High School of the Damned
We return, gentle reader, to the special places of accomodation and appeasement that the Toronto District School Board has created for its' growing population of violent students.
This is the second such facility I have been into. Here you will find nuturing: an experienced teacher close to retirement, a street-wise teaching assistant, and a fridge full of food, a coffee maker, a microwave, and a sofa. The room smells of fresh coffee with an aroma of a loving breakfast. The staff arrive early, and the students do not have to arrive at all. I am told that there are twenty assigned to this program, but at most four (on a good day) will show up. Considering that students found with knives * only get a morning of sitting in a boring office as punishment, I wonder what social insult these absentee victims of society had committed. And then again, because of cuts to social spending by Mike Harris, we can always blame the evil heteronormative taxpayers for not paying enough taxes for teachers to spend, now can't we.
Of the three students that actually showed up (and I must confess that of the twenty students in the expelled students program, only three were there that day, so a proper statistical representation this is not, unless it supports political correctness, in which case it would), all were members of oppressed-Canadian communities. This certainly proved that inadequate social funding, not criminals, cause crime. All three (two girls, one boy) celebrated African-Caribbean-Canadian culture, which gave me cause to pause.
Statistically, I would expect one to two African-Carribean-Canadian participants in the alternatives to suspension for violent crimes program. As the soon to be retired teacher told me (before we started discussing the stock market), social problems are caused by poverty; people are all the same; cultures all across the world are all the same. So the fact that the actual attendees at this program exceed the expected results for the entire group is just so much Mike Harris hogwash. Presumably, the absent seventeen are correctly distributed between knife-wielding whites, machete-wielding orientals, and one and a half axe-wielding jew.
The boy spent his time eating, sleeping, and drawing Crips insignia on anything he could find. His homegirl (also in the class, just to show the Romans that they did not know what they were doing when they said 'divide and rule') helped him use a pen to design a new Crips design on the cover of his math workbook. A critic might say, 'Fenris, how did you know it was a Crips design?'; the answer being the large word CRIP worked into the entwined snakes and spiky foliage of the surrounding garland.
Around 11:30, one of girls had a tantrum, and all guests were sent out of this special place. Apparently, the girl was unaware of the existance of the concept of homework. In the fifteen years of her young life, nobody had told her homework existed, or what it implied. She had never had homework before. I wish I had filmed this priceless gem of social realism: the oppressed, shocked and horrified, eating fresh california strawberries and sipping a latte, that the white oppressors had just made up a new rule. Never heard of homework before! Gosh!
In the staff room, we relaxed with fresh fruit, fresh brewed coffee, croissants (still warm from the oven), and fresh pastry. Everyone agreed on the need for more spending on education. More teaching assistants, more smaller classes, more free nutritious food, and, of course, more administration to oversee this all, are this weeks final solution. After we all agreed to spend more other people's money, we settled into a nice discussion on good retirement locations in rural ontario, those quiet places that are so pleasantly far from Toronto.
And what of the youth, the Crip obsessed artist? Although gang violence in Toronto has declined (from a peak of 40 murders in the year of the gun, down to 69 so far this year), things do not look bright for him. Survival in a gang, and a gang member he is, is neither long nor pleasant. If he survives to be too old for public school, he has neither the skills nor the personality to hold down a job, even a crappy telemarketing one. His best chances of survival are welfare, sponging off a baby momma, and illegal drug retail. He did not have the advantage of intellegence. Effectively, he is one of the walking dead. I memorized his features, so I could recognize him when he showed up on the Toronto police services website * , as the hottest wanted person, or cooling off on the slab.
Indeed, the High School of the Damned. There in the staff room are the caring ones, and in the classes, the damned. More funding, please!
I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this at both DustMyBroom and Mitchieville.
This is the second such facility I have been into. Here you will find nuturing: an experienced teacher close to retirement, a street-wise teaching assistant, and a fridge full of food, a coffee maker, a microwave, and a sofa. The room smells of fresh coffee with an aroma of a loving breakfast. The staff arrive early, and the students do not have to arrive at all. I am told that there are twenty assigned to this program, but at most four (on a good day) will show up. Considering that students found with knives * only get a morning of sitting in a boring office as punishment, I wonder what social insult these absentee victims of society had committed. And then again, because of cuts to social spending by Mike Harris, we can always blame the evil heteronormative taxpayers for not paying enough taxes for teachers to spend, now can't we.
Of the three students that actually showed up (and I must confess that of the twenty students in the expelled students program, only three were there that day, so a proper statistical representation this is not, unless it supports political correctness, in which case it would), all were members of oppressed-Canadian communities. This certainly proved that inadequate social funding, not criminals, cause crime. All three (two girls, one boy) celebrated African-Caribbean-Canadian culture, which gave me cause to pause.
Statistically, I would expect one to two African-Carribean-Canadian participants in the alternatives to suspension for violent crimes program. As the soon to be retired teacher told me (before we started discussing the stock market), social problems are caused by poverty; people are all the same; cultures all across the world are all the same. So the fact that the actual attendees at this program exceed the expected results for the entire group is just so much Mike Harris hogwash. Presumably, the absent seventeen are correctly distributed between knife-wielding whites, machete-wielding orientals, and one and a half axe-wielding jew.
The boy spent his time eating, sleeping, and drawing Crips insignia on anything he could find. His homegirl (also in the class, just to show the Romans that they did not know what they were doing when they said 'divide and rule') helped him use a pen to design a new Crips design on the cover of his math workbook. A critic might say, 'Fenris, how did you know it was a Crips design?'; the answer being the large word CRIP worked into the entwined snakes and spiky foliage of the surrounding garland.
Around 11:30, one of girls had a tantrum, and all guests were sent out of this special place. Apparently, the girl was unaware of the existance of the concept of homework. In the fifteen years of her young life, nobody had told her homework existed, or what it implied. She had never had homework before. I wish I had filmed this priceless gem of social realism: the oppressed, shocked and horrified, eating fresh california strawberries and sipping a latte, that the white oppressors had just made up a new rule. Never heard of homework before! Gosh!
In the staff room, we relaxed with fresh fruit, fresh brewed coffee, croissants (still warm from the oven), and fresh pastry. Everyone agreed on the need for more spending on education. More teaching assistants, more smaller classes, more free nutritious food, and, of course, more administration to oversee this all, are this weeks final solution. After we all agreed to spend more other people's money, we settled into a nice discussion on good retirement locations in rural ontario, those quiet places that are so pleasantly far from Toronto.
And what of the youth, the Crip obsessed artist? Although gang violence in Toronto has declined (from a peak of 40 murders in the year of the gun, down to 69 so far this year), things do not look bright for him. Survival in a gang, and a gang member he is, is neither long nor pleasant. If he survives to be too old for public school, he has neither the skills nor the personality to hold down a job, even a crappy telemarketing one. His best chances of survival are welfare, sponging off a baby momma, and illegal drug retail. He did not have the advantage of intellegence. Effectively, he is one of the walking dead. I memorized his features, so I could recognize him when he showed up on the Toronto police services website * , as the hottest wanted person, or cooling off on the slab.
Indeed, the High School of the Damned. There in the staff room are the caring ones, and in the classes, the damned. More funding, please!
I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this at both DustMyBroom and Mitchieville.
Labels: your local high school
posted by Fenris Badwulf at 8:07 AM
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