I started teaching in 1981. I am retired this year. I have taught in multiple states. School safety rules are the same.
Rule #1 keep all exterior doors lock (the doors must be constructed so a shooter can not make entry if locked.) Have controlled entry.
Rule#2 keep classroom doors locked at all times. (There should be no windows in classroom doors)
Rule #3 place students so they can not be targeted through the door or exterior windows. In some schools this is almost impossible due to window placement. Some modification could change this issue. But most don't go to trouble or expense.
I kept my classroom door locked at all times. Most teachers didn't. I had a co-teacher who would unlock the classroom door after I locked. We had a few heated discussions over this.
I once had a principal who walked around and checked classroom doors. He let you know if they were not locked. This type of principal was rare.
Students and teaches will open exterior doors from inside which allows unauthorized entry. Sometimes prop them open for air flow etc.
Also students take the lockdown practice very lightly. They laugh, talk, and joke. That makes noise and shooters know where students are located.
Here are the questions to ask.
1. Were the exterior doors locked.
2. Was the school following controlled entry protocol.
3. Were the doors hardened so a shooter could not make entry if locked.
4. Were the classroom doors locked.
5. Were there windows in classroom doors.
6. Was lockdown protocol taken seriously and followed.
There was a failure at one on more of these school safety steps. Find the failure point and fix it in all schools. My guess is one or more of the three rules was not followed. If the shooter does not make entry and they can't target through windows, the outcome is different.
As a teacher who spent decades safe guarding students from the potential of school shootings this discussion on gun control is a distraction and putting more students at risk by not focusing on what really keeps students safe. Rule #1 keep all exterior doors lock (the doors must be constructed so a shooter can not make entry if locked.) Have controlled entry. Rule#2 keep classroom doors locked at all times. (There should be no windows in classroom doors). Rule #3 place students so they can not be targeted through the door or exterior windows. In some schools this is almost impossible due to window placement. Some modification could change this issue. But most don't go to trouble or expense.
Listening to the discussion regarding gun control, I just wanted to point out that it is actually feasible to manufacture .223/5.56mm rounds at home with a relatively inexpensive kit. You can even reuse the casings after shooting them, so I'm not sure limiting ammo purchases would work. I think people should be required to carry insurance on their guns. We require it for cars because of the enormous damage they can cause. Guns can cause greater damage than cars and if you shoot someone, it doesn't damage your gun like it would your car, yet we allow people deemed too irresponsible to drive cars to still carry guns. I don't think prohibiting guns is going to work as a means of reducing gun violence at this point because there are too many to be able to confiscate.
I was pleased to see the Sewell Report being discussed. Are its recommendations being taken up? To a certain extent they are -- Kemi Badenoch who is the UK Equalities Minister (immigrant from Nigeria as it happens) has implemented some. Sajid Javid (2nd generation So Asian), the UK Sec for Health has implemented others including a Dept for looking at inequalities in health. One of the first changes was with the fingertip blood pressure gauges which do not accurately read darker skin.
I believe there are changes in policing -- stop and search happening etc because the number of black youths being killed far exceeds white youths due to street violence, generally gang related. Pritti Patel is the Home Sec -- a South Asian immigrant. The Home Office is notoriously dysfunctional though.
The first tranche of UK 2021 (ie England and Wales because Scotland made a mess of theirs) comes on 28 June 2022. From the 2011 census, the UK black population is 3.8% and mainly concentrated in large urban areas particularly in London. Other places like the North East of England have a much smaller population -- the North East has suffered depopulation in recent times because of chronic unemployment and thus it is not altogether surprising that immigrants want to go where the most economic opportunity is. Newcastle Upon Tyne is one of the few cities where its sewers are too large for its population. London has the opposite problem (one which is difficult to fix due to the historic nature of the area).
Academia in Britain also is notoriously underpaid. The City of London traditionally has offered much more opportunities for economists as it is one of the great financial centres of the world. I'd say the most prominent black economist in the UK currently is Dame Sharon White who is the CEO of John Lewis, a large department store chain beloved of the middle class. The civil service has also had to rapidly expand due to Brexit (although this is changing). And the opportunities for better paying post docs in the US can't be ignored. Sometimes one has to go where the pay is. This isn't to say there isn't racism in academia (hint there is) simply that there can be rational reasons for choosing an alternative routes
It is just different in the UK than the US. And other countries in Europe have different experiences. Trying to import US lenses on the problem such as CRT is not necessarily helpful.
A hypothesis: the excessive violence in some communities is related to how much they value their own lives.
In the early 2000s I went on a business trip to Moscow. I learned from our Russian counterpart that many men (at least at that time) died in their fifties. They drank most days to excess and drove even through downtown Moscow at exceptionally high speeds. Consequently they died of liver failure and car accidents. When I asked our counterpart why, he responded that basically their lives were sh*t and they didn’t care if they lived or died. As a relatively wealthy and educated man, he told us, he didn’t feel that way but that it was common of his countrymen.
In this country, the same mentality seems to pervade in the form of criminality and drug use (see opioid crisis). I wonder how much of it boils down to a kind of nihilism that leads people to say what those short-lived Russians did.
It's astonishing to me that Professor Loury (among other conservatives) have cited a statistic that, relative to other types of shootings, the number of kids killed in school shootings is relatively small. I'm not an economist, but I would ask: what about the little girl sitting NEXT TO the girl who gets shot, who smears her friend's blood on herself to save her own life? What about the little girl frantically calling 911 over and over begging for help? What about the children one room over from the room where 19 of their classmates were being slaughtered? How are they accounted for? They didn't die, so no harm no foul? The fact is that thousands and thousands of children have been involved in school shootings. Here's a number: more people die in traffic accidents every month than were killed on 9/11. Imagine President Bush saying that on 9/12. "Only .000375 of all New Yorkers were killed in the attack!" Yet, in response we launched a 20 year war, created a new government agency, ballooned the federal clandestine surveillance apparatus, and I'm still taking my shoes off at the airport! Citation of those numbers in that way seems to betray an ignorance of how terrorism works. Yes, the pathology of violence in poor black neighborhoods is a tragedy, and one that needs to be addressed. We don't have to compare urgencies. I believe Prof. Loury when he says he thinks school shootings are horrific. But maybe the least we can do is to lay to rest the touting of statistics that, while factually accurate, are utterly un-illuminating and a distraction to the larger discussion.
I love what Glenn said around the 36 minute mark. Many of those young teens are not exposed to much outside of their small world. Many years ago, I remember being around many young males who were limited in their imagination. So it was hard for me to interact with them until I studied their culture a little bit more. Then I was able to survive socially in their environment.
These problems is what makes the human development process such a hard task for teachers, social workers, guidance counselors, and every adult involved in those communities trying to make a difference. This is why John is right about the racism thing. There's more to the story than just using that word one thousand times as an explanation.
I’m most excited about the history of the alphabet. I learned about the history of writing at the British Library and remember that specific story about the origin of the alphabet. John has several subjects on the Great Courses.
I see that John McWhorter's class on the alphabet has already been posted on Great Courses Plus. John has six classes posted. Myths of Language Usage (which focuses on the development of English) is my favorite.
John, I'm sure as a professional linguist you'll inform me that my hypothesis is overly simplistic, but I've always wondered if the fact that East Asian written languages are logographic has something to do with their particular cognitive profile. If you'll recall from The Bell Curve, Charles Murray points out that East Asians are skewed towards spatial ability and away from verbal ability, thus supposedly explaining their penchant for mathematical as opposed to verbal fields. I've always wondered if that might also explain why East Asians ended up developing sophisticated logographic writing systems.
I should also add as an aside that ~18% of the global population resides in mainland China. Even with diaspora Chinese included, the total number of ethnic Chinese globally is probably no more than 19-20% of the population worldwide. So not quite 30%. Thankfully there aren't that many of us haha.
Haven’t listened yet but in case I forget later when I have wanted to make sure you have seen the books The Great Demographic Illusion and Beyond Expectations.
Prof. Loury's rebuttal to Prof. McWhorter's "something must be done" doesn't go far enough. Doing the "somethings" proposed in this case would result in millions of Americans - mostly black and brown - swept up in gun dragnets. There's a reason that progressive criminal defense attorneys filed a brief in the Bruen gun control case currently before the Supreme Court on the side of the Second Amendment advocates.
Further, Prof. McWhorter's outrage at the "frequency" of so-called "mass shootings" is an artifact of the massive bulk of the U.S., both demographically and geographically, which allows for the aggregation of events which, geographically, might as well be happening in Spain, France, Switzerland, Albania, Ukraine, or Sweden (Europe has approximately the same land-mass and population as the continental U.S.). It's further an artifact of modern media which doesn't just allow mass shooters to copycat each other, but also allows people to disproportionately freak themselves out about things far removed from their own communities and personal lived experiences.
Several issues. Perhaps, too many, in fact. For now, just one:
You both seem to accept the verbal construct of "gun violence." Yes, of course guns are the tools, but guns just don't jump up off a coffee table and randomly discharge and kill. Better always to say, "violence with a gun," since it correctly links personal behavior with a devastating outcome. And, you both have consistently shied away from discussing the construct of violence and death as cultural attributes that are related to gangsta rap.
No, I don't live in the hood. No, I haven't asked a random inner-city black kid in middle school for a list of the songs s/he has loaded into their phones, but I would bet the list has more gangsta rap like that which Six9ine produces, than with songs of sweet innocence, love, or some other positive theme. Music and culture of youth IS violence and drugs. High crime and murder rates of BonB crime is no surprise. Individual street 'cred' develops from displaying the passion of power, a mean attitude, and a gun.
I like your take on "violence with a gun." But in the age we live, you have to use the language that people understand.
I agree with you to a certain extent concerning music and culture about the hood. I come from that type of environment. It takes someone to make a difference in the lives of those young people early on. But nothing is guaranteed once you take them out of that environment. They would have to relinquish their old mindset and friendships to assimilate and survive in their new world.
OK, More precisely: I agree, a few folks can be "saved," but in the main, one person cannot change the romantic attachment of "black gangsta culture" that is held by millions of black and white kids, grades 5-12.
Thanks, Tag. You are right. Not just someone. I was speaking generally as far as a mentor in that community taking a young person under their wing and making a difference through youth programs and scholarships. There are many coalitions that are formed with adults in many innercity communities.
The music and culture thing comes down to understanding the difference between entertainment and reality. I was surrounded by young males who could not tell the difference. It was sad.
If you you don't have a responsible person at home showing you the difference at a young age, you're screwed.
100% agree. Although, John did mention a few talks back something like .. now they call it gun violence.. see how they did that. (I’m paraphrasing). So I don’t believe they subscribe. The “republicans” are not going to do anything about it” comment drives me crazy. It’s obvious where John gets his news :) see something say something, I’m afraid will be the only way to stop sick teenagers from going into schools and killing children. BUT we haven’t even mastered securing the school for crying out loud. The door didn’t lock. The door didn’t lock!!!! And .. Every teenager has gone into the schools with an automatic weapon and still we have police with their single pistols as the first line of defense.
IMO, local cultural values about guns and violence are diverse. I taught in rural community for 3 decades with only a few thoughts about tragedies like Uvalde, even though our county/town was a deer hunting mecca and 98% of all homes had at least one weapon. That experience is entirely different from the tragic consequences that are recorded daily in large cities, even though on a per capita basis, we had far more weapons per/household. Proximity to guns and ammo have almost no relationship to attitudes of those who might consider terrible use.
I do agree with your suggestion that police (and trained teachers) should have access to weapons as a safety precaution. Gun-free school zones make as much sense as bank safes without locks.
I started teaching in 1981. I am retired this year. I have taught in multiple states. School safety rules are the same.
Rule #1 keep all exterior doors lock (the doors must be constructed so a shooter can not make entry if locked.) Have controlled entry.
Rule#2 keep classroom doors locked at all times. (There should be no windows in classroom doors)
Rule #3 place students so they can not be targeted through the door or exterior windows. In some schools this is almost impossible due to window placement. Some modification could change this issue. But most don't go to trouble or expense.
I kept my classroom door locked at all times. Most teachers didn't. I had a co-teacher who would unlock the classroom door after I locked. We had a few heated discussions over this.
I once had a principal who walked around and checked classroom doors. He let you know if they were not locked. This type of principal was rare.
Students and teaches will open exterior doors from inside which allows unauthorized entry. Sometimes prop them open for air flow etc.
Also students take the lockdown practice very lightly. They laugh, talk, and joke. That makes noise and shooters know where students are located.
Here are the questions to ask.
1. Were the exterior doors locked.
2. Was the school following controlled entry protocol.
3. Were the doors hardened so a shooter could not make entry if locked.
4. Were the classroom doors locked.
5. Were there windows in classroom doors.
6. Was lockdown protocol taken seriously and followed.
There was a failure at one on more of these school safety steps. Find the failure point and fix it in all schools. My guess is one or more of the three rules was not followed. If the shooter does not make entry and they can't target through windows, the outcome is different.
As a teacher who spent decades safe guarding students from the potential of school shootings this discussion on gun control is a distraction and putting more students at risk by not focusing on what really keeps students safe. Rule #1 keep all exterior doors lock (the doors must be constructed so a shooter can not make entry if locked.) Have controlled entry. Rule#2 keep classroom doors locked at all times. (There should be no windows in classroom doors). Rule #3 place students so they can not be targeted through the door or exterior windows. In some schools this is almost impossible due to window placement. Some modification could change this issue. But most don't go to trouble or expense.
Listening to the discussion regarding gun control, I just wanted to point out that it is actually feasible to manufacture .223/5.56mm rounds at home with a relatively inexpensive kit. You can even reuse the casings after shooting them, so I'm not sure limiting ammo purchases would work. I think people should be required to carry insurance on their guns. We require it for cars because of the enormous damage they can cause. Guns can cause greater damage than cars and if you shoot someone, it doesn't damage your gun like it would your car, yet we allow people deemed too irresponsible to drive cars to still carry guns. I don't think prohibiting guns is going to work as a means of reducing gun violence at this point because there are too many to be able to confiscate.
I was pleased to see the Sewell Report being discussed. Are its recommendations being taken up? To a certain extent they are -- Kemi Badenoch who is the UK Equalities Minister (immigrant from Nigeria as it happens) has implemented some. Sajid Javid (2nd generation So Asian), the UK Sec for Health has implemented others including a Dept for looking at inequalities in health. One of the first changes was with the fingertip blood pressure gauges which do not accurately read darker skin.
I believe there are changes in policing -- stop and search happening etc because the number of black youths being killed far exceeds white youths due to street violence, generally gang related. Pritti Patel is the Home Sec -- a South Asian immigrant. The Home Office is notoriously dysfunctional though.
The first tranche of UK 2021 (ie England and Wales because Scotland made a mess of theirs) comes on 28 June 2022. From the 2011 census, the UK black population is 3.8% and mainly concentrated in large urban areas particularly in London. Other places like the North East of England have a much smaller population -- the North East has suffered depopulation in recent times because of chronic unemployment and thus it is not altogether surprising that immigrants want to go where the most economic opportunity is. Newcastle Upon Tyne is one of the few cities where its sewers are too large for its population. London has the opposite problem (one which is difficult to fix due to the historic nature of the area).
Academia in Britain also is notoriously underpaid. The City of London traditionally has offered much more opportunities for economists as it is one of the great financial centres of the world. I'd say the most prominent black economist in the UK currently is Dame Sharon White who is the CEO of John Lewis, a large department store chain beloved of the middle class. The civil service has also had to rapidly expand due to Brexit (although this is changing). And the opportunities for better paying post docs in the US can't be ignored. Sometimes one has to go where the pay is. This isn't to say there isn't racism in academia (hint there is) simply that there can be rational reasons for choosing an alternative routes
It is just different in the UK than the US. And other countries in Europe have different experiences. Trying to import US lenses on the problem such as CRT is not necessarily helpful.
A hypothesis: the excessive violence in some communities is related to how much they value their own lives.
In the early 2000s I went on a business trip to Moscow. I learned from our Russian counterpart that many men (at least at that time) died in their fifties. They drank most days to excess and drove even through downtown Moscow at exceptionally high speeds. Consequently they died of liver failure and car accidents. When I asked our counterpart why, he responded that basically their lives were sh*t and they didn’t care if they lived or died. As a relatively wealthy and educated man, he told us, he didn’t feel that way but that it was common of his countrymen.
In this country, the same mentality seems to pervade in the form of criminality and drug use (see opioid crisis). I wonder how much of it boils down to a kind of nihilism that leads people to say what those short-lived Russians did.
It's astonishing to me that Professor Loury (among other conservatives) have cited a statistic that, relative to other types of shootings, the number of kids killed in school shootings is relatively small. I'm not an economist, but I would ask: what about the little girl sitting NEXT TO the girl who gets shot, who smears her friend's blood on herself to save her own life? What about the little girl frantically calling 911 over and over begging for help? What about the children one room over from the room where 19 of their classmates were being slaughtered? How are they accounted for? They didn't die, so no harm no foul? The fact is that thousands and thousands of children have been involved in school shootings. Here's a number: more people die in traffic accidents every month than were killed on 9/11. Imagine President Bush saying that on 9/12. "Only .000375 of all New Yorkers were killed in the attack!" Yet, in response we launched a 20 year war, created a new government agency, ballooned the federal clandestine surveillance apparatus, and I'm still taking my shoes off at the airport! Citation of those numbers in that way seems to betray an ignorance of how terrorism works. Yes, the pathology of violence in poor black neighborhoods is a tragedy, and one that needs to be addressed. We don't have to compare urgencies. I believe Prof. Loury when he says he thinks school shootings are horrific. But maybe the least we can do is to lay to rest the touting of statistics that, while factually accurate, are utterly un-illuminating and a distraction to the larger discussion.
I love what Glenn said around the 36 minute mark. Many of those young teens are not exposed to much outside of their small world. Many years ago, I remember being around many young males who were limited in their imagination. So it was hard for me to interact with them until I studied their culture a little bit more. Then I was able to survive socially in their environment.
These problems is what makes the human development process such a hard task for teachers, social workers, guidance counselors, and every adult involved in those communities trying to make a difference. This is why John is right about the racism thing. There's more to the story than just using that word one thousand times as an explanation.
I’m most excited about the history of the alphabet. I learned about the history of writing at the British Library and remember that specific story about the origin of the alphabet. John has several subjects on the Great Courses.
I see that John McWhorter's class on the alphabet has already been posted on Great Courses Plus. John has six classes posted. Myths of Language Usage (which focuses on the development of English) is my favorite.
https://www.wondrium.com/myths-lies-and-half-truths-of-language-usage?tn=Expert_tray_Course_0_1_230
Glenn, you probably have free access to these lectures from the Brown University Library.
Glen, we’re you European talks recorded? If so, have they been posted online? Many thanks…
John, I'm sure as a professional linguist you'll inform me that my hypothesis is overly simplistic, but I've always wondered if the fact that East Asian written languages are logographic has something to do with their particular cognitive profile. If you'll recall from The Bell Curve, Charles Murray points out that East Asians are skewed towards spatial ability and away from verbal ability, thus supposedly explaining their penchant for mathematical as opposed to verbal fields. I've always wondered if that might also explain why East Asians ended up developing sophisticated logographic writing systems.
I should also add as an aside that ~18% of the global population resides in mainland China. Even with diaspora Chinese included, the total number of ethnic Chinese globally is probably no more than 19-20% of the population worldwide. So not quite 30%. Thankfully there aren't that many of us haha.
all the talk about bangladeshis. i feel seen :-)
fwiw, obscure fact is that bengali muslims were actually present in harlem early in the 20th century and intermarried with black women https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674503854
Haven’t listened yet but in case I forget later when I have wanted to make sure you have seen the books The Great Demographic Illusion and Beyond Expectations.
Be well and safe travels
Art
Prof. Loury's rebuttal to Prof. McWhorter's "something must be done" doesn't go far enough. Doing the "somethings" proposed in this case would result in millions of Americans - mostly black and brown - swept up in gun dragnets. There's a reason that progressive criminal defense attorneys filed a brief in the Bruen gun control case currently before the Supreme Court on the side of the Second Amendment advocates.
Further, Prof. McWhorter's outrage at the "frequency" of so-called "mass shootings" is an artifact of the massive bulk of the U.S., both demographically and geographically, which allows for the aggregation of events which, geographically, might as well be happening in Spain, France, Switzerland, Albania, Ukraine, or Sweden (Europe has approximately the same land-mass and population as the continental U.S.). It's further an artifact of modern media which doesn't just allow mass shooters to copycat each other, but also allows people to disproportionately freak themselves out about things far removed from their own communities and personal lived experiences.
Several issues. Perhaps, too many, in fact. For now, just one:
You both seem to accept the verbal construct of "gun violence." Yes, of course guns are the tools, but guns just don't jump up off a coffee table and randomly discharge and kill. Better always to say, "violence with a gun," since it correctly links personal behavior with a devastating outcome. And, you both have consistently shied away from discussing the construct of violence and death as cultural attributes that are related to gangsta rap.
No, I don't live in the hood. No, I haven't asked a random inner-city black kid in middle school for a list of the songs s/he has loaded into their phones, but I would bet the list has more gangsta rap like that which Six9ine produces, than with songs of sweet innocence, love, or some other positive theme. Music and culture of youth IS violence and drugs. High crime and murder rates of BonB crime is no surprise. Individual street 'cred' develops from displaying the passion of power, a mean attitude, and a gun.
Consider the the Kia Boys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbTrLyqL_nw&ab_channel=TommyG
How is anyone going to change that cultural pattern? Been that way for decades. My realistic view --> no substantive hope for change. Sorry.
I like your take on "violence with a gun." But in the age we live, you have to use the language that people understand.
I agree with you to a certain extent concerning music and culture about the hood. I come from that type of environment. It takes someone to make a difference in the lives of those young people early on. But nothing is guaranteed once you take them out of that environment. They would have to relinquish their old mindset and friendships to assimilate and survive in their new world.
OK, More precisely: I agree, a few folks can be "saved," but in the main, one person cannot change the romantic attachment of "black gangsta culture" that is held by millions of black and white kids, grades 5-12.
Thanks, Tag. You are right. Not just someone. I was speaking generally as far as a mentor in that community taking a young person under their wing and making a difference through youth programs and scholarships. There are many coalitions that are formed with adults in many innercity communities.
The music and culture thing comes down to understanding the difference between entertainment and reality. I was surrounded by young males who could not tell the difference. It was sad.
If you you don't have a responsible person at home showing you the difference at a young age, you're screwed.
Good reply!!! Thanks.
100% agree. Although, John did mention a few talks back something like .. now they call it gun violence.. see how they did that. (I’m paraphrasing). So I don’t believe they subscribe. The “republicans” are not going to do anything about it” comment drives me crazy. It’s obvious where John gets his news :) see something say something, I’m afraid will be the only way to stop sick teenagers from going into schools and killing children. BUT we haven’t even mastered securing the school for crying out loud. The door didn’t lock. The door didn’t lock!!!! And .. Every teenager has gone into the schools with an automatic weapon and still we have police with their single pistols as the first line of defense.
IMO, local cultural values about guns and violence are diverse. I taught in rural community for 3 decades with only a few thoughts about tragedies like Uvalde, even though our county/town was a deer hunting mecca and 98% of all homes had at least one weapon. That experience is entirely different from the tragic consequences that are recorded daily in large cities, even though on a per capita basis, we had far more weapons per/household. Proximity to guns and ammo have almost no relationship to attitudes of those who might consider terrible use.
I do agree with your suggestion that police (and trained teachers) should have access to weapons as a safety precaution. Gun-free school zones make as much sense as bank safes without locks.