A reader offered a personal experience of his own in response to our post the other day titled Watching Our Kids Self-Destruct. He writes:
Your most recent blog entry struck a chord with me. I have to relate my own experience from [a local] Middle School last year.
I was substituting in an 8th grade classroom, and one of the girls in the homeroom came in dressed in the traditional post-"Matrix" "outsider" attire of a black trenchcoat and dark eyeshadow. I also noticed some scratching on her wrists when she took the trenchcoat off during part of the period. If it was cutting, it was halfhearted at best, but still disturbing given the context of what I saw next.
She was also in my 4th period social studies class and she sat right in front of the podium. I noticed her binder was covered with quotes from the Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, and most strikingly, the Columbine killers - one I can remember to this day: "The lonely man strikes with absolute anger. - Eric Harris."
During my free period I walked down to the guidance office and asked to talk to someone about the girl and what I had noticed about her questionable identifications. They told me to call down later and talk to a guidance counselor.
Towards the end of the day I had another free period so I called down and got a guidance counselor. "Oh, we've told her she's not supposed to write things like that in school before. I guess we'll have to have a talk with her again."
I was pretty numbed by the thought that the best thing these highly-paid, highly-trusted "guidance counselors" could come up with was "we will tell her not to do that in school anymore." In my mind someone who is covering their binder in quotes from mass murderers has a problem that needs to be addressed more definitively. It is a disservice not
only to the other students and staff, but especially to the girl herself, not to help her by figuring out what is going on.
But hey, the guidance counselors collected their paychecks that weekend whether her problems got solved or not.
Sometimes we misinterpret other people's responses to us, of course, but if the counselors in this instance did indeed respond as insouciantly as our correspondent perceived them to, then their indifference is no less disturbing than that a 14 year-old girl would find Eric Harris worth quoting. Perhaps more.