Salon.com > High School

High schooler suspended for poem on understanding Adam Lanza

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:50:00 +0000

A 17-year-old high school student in San Francisco has been suspended indefinitely after she wrote a poem in her personal notebook which included the lines, "I understand the killings in Connecticut; I understand why he pulled the trigger."

A teacher at the Life Learning Academy found Courtni Webb's notebook and reported the poem to the principal who suspended the student. The school district is now deciding whether and when Webb can return to the small vocational school. Webb and her mother have reached out to the media to decry the school's actions.

They told NBC's Today that Webb was simply expressing herself and exploring ideas about helplessness and darkness that she believed were behind the Newtown massacre. "Never in my life have I heard that you couldn't mention a tragedy that happened. I didn't say that I agree with it, I said I simply understand it" Webb told Today, noting that the she felt the school was making her look like "a monster." Her mother said that she believes her daughter's free speech is being violated.

Via NBC:

NYPD block off whole JPMorgan building to arrest three teens

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:24:00 +0000

The entire 60 floors of JPMorgan Chase's downtown New York office building were temporarily blocked off Wednesday so that three high-schoolers could be arrested, according to a news release from anti-corruption activists.

The students were staging a sit-in protest at the bank headquarters, "demanding full disclosure of the bank’s anonymous political expenditures," reported an announcement from 99Rise, the anti-corruption group of which the three young people are members. "The students, who delivered a petition to the bank over three weeks ago articulating their demand, refused to leave the bank’s premises until the requested information was handed over to the public. The bank instead chose to shut down the entire 60 floor building have them arrested," the release read. A live Twitter feed from the group reporting on the small sit-in noted that police set up barricades around the building, closing entrances to the public.

99 Rise describes itself as "a new anti-corruption movement to get Big Money out of American politics." The three students have reportedly been taken to a police station in the Bronx.

An excited Drake: “I got my high school diploma”

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:01:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- A day after earning his high school diploma, an excited Drake performed hit songs for a few hundred people at an event for Tyra Banks.

The 25-year-old told the crowd Thursday night that he took a small break from music and "spent some time going back to high school."

"I got my high school diploma," he said with excitement as the crowd roared.

Drake also posted on Twitter late Wednesday that he earned a 97 percent on his final exam and an 88 percent in his last class through work with a private tutor. The Canadian dropped out of high school, ironically, to star in the high school TV series "Degrassi: The Next Generation." He played the role of Jimmy Brooks.

My students called me gay slurs and worse

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:51:00 +0000

They tell you to make it a teachable moment, to make it an opportunity to start a “critical conversation," to use the situation to engage your students in making connections to their own experiences with racism and prejudice.

But when your 15-year-old student interrupts your lesson to tell you that he “hope[s] you die of AIDS,” all that goes out the window. In that moment, if you can think of anything beyond your overwhelming instinct to leave the room and never come back, you certainly don’t think about the ways you can turn the comment into a mature conversation about the value of tolerance. Maybe in next week’s lesson plans. Maybe after you write your assessments and compile your readings. Maybe after you think about strategies for engagement. But not now, not in this moment, not as he spits “faggot” at you from across the room.

And so, feigning calmness, you send him out to the discipline office, pretend not to be affected, and move on with the lesson, quietly counting down the minutes to the end of the day, to the moment of your escape.

My life as a teen brawler

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0000

I didn’t cry when I shredded my knee in ninth grade, even though it was the worst pain I’ve ever felt or hope to feel again.

I was 15 years old, in the middle of that aching, interminable era of pent-up urges, when you want to do a lot of things but simply can’t. I wanted to cry then and at plenty of other times, but inhibition always won out. I wanted to spend my days running free and knocking into shit, but instead I sat imprisoned in the classroom. Most cruelly, I wanted to fuck a girl, or at the very least, God willing, perhaps touch a breast. That wasn’t happening either.

All of which goes to say that I relished the frequent spats of roughhousing that would break out in school throughout the day. “Brawling,” we called it, in ironic hyperbole. It was wholesome, thudding contact, hardly “fighting.” Punches were rare, restricted to when somebody was having a really bad day.

How do I tell her I like her?

Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Salon,

I'm a 17-year-old guy and I'm a junior in high school, and I've had this friend, this girl, that I've known since our freshman year. I've liked her since freshman year and I've just now this year become really great friends with her. My best friend moved to Missouri last year and he just moved back. Him and this girl that I've liked forever started going out (they have only known each other for four or five months). This made me wonder what I've done wrong for the past three years of my life with her, but that's not the end of the story. They went out for three weeks and then she broke up with him because he was "too clingy" and she "sucked at relationships," or at least that's what she told me. She trusts me with EVERYTHING. She goes to me with things, tells me I'm funny, hangs out with me, and constantly drives me crazy for her. Right now I feel confident enough to do something about the way I feel, but since her and my best friend went out doesn't that make her "off limits" according to the man law or guy code?