Minnesota high school student David Riehm bristled at his creative writing teacher's stinging comments at the bottom of his assignment. "David, I am offended by this piece. If this needs to be your subject matter, you're going to have to find another teacher," Ann Mershon's critique began... ..."I'm actually a little concerned about your obsessive focus on sex and potty language. Make a change — today!" Mershon warned. David did not make a change. The poetry, scripts and songs he loved to write typically earned him praise from friends and family. Mershon's rebuke only roused him to rebel against her in two more essays over the course of the term. "Bowling for ****cheson," a vivid dream-within-a-dream about a boy who finds a gun under a church pew and shoots his teacher, "Mrs. ****cheson," so frightened Mershon that she alerted the school administration. "I felt threatened and violated by this thinly veiled fictional account of revenge against me," Mershon wrote in a statement to authorities. "I immediately had anxieties, which I have struggled with since reading the story. It scared me, it hurt me, and it also makes me very concerned for David." David was suspended on Jan. 24, 2005. The next night, three men — a Cook County deputy sheriff, a state trooper and a social worker — showed up at Colleen Riehm's home on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation with a court order to seize her son and commit him to a psychiatric ward 150 miles away in Duluth. So, do you feel yet that maybe students are getting stifled and shafted when they attend a public school? Though, maybe this is an isolated incident... If something like this is so common, that there is a name that has "Classic" in it, THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG. I'm sorry, but I just believe that if as a country, you lay down rules for the populace to follow, that you can't just suddenly drop the rules and quiet a large portion of the people because you feel the need to. Free speech is free speech, regardless of what age you are, and where you are. What do you think? Oh, wait, no, you shouldn't be allowed to express your own personal opinion, sorry about that!
Wow, not only did they stick him in an adult mental institution because the child one was full, but they charged his mum $6000 for it? Is it legal to charge someones family for the imprissonment of their relatives in the US? This shows a rediculous trend frankly, if you wanna prevent high school shootings, clamp down on bullying, make your school a better environment for everyone in any way you can, and make sure kids don't feel alone, lonely, angry, and confused every day from 9am untill 4pm. Thats how you stop school shootings, not by sticking harmless kids who have the sense to express themselves on paper in a mental institution :|
its disgusting. Guess who really got the revenge? The teacher. She told him she didnt approve. He did nothing wrong consitutionally by expressing his creativity in words. I bet she feels the mental anguish. I hope she rots for ruining the kids life. This society is so corrupt that our own constitution is hypocritical. There are other alternatives. This should not have been one of them.
Maybe so, but the point is, while this possibly isn't appropriate, the worst it should have landed the kid in is a few days in detention and a letter home telling his parents to make sure he doesn't write stuff like that again. Not a holiday in an adult mental institution and a $6000 bill, as well as suspension from his school.
Why should the kid be punished for it? Why would you reinforce bad behavior with something bad? You're saying to the kid "OK, so you're expressing how you feel in a truthful, intelligent way, but we don't like some words you use, or how you described some things, so we're going to give you detention and send a letter home to your parents so they can further punish you for speaking your mind." I'm sure Nexxo would have more insight into this, but it just seems stupid and silly to react to something like this in such an extreme and bad way, when you could just as easily send the kid to a psychiatrist to get a check-up. Maybe the kids story isn't something most parents would like their kids reading, and may the teacher got offended by it, unfortunately NOBODY HAS A RIGHT NOT TO BE OFFENDED. Why should you or I quiet somebody because we are offended by something they do? It's just stupid to do that. If you don't like something, don't deny me access to it. That is what free speech is.
I wrote a creative piece of writing once... which was written in 1st person, in which i committed suicide ( for being guilty of a sisters death) and i didnt get any special treatment
Your telling me this. I saw no threat being made there, I saw no motivation to harm anything but the teacher's pride. He prob was just joking, I do it all the time but have yet to be thrown away.
I think the school's reaction has been incredibly damaging. Sure, to write a story about shooting a teacher was a bit churlish, but the teacher hadn't exactly levied constructive criticism either. As a teacher she has to be able to put personal opinion aside for a moment and explain to the pupil why a piece could be considered offensive, and why certain language is inappropriate. To have the kid committed basically pathologises his anger (considerably), has no mental health benefits but is, in fact, likely to be damaging, and he will now have a mental health record that could preclude him from pursueing careers, holding positions of responsibility or authority, travelling abroad (or on a plane...) or taking out loans or a mortgage. Way to go ruining someone's life over a frigging story. What I think is happening (if I read between the lines correctly) is that this none-too-bright white middle-class teacher felt threatened by this dark-skinned, sullen Native American teenager. She probably was ready to circle the wagons and pull out the Winchester as soon as he looked at her, with images of being raped at the totem pole flashing through her White Anglo-Saxon Protestant* mind. In short, it is prejudice at work. * No disrespect to anybody who is denominationally white, anglo-saxon and/or protestant. But like in all cultural and ethnic groups, there are just some people that give you a bad name...
If she's teaching at a public school odds are in favor of her being a liberal 'do-gooder'. I don't think she thought the 'Injuns were going to scalp her'.
Is it a public school? It doesn't appear to mention. You could well be right of course, but the other scenario is equally likely. Actually, I just chalk it down to her being well out of her depth with this situation. From the news article I gather there was some concern because of a massacre on an Indian reservation in northern Minnesota in March 2005, when a 16-year-old killed nine people before he shot himself at Red Lake High School. However given that we are talking about only a single essay here, and that there was a three month gap between it being written and it being read and reported, during which the student pretty much behaved perfectly normally, I would say they really jumped the gun, and then overreacted to boot. Where they got the whole mental health thing from, I don't know. Having read the essays (displayed in the news article), I'd say there is no evidence of thought disorder, delusional thinking, or depression. I think the kid needs to learn to manage conflict more productively, but that's it.
