4th grader suspended for pretending to have the One Ring

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Boy Suspended for pretending to have the One Ring
Kermit Elementary School officials called it a threat when the 9-year-old boy, Aiden Steward, in a playful act of make-believe, told a classmate he could make him disappear with a ring forged in fictional Middle Earth’s Mount Doom.
Previously he had been suspended for calling another student "black" and bringing his own book to science class.

Crazy.

In an age of metal detectors in schools they get upset at a kid playfully "threatening" another kid with a fantasy "weapon" from the Hobbit movie!

Go figure.

Where was this school, Tehran?

TEXAS?! The kid's lucky they didn't string him up!

There are some really anal-retentives running that state.

Last edited by Fnord on 03 Feb 2015, 9:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

In a county next to the least populated one in the US.

Public schools (and more than a few private schools) appear now to be nothing other than prison-introduction facilities. They are ruled by too many laws and policies, they are patrolled by law-enforcement officers, even the ubiquitous vending machine is now behind cages to prevent vandalism. Students are indoctrinated daily with Common Core instruction and "zero-tolerance" thinking. Autodidactic survival skills are de rigueur.

In the face of all this from so-called educators, I amn't surprised that the Chicken Littles of academia broke out in a cold sweat and were apoplectic about a non-existent ring. Our national education system is clearly in the hands of abjectly incapable individuals armed like petty marionettes. The real power, their puppeteers, are the real threat. Perhaps that is why many suggest that, until recently, education never was and never should have become a federally operated scheme.

Left to their local educators, this embarrassment of authority probably wouldn't have have played out.

The fact that they are so stupid as to take a threat based on "magic" ring seriously speaks volumes.

Would they have prefered the N word?


A book in school. The horror!! !


Some day it will be "Heavily armed police SWAT team guns down 30 elementary school children for having a snowball fight during recess. Spokespersons for the school and the police department stress that this was a dangerous situation that had be brought under control for the safety of all".

Hallelujah!

Does anyone agree that reasons for kids getting suspended from school are increasing in ridiculousness?

The US is such a complicated and bewildering place to me. Up here you have to travel for quite a while to get to another province or territory, while in the US there all those many states packed together like sardines so that a traveler can drive through more than one in a day, and what's legal and perfectly acceptable in one state is a huge no-no in another. It's scary.

TLOTR is fantasy, and much of fantasy is about the conflict of good against evil. Adults think that kids can't tell the difference between what's real and what's just pretend but most kids over 5 can. When I was a kid I would play with baby dolls but that was just pretending and I knew the difference between that and raising a real baby. A lot less sleep and a lot more mess...

Americans overreact to everything.

Oh come on now there are plenty of americans who find this kind of thing to be BS, we aren't all in support of every single thing that happens here there are varying opinions and a lot of people are quite unhappy with the current system and our government.

That is a very stupid reason to suspend a kid no matter how you slice it.

No, a minority of Americans overreact to everything. A very shrill, very loud, very annoying minority, that will constantly harp on how innocuous things are dangerous and must be stopped before they cause society to crumble into a bad version of a Mad Max movie. It's the slippery slope that everybody knows about but nobody wants to take heed of.

Lets look at some examples.

Kids should not be playing with real firearms. They shouldn't run around and shoot actual guns at each other. Rather than simply teaching kids not to point actual guns at each other and shoot each other and depending on that to prevent daily bloodbaths at recess as had actually worked for decades, it was decided by some that toy guns would encourage kids to start shooting each other, so they were banned from school. After the banning of the toy guns which kids would pretend to shoot each other with, they decided to ban toys with guns on them - such as Army men figures. As the school violence continued to rise, they took it a step further and banned anything that resembled a gun, such as a stick or a pointed finger. Simply banning the imagination didn't seem to stop kids from their newfound interest in shooting up the schools, so the idea of a threat, any threat and not simply an actual, credible threat, must be taken very seriously and nipped in the bud before it ever gets a chance to become a politically incorrect idea, such as turning someone invisible with jewelry.

It's not the nonexistent ring that is the problem, it's not that any idiot believes that the story is real and the kid actually has the ring, it's that the kid said he was going to make the other kid disappear with it. What was simply brushed off as imagination 30 years ago is now put in the same category as a serious threat to do harm to another, which could actually be carried out and doesn't involve wizards. The "threat" was the problem.

The reactionaries have gone so unbelievably far overboard that we now have adults suspending children from school for threatening to do magic. Because it's a threat, and as we all know, threats are bad. If this jackassery isn't brought to an immediate screeching halt then a decade from now we will see children suspended from school for
saying they don't like someone, or calling someone poopyhead or boogerface, or even not displaying what is by then deemed the appropriate level of team spirit or voicing an opinion that the authorities don't believe is helpful.

While some of you may read this and say that my predictions are extreme, bear in mind that 20 years ago nobody could imagine this kid getting suspended for pretending to be Bilbo Baggins.

I never believed the people who said that we are heading toward an Orwellian society, but now I just hope that when my grandkids get their own apartments they have a good spot to put the FreeVee.

When I was in high school, many cars in the parking lot contained at least one rifle, shotgun, or handgun. And the rifles and shotguns in pickups were on gunracks just in front of the back window.

One time the prize in a school contest was a .22 revolver.

And another time there was a fundraiser selling magazines that you could get prizes for by selling magazines. One neighbor got a .22 semi-automatic rifle and my cousin got a 30-30 rifle. Several other people got rifles as well.

Quite a few had good sized lockback knives, but my pocket knife was a normal pocket knife with multiple blades. And when it was cold enough to wear a coat, I often had ammo in my pockets.

And nobody thought a thing about it.

He got disciplined earlier for having a science book with him? It depicted a pregnant woman, oh the HORROR!! !

Schools just keep getting weirder and weirder.

At the high school here, in the second parking lot, the boys have guns in the trucks during hunting season. Nobody's ever had a problem with it. But then they don't go overboard with that crap at the school down here. The high school cheerleaders raised money by having a squirrel hunt. Real squirrels, real guns, real ammo. It was on somebody's private land. There is a big hunting culture down here, just like there is a big football culture and a big religious culture. Three things they will never see as bad in this school district are guns, God, and college football lol.

Lol, this is hilarious.

Just to play devil's advocate though, what if the boy really wants to make this other kid disappear forever?

Okay, I realize this is dumb. I'm just thinking. Yeah, it's dumb though.

You need a much better reason to suspend the kid other than make-believe. Perhaps if there was some truly sinister motive behind it but this seems rather difficult to swallow.