David Morales an eight year old adorned a baseball cap with some of his toy soldiers and wore it to school as part of his show and tell presentation in support of the troops. For that he was told he couldn’t were the hat because it violated the school zero tolerance policy around weapons.
Any of you familiar these small plastic figures – that have been around for years – fully understand that this claim is as ridiculous as they come. You would think any teacher would have the common sense to know these figures offer no threat of violence and that their little rifles are completely incapable of firing a shot.
When I read about this I remembered my childhood and how I use to carry one of my favorite toy soldiers with me, that had a flame thrower. I can only image what would happen to me if today’s rules applied when I was David’s age. For that matter, some of the pictures I drew of pretend battle scenes would have clearly been my invitation to have a front row seat in the school’s psychologist office. I can only think it was because I grew up during the Korean Conflict – the war that wasn’t a war.
One has to ask are these teachers so lacking of common sense they are incapable of thinking about what truly constitutes a weapon that would meet the criteria they claimed these toy soldiers did. In his blog Alan Weiss refers to it as “dumb-ass stupid management.” Not only do I agree, but it is as General Honore said “it’s being stuck on stupid.” You’re stuck on stupid when you look at a three inch toy and equate that toy to a violation of a zero weapons tolerance policy which is clearly designed and developed to deal with real weapons.
I would like to think that our teachers, our educators understand the concept of critical thinking you know the ability to assess and comprehend a situation and apply a logical and reasonable solution to addressing the problem facing them. But this most recent example clearly demonstrates those we call teachers are in tremendous need of being taught not only the concepts of critical thinking but need a heavy dose of common sense added to the process.
However, we may have ourselves to blame. For every David Morales story, there are stories about parents coming in to challenge the teachers about a grade given to their precious little Johnny or Suzy saying it will impact their ability to get into Harvard even though their kid is only in the second grade.
As ridiculous this story is, we have to get back to having some level of reason in how we train our teachers and how we act toward them. What happen to David Morales, is beyond ridiculous, common sense must prevail, for if it doesn’t we’re going to continue to be stuck on stupid.
