Stupidity in Numbers

A fact about me is that I am pretty careful about planning my time away from school so that I isolate myself from my students and avoid any recreational encounters. The last thing I need is one of my kids seeing me buy medicated spray for my athlete’s foot. No, I don’t buy groceries near the school. I never get gas around the school. Heck, I don’t even live near the school so that the risk of a student encounter is seriously reduced. From time to time interactions do occur, but no system is perfect.

Another flaw in this particular system is that even if one is successful of avoiding the jack-a-ninnies at a particular school, there are still the thousands of other jack-a-ninnies to deal with from all the other schools. This weekend, for example, I was traveling down a busy stretch of road when a pack of teens (about ten) darted across for an impromptu game of Frogger.

Out all of those kids, not one of them thought it was a bad idea to launch into oncoming traffic instead of getting to the other side via the crosswalk twenty yards away? Maybe what I witnessed was a classic case of the herd mentality. One jack-a-ninny got spooked (must have heard a book open) and took off, thus prompting the others to follow by instinct.

Then I got to thinking that this was a moment on the weekend, a time when students are not in school. What if kids were not in school at all? Then stuff like this would be going on all day long and as a result would seriously hinder the day-to-day business of society. If it wasn’t darting out into the streets, then it would be climbing structures and swinging from them like monkeys or humping fire hydrants. Once again, my theory that public education is in place to simply babysit, while others can do what they need to get done has been fortified.

One final thing, a confession: I didn’t exactly tap on my brakes when the kids scrambled across the road. Is that bad? Frankly, I was proud of the fact that I did not accelerate.