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Menopausal Moments: One Reason Teachers Don’t Need Guns
Students often want to write papers about the same old topics. Abortion. Legalizing weed. The death penalty. Gun control.
Read a few dozen of those papers, and you’ll want to bang your head against a wall, or stick a knife right in your own damn head. Knowing this, and fearing for my life, I banned papers on these often-plagiarized topics.
But I did sometimes allow class discussion.
If the topic of gun control came up in my classroom, I’d ask my students to imagine that I had come to class in a menopausal rage.
“If I had a knife, and I threw it at John there in the back row, and it stuck right in his head, what would y’all do?” I’d ask.
Students would laugh, scream, squeal, or pick at their fingernails, but one would finally say “We’d jump on you.”
“Exactly,” I’d say. “Now imagine I came into class with a semi-automatic weapon and started mowing y’all down in one magnificent menopausal moment. What would you do then?”
I wouldn’t make that argument in a classroom today; in fact, I never made it again after Sandy Hook. But there’s another reason teachers shouldn’t have guns besides being driven mad by menopause or…
