Passing on this bit of news from Maryland:
GLEN BURNIE, MD (CNN) – A 7-year-old Maryland boy was expected to return to school Tuesday after serving a suspension for forming his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and allegedly saying the words “bang, bang.”
Children at Park Elementary School went home on Friday with a letter explaining there was a disruption in school.
Josh Welch and his father B.J. say the disruption lead to a two day suspension for the second grader in Brooklyn Park.
Academics are hard for Josh, who suffers from ADHD, but he excels in art class. It is Josh’s own creativity that may have gotten him into trouble.
Josh was enjoying his breakfast pastry when he decided to try and shape it into a mountain. “It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t,” Josh said.
Josh takes full responsibly for trying to shape his breakfast pastry, but admits it was in innocent fun. “All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but, it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda,” Josh said.
When his teacher saw the strawberry tart he knew he was in trouble. “She was pretty mad? and I think I was in big trouble.”
Reminds me of when the elder of my sons was a toddler in his high chair eating toast. He ate it down to where he had two crusts left intact in an L shape. He then grasped it by one side, and aiming the other around the room said “Pow, pow!” Nearly broke my wife’s heart. She felt like she had done something wrong raising him — after all, his older sister had never exhibited such “violent tendencies.”
But boys will do things like that.
The fact that this one did it with a dessert-type item reminds me of a bit of silly dialogue from the original version of “The Office:” It was only a trifling matter. Nevertheless, they took him into custard-y.
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Tar and feathers are appropriate for the principal and teacher, as well as the Glen Burnie school board.
This is so far beyond ludicrous, they’ve gone to plaid.
LOOK OUT, IT’S AN ASSAULT PASTRY!
For people who teach critical thinking, you would expect that they could do some “critical thinking” of their own. This is just another example of the zero-tolerance policies in schools being an abject failure. There is now apparently “zero-tolerance” for a pastry as an imaginary gun. This is really warped thinking. I don’t understand how people who constantly say they are for “common-sense” gun regulations are still on board with banning pastries in the shape of guns.
Children should not be punished for acting like children.
My favorite line from the column/article (not sure if those words are interchangeable):
“B.J. received a phone call from the school saying that Josh has been suspended for two days because he took his breakfast pastry and fashioned it into a gun.”
He “took his breakfast pastry and fashioned it into a gun”? Actually, no. He fashioned it into a pastry that was probably very roughly in the shape of a gun. It was, in point of fact, still a pastry. The pastry did not trans-substantiate and become a gun.
Nevertheless, the school is offering counseling services to any students traumatized by the assault pastry.
It really makes me wonder about educators who allow behaviors such as this to rise to the level of even noticing it. I realize that some people think of instances like this as a “slippery slope” (i..e. if you allow a ‘gun’ such as this one how can you keep AK-47s off of the play ground?), but the simple answer to that is a firm grasp on reality. Neither pastry, nor pictures, nor even sticks are actual guns. If you can’t tell the difference you shouldn’t be teaching our children. And parents who want to argue that there’s no difference between an imaginative representation and the actual object need help (but they do not need catered to).
This is another one of those ridiculous but EXTREMELY rare incidents where some liberal authority figure went overboard. Fox News and right wing radio use these rare incidents to brand all liberals as a bunch of extremist kooks. Conservatives are rapidly running out of real evidence that conservatism is the better way so they scour the planet for any trivial anecdote that supports their agenda.
Who’s agenda does this story support, the pro-pastry lobby?
Do you check under your bed at night to be sure there are no Fox News network employees hiding under it so they can kidnap you and take you away to a re-education camp and brainwash you into becoming a conservative?
If only these incidents were rare.
In the meantime, as the conservative movement flounders along in a desparate attempt to stay relevant the Obama economic recovery rolls on with the DOW poised to close at an all-time high. It currently sits at 14,264 which would be a record.
The last time the DJIA was at this level (in 2007)
1. GDP Growth: Then +2.5%; Now +1.6%
2. Regular Gas Price: Then $2.75; Now $3.73
3. Americans Unemployed: Then 6.7 million; Now 13.2 million
4. Americans On Food Stamps: Then 26.9 million; Now 47.69 million
5. US Debt as a Percentage of GDP: Then ~38%; Now 74.2%
6. Total US Debt Oustanding: Then $9.008 trillion; Now $16.43 trillion
7. Consumer Confidence: Then 99.5; Now 69.6
8. S&P Rating of the US: Then AAA; Now AA+
9. 10 Year Treasury Yield: Then 4.64%; Now 1.89%
10. EUR/USD: Then 1.4145; Now 1.3050
11. Gold: Then $748; Now $1583
Just the raw numbers. Draw your own conclusions.
A consumer confidence level of 99.5 in 2007 says it all. Whenever everyone thinks one thing, the other will happen. Just like now. Today’s level should be reveresed with the 2007 figure.
The next ten years will far surpass the last six, economically.
One more to add Bryan. The Dow is higher not because of what the American economy is doing, it is because China and other economies are just performing so damn much better than ours. Get it bud? The stock market is performing well based on what the economy in other countries are doing. Recovery my ass.
Once again, grammar police – should be “The stock market is performing well based on what the “economies” in other countries are doing.”
It’s Bush’s fault.
By “George”, I think you have it!
So, the value of a formula that tracks 30 Large Cap industrial stocks has surpassed the previous highs of October 2007, proving that those 30 companies are currently highly profitable, and yet poor people are still poor? Is that what you were inferring?
FYI, #10- the Euro to Dollar reading is a positive for the USD, in case you were wondering.
So we get the sequester and immediately get a new DJIA high?
I don’t think of it as left and right. I just think of it as foolishness.
Although I’ll say in this teacher’s defense that her action wasn’t quite as insane as what this English headmistress did in the name of protecting kids. That one took the prize.
These are the same people who implement Blue Laws.
If delicious breakfast pastries are outlawed, than only outlaws will have delicious breakfast pastries.
You can have my Pop Tart when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Happiness is a warm Pop Tart.
There’s no reason why anyone would need a box of more than 5 Pop Tarts.
People who want to own a Pop Tart should be required to receive annual training and be subject to a background check.
Teddy Kennedy’s car has killed more people than my Pop Tart.
This house protected by Kellogg’s.
I got a million of them.
Americans have the right and advantage of having Pop-Tarts, unlike the people of other countries, whose leaders are afraid to trust them with any kind of delicious toaster pastries.
It’s no wonder this country is getting dumber by the generation, we have students who are being taught by teachers and school administrators who have absolutely no common sense.
“serving” suspension? When are we going to start calling detention “kid jail”?
Well, I’m guessing that the rectangular breakfast pastry was a POP Tart, so whaddya expect?
If he’d put a silencer on it, it would have been a Pffft-Tart.
Or a hush poppy.
http://www.gunslot.com/pictures/mk-22-hush-puppy
Why are we allowing children to eat such crap in school, anyway?
There you go trying to take away our freedom to feed scrap to our kids. kids This would never have happened if we’d had a village.
Well according to the food stamp discussion, schools must be too poor to feed their students healthy foods.
My son eats pop tarts every day – and I’d bet you $500 he’s in better shape and can run faster- and his blood numbers are better than any fitness nut that has ever posted on this website – and he’s not particularly atheltic – just a normal active child.
Let’s kids be kids.
If kids want to eat pop tarts at school- have at it.
quit generalizing – it’s silly.
Would it make you people feel any better to know that I have personal experience with many such cases where school administration did not overreact in such a way. Most teachers would just handle it in the classroom as a teaching moment and not do a formal discipline referral. Most administrators receiving such a referral from a teacher would not choose to suspend the child. That is my experience. If it was me, I would happily note that the child’s cognitive development is on track for understanding symbolic representation – which is something that is rather important for literacy because if you can’t understand that groups of letters can represent semantic concepts then you will likely have trouble learning to read (or at least understanding what you read).
So don’t freak out that this is the norm. It really isn’t.
That kid’s too young to be messing around with tarts anyway.
I’ll second Scout’s comments. Most teachers, if they had noticed it all, would have told the kid to quit playing with his food. The strangest aspect of the story for me is that the children were given a letter to take home explaining there was a disruption at school. I wonder if the school officials’ overreactions may have been precipitated by how students around him reacted when he said “bang, bang.”
I’m with Kathryn. Seems like the bigger issue is one of poor nutrition in the schools. Lack of fiber in the diet is probably one of the leading causes of health problems later in life. Let’s teach our kids to eat right at a young age. We can start by staying away from corporate fast food places that essentially aim to adict kids to their crap. Once hooked folks will likely eat at those awful places into adulthood. Schools should do their part by providing nutritious foods rather than junk. This really should be a high priority in this country rather than all this natering about sequestration, phantom threats from abroad, and immigration.
Poor diet is less threatening than Obama’s illegal drone strikes on American citizens.
“Lack of fiber in the diet is probably one of the leading causes of health problems later in life.”
Metamucil and Fiber One bars for everyone!!! Do you know what the main side effect is in some of these fiber supplements… every grade school boy’s dream. It’ll sound like the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles.
There is nothing but empty calories and maybe vitamin supplementation in a Pop Tart. Sugar, HFCS, white flour, mystery fat….whatever your diet health theory, Pop Tarts ain’t good!
Heck, they even taste like cardboard!
Pop Tarts are a form of child abuse!
Pop Tarts (the strawberry ones) are delicious.
“Pop Tarts are a form of child abuse!”
Offer a kid the choice of a pop tart or a rice cake and see which one he views as child abuse. Pop tarts may taste like cardboard, but a healthy rice cake tastes like chewing on a packing peanut.
Rice cakes aren’t healthy in most people’s books. They are pure white starch!
I love them too – and I’d bet I’m in much better condition than most.
Any parent who feeds their child a pop tart is just as bad as Hitler.
Actually, it was Pol Pot who was a big Pop Tarts fan. I remember going to the Kellogg’s Fields, where we were forced to cultivate Pop Tarts as part of our re-education under the Khmer Rouge.
“Any parent who feeds their child a pop tart is just as bad as Hitler.”
And there we have our daily budism… if he keeps it up he just might be able to make a living at it.
Bud was kidding. He was making fun of something Silence said on another thread. I think…
I think/hope so too!
Taking gym and recess away from kids is more abusive in my mind. Kids should be burning off all of the Pop Tart calories by running around playing tag, climbing trees and hitting each other with sticks. Being young used to require lots of calories. I was a skinny kid growing up and burned all the calories I ate. If you feed kids a bunch of fiber and nothing with any energy, you’ll just get a bunch of lethargic kids. It’s adults who don’t need the Pop Tarts.
I’ve got a letter from my doctor here who says I don’t have to exercise because my love handles chaff against my shirt when I do anything more than adjust my position in my recliner. Just another excuse of the lard-assing of America.
Especially for the boys. Girls need exercise, too, of course, but they can still sit still and focus when they don’t get it.
If it is not pouring rain or less than 34 degrees in a stiff wind, send the kids outside!
Funny Brad – I was raised where if you didn’t form your burnt toast into a gun shape- something was wrong with you.
I even took my dad’s old army bullet collection to school to show to my JROTC instructor. He encouraged me to get in front of the class and tell the class about them in a ‘show and tell” in high school.
and get this- I own guns now- and I’ve never shot anyone, shot myself, threatened to shoot anyone – and it’s been over 13 years since I had even a traffic ticket.
I know that might be hard for you and others to believe.
What makes you think that would be hard for me to believe?
I grew up in a small town, during duck and goose hunting season we had people who at times would store their shotgun in their locker if they didn’t want to leave it in their vehicle. Before people start screaming BS, I only saw this on one or two occasions, some would just leave them in the Superintendent’s or Football Coach’s office.
We just left our guns in our cars. I had one in the trunk (with my Dad’s knowledge) on numerous occasions. I remember seeing several in gun racks on people’s trucks.
We really have huge differences don’t we? I haven’t shot a gun in over 40 years. I haven’t held one in about 10. I have no desire to own one, shoot one, be in the sight of one or have anything to do with them. Yet others here and elsewhere seem to have a huge interest in guns. And even though guns can be very dangerous that’s fine.
But what if I wanted to have that same level of interest in gambling or smoking pot? (I don’t by the way but use this as an example) I’d be denied the opportunity to fully engage in my interest yet many of the gun lovers would feel fine denying me that opportunity. Seems like a pretty messed up world we live in.
bud, if we combined the guns, pot smoking and gambling, we’d have a pretty great time!
@bud – The first paragraph sounds like me and church.
As soon as gambling and pot are legalized in SC you’ll be all set. Gun ownership is legal, your interests are not. You could always move to Colorado or Washington… you might actually be happier there since both are liberal states and Colorado is becoming a gun unfriendly state.