Ironic Crunch!
The day got off to a start with a, errr, bang, when my car was slightly rear-ended on my way into work. All's well with me, all's functional on the car, and all it did was put a 12-inch crease in the metal of the outside of the hatchback and crack the paint in two places. You can barely see the damage, no cracked taillights even. But the CRUNCH certainly woke me up more than I was already :)
This isn't the first time I've ever been rear-ended, and the other time was worse. This was one of those sudden slowdowns that happens in heavy freeway traffic -- there's this one spot on my daily commute that seems to attract slowdowns and accidents, I don't know wny. It's a perfectly ordinary stretch of road between exits, but if there's an accident anywhere on my commute, it will nearly always be at this one spot, at the top of a small rise. *I*, of course, was staying well back from the car ahead of me and although I did jam on the brakes a bit hard, there was plenty of warning as all three lanes of traffic were showing red taillights for some distance ahead. I had enough stopping room. The big red pickup on my tail was, however, apparently not paying close enough attention. It was enough of a jolt to startle me considerably and to propel a few lightweight odds and ends in the car backward a couple of feet, so I'm very thankful it wasn't worse.
The traffic was heavy enough that by the time I had crossed three lanes of traffic and was looking for a spot to pull over, the person in the red pickup had dropped way back and taken the next exit. I hope they're feeling guilty.
This was all somewhat ironic because the school I work at gave us a briefing later in today's staff meeting on the "Every 15 Minutes" exercise we're going to be doing this fall.
This is an exercise of the "scared straight" variety, i.e. the plan is to show high schoolers what the real consequences are of (in this case) drinking and driving. That's a basic premise that makes me a little uneasy, but I think it *could* be done well. The way it is supposed to work is this. Much planning takes place. Awhile before the event, announcements are made that it will be happening, but not when. Students and faculty can volunteer to play the role of "victims," but they are not supposed to tell their friends that they have volunteered. Support from local law enforcement and so on is arranged -- I think we have seven sponsoring agencies (the head planner said there were some amusing arguments among them about whose helicopter was better than whose).
On the day of the event, every 15 minutes, a small group of officers walk into a classroom and say something like "We're sorry to have to tell you that So-and-so (a student or teacher) was killed in an auto accident last night." The way it is supposed to work, the designated "victim" is sitting right there in the classroom in front of everybody so it's very clear this is not real. The classroom teacher, or the officer, then read the "obituary" the student wrote as part of the planning process. The student then packs up and leaves with the officers and is "dead" for the rest of the day (actually spend most of it participating in other program stuff). The "living dead" are on campus, so any friends of theirs who were not in the class they "disappeared" from have a chance to see that they really are alive and well. But everyone is supposed to pretend they aren't there.
The exercise goes on like this, and at some point during the day, a designated team of student volunteers are the victims of a "car crash," complete with "injury" makeup. In our case, the whole school will get called out to watch as the "victims" are loaded into ambulances and a Life Flight helicopter. (The planners have had great fun with this -- they get to play with fire trucks, sirens, etc.) The neighbors, by the way, will have all had hand-delivered notices that this drill will be happening so they don't panic.
What we're told is that, even though everyone knows it's not real, it can be very upsetting. The head planner told us today she's laid in lots of extra Kleenex, everyone seems to be prepared for not getting much normal teaching done that day, and there will be lots of chaplains and counselors on campus to help people process this.
I was a bit concerned because a news story has been circulating on my f-list about one in Southern California that really upset some people. I asked the facilitators about it, and according to them, it was a combination of things going wrong: quite probably one error of judgement, followed by some misunderstandings.
The first thing that went wrong there was that, apparently, they did the "We're sorry..." thing in a classroom where the designated "victim" was actually not there -- he was absent that day. You can see that would be a problem. Add to that the fact that everyone is rattled, that a lot of the upset people are teenagers, and you can kind of see that some kids might indeed have thought something real was happening. If that's what happened, that was a really bad judgement call on someone's part.
Another thing that could very well be upsetting is that the "victims" spend the rest of the day, and the evening, in the program, and stay overnight, coming back to campus the next day. During that time they are out of communication, which means friends who try to call their cell phones or text message them won't get an answer. I was told, though, that any student who asks a staff member about their friend will be immediately reassured. Every parent in the school has also received a letter, so *they* all know what's going on. And there is plenty of gossip about the program among students, especially since the nearby Catholic boys' school did this exercise just a year or two ago.
I can see there could be some real problems here, but if I can believe the officers who briefed us, the news story got parts of it wrong. (No surprise.) I was outraged when I saw the story because it sounded like the faculty had lied to the students and actually tried to make them believe their buddies were dead -- and that's not how it's supposed to work.
Anway, you can see why my nerves were not quite at their best while this all was being discussed....
This isn't the first time I've ever been rear-ended, and the other time was worse. This was one of those sudden slowdowns that happens in heavy freeway traffic -- there's this one spot on my daily commute that seems to attract slowdowns and accidents, I don't know wny. It's a perfectly ordinary stretch of road between exits, but if there's an accident anywhere on my commute, it will nearly always be at this one spot, at the top of a small rise. *I*, of course, was staying well back from the car ahead of me and although I did jam on the brakes a bit hard, there was plenty of warning as all three lanes of traffic were showing red taillights for some distance ahead. I had enough stopping room. The big red pickup on my tail was, however, apparently not paying close enough attention. It was enough of a jolt to startle me considerably and to propel a few lightweight odds and ends in the car backward a couple of feet, so I'm very thankful it wasn't worse.
The traffic was heavy enough that by the time I had crossed three lanes of traffic and was looking for a spot to pull over, the person in the red pickup had dropped way back and taken the next exit. I hope they're feeling guilty.
This was all somewhat ironic because the school I work at gave us a briefing later in today's staff meeting on the "Every 15 Minutes" exercise we're going to be doing this fall.
This is an exercise of the "scared straight" variety, i.e. the plan is to show high schoolers what the real consequences are of (in this case) drinking and driving. That's a basic premise that makes me a little uneasy, but I think it *could* be done well. The way it is supposed to work is this. Much planning takes place. Awhile before the event, announcements are made that it will be happening, but not when. Students and faculty can volunteer to play the role of "victims," but they are not supposed to tell their friends that they have volunteered. Support from local law enforcement and so on is arranged -- I think we have seven sponsoring agencies (the head planner said there were some amusing arguments among them about whose helicopter was better than whose).
On the day of the event, every 15 minutes, a small group of officers walk into a classroom and say something like "We're sorry to have to tell you that So-and-so (a student or teacher) was killed in an auto accident last night." The way it is supposed to work, the designated "victim" is sitting right there in the classroom in front of everybody so it's very clear this is not real. The classroom teacher, or the officer, then read the "obituary" the student wrote as part of the planning process. The student then packs up and leaves with the officers and is "dead" for the rest of the day (actually spend most of it participating in other program stuff). The "living dead" are on campus, so any friends of theirs who were not in the class they "disappeared" from have a chance to see that they really are alive and well. But everyone is supposed to pretend they aren't there.
The exercise goes on like this, and at some point during the day, a designated team of student volunteers are the victims of a "car crash," complete with "injury" makeup. In our case, the whole school will get called out to watch as the "victims" are loaded into ambulances and a Life Flight helicopter. (The planners have had great fun with this -- they get to play with fire trucks, sirens, etc.) The neighbors, by the way, will have all had hand-delivered notices that this drill will be happening so they don't panic.
What we're told is that, even though everyone knows it's not real, it can be very upsetting. The head planner told us today she's laid in lots of extra Kleenex, everyone seems to be prepared for not getting much normal teaching done that day, and there will be lots of chaplains and counselors on campus to help people process this.
I was a bit concerned because a news story has been circulating on my f-list about one in Southern California that really upset some people. I asked the facilitators about it, and according to them, it was a combination of things going wrong: quite probably one error of judgement, followed by some misunderstandings.
The first thing that went wrong there was that, apparently, they did the "We're sorry..." thing in a classroom where the designated "victim" was actually not there -- he was absent that day. You can see that would be a problem. Add to that the fact that everyone is rattled, that a lot of the upset people are teenagers, and you can kind of see that some kids might indeed have thought something real was happening. If that's what happened, that was a really bad judgement call on someone's part.
Another thing that could very well be upsetting is that the "victims" spend the rest of the day, and the evening, in the program, and stay overnight, coming back to campus the next day. During that time they are out of communication, which means friends who try to call their cell phones or text message them won't get an answer. I was told, though, that any student who asks a staff member about their friend will be immediately reassured. Every parent in the school has also received a letter, so *they* all know what's going on. And there is plenty of gossip about the program among students, especially since the nearby Catholic boys' school did this exercise just a year or two ago.
I can see there could be some real problems here, but if I can believe the officers who briefed us, the news story got parts of it wrong. (No surprise.) I was outraged when I saw the story because it sounded like the faculty had lied to the students and actually tried to make them believe their buddies were dead -- and that's not how it's supposed to work.
Anway, you can see why my nerves were not quite at their best while this all was being discussed....