It's no revelation that unusual things happen daily across this land of ours, but grade-schoolers getting hauled out of class in handcuffs for drawing stick people?
That's precisely what happened Jan. 24 in Ocala, Fla. According to an Associated Press account, two boys, ages 9 and 10, were caught drawing stick facsimiles of themselves doing bloody stick-violence to an apparent stick facsimile of a classmate. Rendered in pencil and red crayon and accompanied by \misspelled profanities,"" the doodles brought the boys not only suspensions, but felony charges of making a written threat.
Regardless of what misspelling simple, phonetically straightforward four-letter words means for the declared success of No Child Left Behind, this incident struck me as reactionary at best, ludicrous at worst.
Who among us has not at one time put something decidedly tasteless yet tangibly harmless down on paper (or into binary), only to have trouble materialize when the wrong party sees it? It's part of the human condition.
But the tendency to see behavioral red flags where there are probably mere pink Post-it Notes endures, and it is not a new one.
When I was in middle school, an artistic (not autistic, despite some reports) friend drew a series of hilariously accurate caricatures of her teachers-until one confiscated her notebook, called in her parents and lobbied to force her into therapy for her ""anger issues.""
And it's not just documentary antics-another friend told me he once climbed a tree on a grade school field trip, but his teacher, displeased by his display of arboreal agility, called in his parents and declared him ""out of control.""
This issue of expressive freedom is close to my own void where most people have a heart, for as a child, I produced some, shall I say, ""unconventional"" work. My masterpiece was a comic strip, coming at the height of my prolific fifth grade ""Nobody Wants to Sit by Me at Lunch"" period, titled ""Dick Meets a Marmoset.""
It told a tale, in magic marker and penciled prose more rife with malapropisms than a presidential news conference, of an unlikely friendship forged between a young lad and a cross-dressing marmoset distressed over misplacing his credit card. (Remember that, you may see it under glass one day in the Smithsonian.)
My mother maintains she probably ""should have"" punished me for such shenanigans, but was simply too busy laughing at them. And the cool thing is, the parents in the anecdotes above reacted in kind.
Though it may fly contrary to the popular ""zero tolerance"" approach, there's something to be said for letting kids be kids before they're conditioned-or nowadays drugged-into an imagination vacuum.
And as for bloody stick figures, they can have a place in civil society-for instance, in helping to explain President Bush's proposed health savings accounts. Picture this: A stick man with a stick blunt instrument embedded in his head and spurting crayon blood walks up to a stick doctor and says, ""Excuse me, I'd like to have this removed. But first, now that I have ownership over my own health care, can you give me your rates, plus the rates of your competitors? I don't want to pay too much.""
See? Creativity, people. Ritalin, I bite my thumb at thee.
flamingpurvis@yahoo.com.
