Chicago School Punishes Thought Crime

Hard to know what to make of this without knowing exactly what the student wrote:

Told to express emotion for a creative-writing class, high school senior Allen Lee penned an essay so disturbing to his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct, officials said Wednesday. Lee, 18, a straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with the misdemeanor for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location. ...

Some legal experts said the charge is troubling because it was over an essay that even police admit contained no direct threats against anyone at the school.

We'll see. Maybe I'm just getting into semantics here, but a straight-A's student who follows the Creative Writing teacher's instructions and quietly hands in an essay on the assigned topic — "communicating ideas and emotions through writing" — can hardly be said to be guilty of "disorderly conduct."

Whether he's a threat to anyone is not for me to say, but I'll venture a wild guess and say that the whole thing smacks of an idiotic overreaction.

And the charges against Lee wouldn't have anything to do with the fact he's Asian-American, would they — just like you know who?

Interesting parallel: the Virginia Tech shooter had creeped out his Creative Writing teacher, too (with good reason, as it turns out). Are writing teachers becoming the first line of defense against real and imagined mass murderers?

 [Thanks, Nicky and Erik!]

Comments

[Ben]

Yeah, I live in Chicago and when I heard about it on the news it sounded kinda fishy. But, officials here are very prone to overreact. Just look at our froi gras law. I hope the kid gets out of it and then everyone involved has to apologize publicly....but this is America.

[Myrtle]

I only wish this would happen enough for these kinds of feely assignments to stop.

It would be nice to take a class without someone trying to get in your head.

[miche]

Kneejerk reaction to VA Tech. Typical.

[Mike]

The cops released pieces of the essay today (sorry, no link because I'm lazy - google it). He wrote about shooting people and then fornicating with the corpses. Then, at the end, it apparently said that he would never do anything like that, although it would be funny if he did. The people that he shot in the essay had no identifying characteristics.

[Martin Owens]

I guess there is a difference between IQ and smarts.

Glad to hear the kid is an ‘A’ student and all that, but you don’t have to be a Nobel physicist to figure out that

a. people in general are jumpy after a very publicized mass murder like VT

b. Teachers and faculty in particular would be jumpy, and

c. Writing like that, about shooting people and buggering the corpses, is not, shall we say, a reassuring, timely theme. It’s genteel way of “flipping the bird” to the powers that be, and I have a hard time believing an ‘A’ student wouldn’t realize this.

Add to that, the fact that yes, both he and the VT shooter are Asian, and you have the perfect prescription for overreaction by school authorities, many of whom are scared little mediocrities anyway. And let’s face it, that’s probably why he did it, to play with their heads, spook them a little.

If you gotta spook the jackasses, don’t stand where they can kick you.