Robert Stacy McCain’s article Math Teacher Goes Berserk brought to mind some silliness in which I engaged as a seventh grader.
Just a typical day in a Wisconsin school:
Brenda Poulos remembers working in Kenosha last Friday when she received a series of texts from her son.
“I know he’s not supposed to use his phone in school, so the fact that he texted me was already, something’s up right,” Poulos said. “He said, ‘Mom, something’s going on at school. They fired our teacher and something bad is going on.”
Poulos’ son, Ethan, is a seventh-grade student at John Long Elementary. He told WISN 12 News he was in math class on Friday [May 12] when his teacher became upset and started making threats after discovering a swastika drawn in a notebook.
“Five seconds later, he went on this ramble about how this was a disgrace to his people and how he wanted to scorch Earth on us and how he was apparently going to cause pain on all our families,” Ethan said. “How he’d send his daughter to our house with a baseball bat and that he had 17 guns and he wasn’t afraid to use them.”
The teacher in question, David Schroeder, 46, of Grafton, Wisconsin, was charged with making terroristic threats. Under Wisconsin §947.019, if that is with what the distinguished Mr Schroeder has been charged, it is a Class I felony. Under §939.50, a Class I felony carries a penalty of a maximum $10,000 fine and up to 42 moths imprisonment.
If this is Mr Schroeder’s first offense, he would probably not get the maximum, but would be offered a plea deal: three years probation, and a $5,000 fine. The most important part of that would be that the felony conviction would mean the revocation of his teaching certificate, and the felony conviction would bar him from ever owning a firearm.
According to the complaint, Schroeder told the students that he was Jewish, that “all Jews have guns and that he had 17 guns in his basement and that he would ‘F’ them up.”
At that point, Mr McCain started talking about what middle school boys sometimes do:
(I)f drawing swastikas in your notebook was some kind of human-rights violation, basically every kid in my childhood schools would have been under investigation. Our fathers’ generation had fought World War II, which was a subject of lots of TV shows (e.g., Combat!) and movies (e.g., The Longest Day) that we watched as kids, so we were fairly saturated with that stuff about fighting the “Krauts” (as the Germans were habitually referred to in the G.I. slang dialogue of those old movies). Because a swastika is a simple thing to draw (as opposed to say, a Stuka dive bomber or a Tiger tank), basically every schoolboy drew them, in notebooks, on desks, etc. It had no deeper meaning in our minds. Certainly the boys who drew swastikas — and I mean, literally every boy did, back in the 1960s and ’70s — did not intend it as signifying support for totalitarianism, or sympathy toward Germany, least of all Jew-hating. It was like drawing Batman (another favorite schoolboy doodle) or hot rods, just stuff that boys did, without any political intent. But that was long ago, in what may now be viewed as a Golden Age of political incorrectness, when a popular comedy on TV was Hogan Heroes, with the Nazis played for laughs.
Swastika on apartment building at corner of Rose Street and Lyndhurst Place, in Lexington, Kentucky. This building predates the Nazis. Photo by DRP, click to enlarge.
As far as I can recall — and my memory is pretty good — I never drew swastikas in my notebooks or anywhere else; that just wasn’t my thing, and World War II really wasn’t my interest. But here is where I need to confess my very unintentional sin.
Between late August of 1965 and early June of 1967, I attended the seventh and eight grades at Mt Sterling, Kentucky, Junior High School, in what was then the Harrison Avenue Building. Built sometime around 1900, it was a two-story brick building with somewhere around 12-foot high ceilings and big, tall windows. With no air conditioning, Southern school buildings used the trick of tall windows, in which the upper sash could be lowered a bit, and the lower sash raised, to get natural air circulation, with the warmer air escaping through the upper opening and — hopefully! — cooler air entering.
I had Mrs McCarren for English, and Mr Hawkins for history back then. Mrs McCarren was forever assigning some of the other boys, and me, sentences, to write “I won’t talk” 200 times for talking out of turn in class, something I tried to amuse myself with by including an occasional “I’ll shut up” and, with a very sharp pencil, I could get all 200 of them in the blank area at the top of otherwise blue-ruled notebook paper.
But there was something else. Those very tall windows also had very tall, buff-colored roll-down shades, and as tall as the shades were, they also had very long thin, white draw cords. Being a typical 12-to-14-year-old boy, my hands did keep busy, and, seated next to the windows, I frequently made them into hangman’s nooses.
Today? OMG, it would be straight to the principal’s office, but, in the seventh and eights grades, nobody cared, or at least I didn’t think that anybody cared.
The Mt Sterling school system had recently integrated, during my sixth-grade year, after the segregated, black school, DuBois, mysteriously burned to the ground just before school started that year. An integration plan was already in the works, moving four, non-consecutive grades per year over three years, to the regular school system, but the fire forced immediate, total integration. Maybe some of it escaped me, but I really don’t recall any problems with integration. Then again, I wasn’t the most popular kid around, and maybe some other families did have more problems with it, but if so, I was unaware of them.
And there was one other thing of which I was unaware. To me, a hangman’s noose was just something I saw on television, in the Westerns which made up so much of the evening fare. I was unaware that a hangman’s noose might somehow symbolize lynchings.
Did Mr Hawkins, who was black, take offense at those nooses? He had come over from the DuBois school, where (I think) he had been the principal, but if anyone took offense, I never heard about it, nor did anyone ever mention to me what those nooses could mean. The nooses were frequently undone the following school day, but I do not know by whom.
Mr Schroeder, however, did get upset, over things done by kids mostly meaninglessly. Will the kids continue, as a form of rebellion, something junior high and high school boys do? I have no way of knowing, but I do know one thing: MR Schroeder’s overreaction has cost him his job, at the very least, and might well cost him his profession and his right to keep and bear arms.