Teacher refused to grade report on guns

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The left’s war continues

Fil Alvarado @ Fox News-Dallas:

A Denton teacher allegedly refused to grade two student reports because they were about guns. Now one mother is demanded answers and an apology.

Marshall Williams said he and his classmates were told by Mr. Dewey Christian at Denton High School to write a report on anything that they were interested in using different types of sentence structures. He chose to write about the Fort Worth gun show.

But then he said his English teacher told him he would get a zero on the assignment because of the topic.

Williams’ mom confronted the teacher. She asked him if he had outlined any criteria for the topic and posted a video of his response on YouTube.

“So because it had guns in it you refused to grade it?” Kimberly Williams asked.

“Not just guns, but you see we’ve had a certain amount of violence and things in schools…” Christian replied.

“I’m not asking you about that. I’m asking you about the subject matter of his paper and why you took issue with it,” the mother said.

“The problem was not the subject matter…” the teacher said.

“You just told me it was the subject matter,” the mother said.

The family demanded an apology.

The Denton Independent School District said in a statement, “The teacher has accepted the paper and apologized to the student for misperceptions. The teacher’s intent was for guns not to be trivialized in any school situation because of recent events.”

“I don’t feel like I’ve gotten an apology yet. I feel like he has just stomped on our right to free speech. He told us we would not be allowed to express ourselves and didn’t even consider what we had said. He didn’t have a clue of the content of my paper before he told me… he just knew that my paper was about guns before he told me that I would be getting a zero on the assignment,” Marshall Williams said.

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“I don’t feel like I’ve gotten an apology yet. I feel like he has just stomped on our right to free speech. He told us we would not be allowed to express ourselves and didn’t even consider what we had said. He didn’t have a clue of the content of my paper before he told me… he just knew that my paper was about guns before he told me that I would be getting a zero on the assignment,” Marshall Williams said.

The insufferable little twit and his wiseass mom have probably gotten about as much apology as they deserve. Here’s an article with a photo of the jackass. (The boy, not his enabling mother.)

An assignment to “write about anything you want” shouldn’t be taken as a challenge to see what you can get away with. There are and should be limitations on free speech in a classroom.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, a photograph shows Williams’ holding a gun. Despite how seriously he took the matter of his misconceived right to ‘free speech’ in his gun essay, he in turn decides to trivialize the deaths of more than 35 Americans in his caption: “Today I held both the guns used in Aurora and at Sandy Hook Elementary. Contrary to popular belief, everyone in my vicinity did not die.”

Like his mother, FOX News is enabling an immature jackass who doesn’t deserve to be rewarded with media attention.

@Greg: #1
“An assignment to “write about anything you want” shouldn’t be taken as a challenge to see what you can get away with. There are and should be limitations on free speech in a classroom.”
Since his paper wasn’t quoted from, this is pure negative speculation on your part. As for his Facebook posting, the school should have no control over that.
He was making a valid point, and that you choose to be offended by it is not, and should not, be his problem.
Freedom of speech eliminates any “freedom” to not be offended.

And, yes, he DOES “have a right to be so insensitive”.
This is not a society set up to cater to the hypersensitive…yet.
This society is set up for us all to share, it will not satisfy any one of us completely. Deal with it.

@Greg:

Freedom of speech includes allowing free speech that you do not support and yes, even that which some might find offensive. Otherwise Curt would not suffer you Greg, or other anti-conservatives, to post here. Your side seems to be the intolerant, hypocritical ones, in censoring and deeming as dangerous opinions that you disagree with as requiring “limitations”. Were the student’s paper on a radical leftist theme, you would no doubt be fully supportive of his right to “write about anything he wants”.

@Petercat:

And, yes, he DOES “have a right to be so insensitive”.

Not in the context of a paper to be read aloud in a school classroom, he doesn’t. Classrooms aren’t open venues for the full expression of Constitutional rights. Were they, they would cease to be functional classrooms.

So far as pure negative speculation on my part goes, why should we assume FOX News isn’t engaging in the exact opposite, glossing over the fact of a knowingly inappropriate presentation to give the impression that young Mr. Williams has had his Constitutional rights trammeled by some left-leaning teacher? FOX didn’t have a word to say about the actual content of the paper. For all we know, the teacher had every reason to suspect exactly what the kid was up to the moment he opened his mouth and started reading. Teachers can generally figure out their students.

The Fox video is interesting. The kids’ displays of total, uncomprehending innocence are deserving of an Emmy nomination. I’m sure they both just happened to decide that firearms would be a suitable classroom topic in the wake of—what? Twenty-six recent school-shooting-related wakes? The kids don’t seem to be total idiots. They had to suspect that the topic wouldn’t be well received.

The mother was taking her little darling’s side–to the extent of badgering his teacher, and trying to turn a minor exercise of classroom discipline into a combined First and Second Amendment case. And what was the extent of this discipline? Rewrite your paper about something else, or get a zero? Since when don’t teachers have a right to say something like that? Who’s supposed to be running the classroom?

@Greg:

There are and should be limitations on free speech in a classroom.

Well it is up to the teacher to set those limits ahead of time. clearly this teacher wanted to move the goalposts after the fact.

@Greg:
Make no mistake, that teacher is one armed assault away from arming himself…unless of course he just cowers and dies.

If not in the classrooms, then where Greg? I blame your teachers…

Greg has shown his tendency towards the tyrannical in his postings here. Not that many of us had not seen it before, mind you.

I imagine that, like Ditto above, that if the paper was on a contentious issue closely associated with the left, even the radical far-left, and that the teacher took the same route in disallowing the paper, that Greg would be blasting the teacher instead of the student.

@Dan StPeter, #8:

If not in the classrooms, then where Greg? I blame your teachers…

Here we have conservatives reflexively lining up against a teacher’s entirely reasonable exercise of classroom authority, simply because a student’s testing of the disciplinary boundaries was framed within the topic of firearms.

Adults really shouldn’t be so easily and transparently manipulated by teenage children. Nor by news commentators and politicians, for that matter.

@Greg:

Adults really shouldn’t be so easily and transparently manipulated by teenage children. Nor by news commentators and politicians, for that matter

Any teacher who lacks basic common sense should be standing in the unemployment lines, not collecting a paycheck funded by the taxpayers.

Explain why, when we had rifle clubs and skeet shooting clubs in high schools we did not have tragedies like Columbine and Sandy Hook, if you can.

Bigshot with his AR and Superman tee. You and mommy got your 15 minutes. Won’t accept teacher’s apology.
Stop posturing punk. Join The Marines..

@retire05, #11:

There are likely many reasons, none having a damn thing to do with rifle or skeet shooting clubs. Part of the problem might be a breakdown in the respect that children were once expected to show for their elders and for authority figures. Teachers, for example.

This was one of those points that most people used to agree on across partisan lines. It’s a once-obvious point of agreement that confrontational politics seems to be eroding.

With this particular news story, firearms and freedom of speech aren’t really the issues. They’re the distractions.

@Richard Wheeler, #12:

BINGO!

And yet if he had written on how to use a condom the teacher would have instinctively awarded him an “A”…but I’ve said too much already…