and distance that they get with the rubber bands, so they don’t carry quite the same danger, they’re just annoying. Rubber bands that go into braces aren’t large enough to fling the wasps. And quite frankly, if you have kids who want to hide those rubber bands, it’s pretty easy, so sometimes you just don’t know who shot what — especially if several kids are shooting. (Trust me — I had a class of 24 kids in which 18 of the students were major behavioral problems for the whole school[and our county juvenile justice system]. Trying to pinpoint which of the 18 kids flung something the size of a small safety pin while you were trying to conference with another student on a writing project is next to impossible.)
And yes, I have suggested that the content areas that have classes like this need to place an aid in the class next year. Who wants to bet that we don’t have funding?
The worst offender of them all.
http://rubberbandman.officemax.com/
I attended school during the late sixties and early seventies. In my class we discovered quite a few ways of launching a variety of projectiles, preferably at fellow students. All these delivery methods and accompanying ammunitions went through the stages of discovery, development, stagnation, boredom and abandonment (for the next big thing).
Just some examples:
1. Chewn blotting paper.
Nowadays somewat difficult to find, back then the standard quality of in-house printing paper and thus in rich supply. You chewed a sizable piece of it to the right properties and threw the resulting wet blob by hand against the (white chalk) ceiling, exactly over the intended victim’s seat. As the chalk extracted moisture from the blob, its ability to stick deminished and in time it would fall down. Or maybe never.
Then we found that blowpipes were more accurate in delivering the ordinance. And though the size of individual blobs had to be substantially reduced to fit the pipes, you could shoot infinitly more of them and, when required, dispense with the ceiling delay. We had to start pre-prepairing the pellets between hours and at home in order to have enough supply. Chewing students could be seen everywhere (chewing gum wasn’t as popular in The Netherlands as in the US). Before action you put as many pellets in your mouth as manageble, wait until the right moisturisation had been accomplished, and fire away in one go.
My own blowpipe, consisting of the three lower sections of a telescopic antenna, was the most accurate of all and the craving of my peers.
When this craze had fizzled out, all the ceilings were covered in large and smal blobs.
2. Water.
This came into swing when the dentist’s son was able to provide us with syringes with needles. Of course there were those who had the bigger syringes, so instead of refilling between hours (suddenly *everyone* had to visit the loo inbetween *every* hour), we made water containers out of tubing, medicine tins, and anything that would fit in pencil pouches. Needless to say, these pouches had to be sizible, though still inconspicuous. The best containers would have septums to prevent the contents leaking all over the place.
The best experience would be seeing someone’s sillouette-in-water develop on the blackboard behind him, while he had to take his turn in front of the class.
Of course this had to go wrong eventually. In our attempts to propell the water over greater distances, one day during chemistry class a needle came off and hit a student in the arm. Ploink. That caused a rethink of the whole water thing. And while some went on to glue their needles onto their syringes, somehow the fun was overshadowed by the risk. The water craze went away fairly quickly.
3. Elastic bands.
Of course one can shoot elastic bands at any time, but somehow it developed into a (short-lived) rage. It took off when someone put an elastic band around a ruler and proved considerable accuracy. Te arms race then was about getting the longest ruler, from the standard 20cm up to as much as 40cm or even 50cm with special elastic bands. They had to be made out of wood in order to be able to release the bands with one’s thumb.
And of course you could put more than one elastic band on a ruler; more than 20 if I recall correctly.
Of course one could use elastic bands for launching other stuff, but there proved to be risks and that dampened the joy. Anyways, elastic bands went quickly out of fashion.
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I’ll leave the weapons of mass disruption like smoke bombs, fire crackers, bugs, smelly agents etc. out of this story.
The point here has to be this:
The Powers That Be (on all levels) seem to insist on making this simple but crucial mistake over and over again: Just ban anything that has had any role in anything that went wrong (in their vision) anywhere, somehow.
Now some of these bans are undeniably perfectly sensible and merit full support. We do not for instance practice the refining of radium in chemistry class the way the Curies once did, for obvious reasons. And many other materials that we now know to have dangerous properties we don’t handle in school anymore because they can’t be processed safely there.
But some bans are on the edge, take mercury. Clearly, mercury and its vapour are dangerous and we should not go back to the way we handled them 50 years ago. But you cannot ban an element, because it simply exists and cannot destroyed. In Holland mercury traders had golden years after the ban came into effect because schools had to pay them to collect their stocks of mercury and they then simply sold it on for good money. And the mercury mines in Spain still spew out the stuff today because industry needs it.
Mercury can be handled safely in school and handling it (with proper safeguards) is a learning experience that compares to nothing else on this earth. As this experience would be required only once, there would ne no more risk than with any other potentially dangerous chemicals students do handle at school today.
But we ban everything.
The Dutch variant of the FDA tried to ban French cheese years ago. Their reasoning was simple: Any foodstuff that has fungi growing on it is rotten. Rotten foodstuffs are illegal to sell. Thus French cheese must also be declared illegal to sell. This attempt failed. They went completely ballistic over Stilton cheese btw.
The EU however did manage to ban the traditional smoking of salmon. As there are numerous dangerous chemicals in the smoke that collect on the inside of the smoking containers, these containers must be chemically cleaned after each batch of salmon, preventing the salmon to acquire the really good taste and flavour that it should.
And then there is the slew of crazy bans in schools that this site reports on.
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However, the one thing that is most of all in danger of being banned everywhere is Free Speech.
Sects (small and large, be they religious, political or commercial) all over the globe consider Free Speech the ultimate threat to their God given Holy truth or Wallet and will spare no effort, cost or lives to ultimately eradicate it. Power, in the minds of these people, is something you simply do not share with anyone ever, period.
Now this has always been the case when or not Free Speech popped up, and it will most probably be so in the future. Free Speech to many is a disruptive influence and must therefore be banned. Too bad the the biggest military power of the day has its mouth full of Free Speech and Democracy, so we’ll just talk along when opportune and in the end do what we want regardless.
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I am not at all certain where all this is going to go. These are scary times and sites like this one are more important than ever.
Best wishes for 2005 to everyone,
Paul (from The Netherlands).
Consider this parody:
Young Middle Magnet School of Mathematics, Science & Technology in Tampa, perhaps stretched beyond its limit, has banned the BRA. In a December newsletter, the Buffalo Bulletin, administrators warned parents and students.
“There have been recent incidences of students at our school using BRA straps as a method of projecting objects at other people. The students refer to some of the projectile objects as “wasps.’ Occasionally, students are using their fingers to project the wasps. These activities have resulted in injured students.
“BRAs are not permitted at school. If students are in possession of BRAs for any reason they will be subject to consequences that may include out of school suspension. When BRAs are required for classroom use, they will be provided and collected.”
Or how about TEXTBOOK? Use a textbook cover as a catapult! Ban the Textbook!
Vigile de l’ineptie scolaire
Le blog Zero Intelligence d�nonce la bornerie qui fait immanquablement irruption, comme l�acn�, dans le syst�me scolaire. C�est l�occasion de se consoler quand notre propre milieu nous donne le cafard. Parmi les histoires qui semblent tir�es d�un mauva…
LOL ^^
p\/\/ /\/t t3|-| $|<00|_z y0!
That means he totally owned the school system.
Sorry for the forum speak, but I am on rather many forums….