Menopausal Moments: One Reason Teachers Don’t Need Guns

| Michele Sharpe

woman beside wall by Ursula Madariaga via PexelsStudents often want to write papers about the same old topics. Abortion. Legalizing weed. The death penalty. Gun control.

Read a few dozen of those papers, and you’ll want to stick a knife right in your own damn head. I banned papers on these often-plagiarized topics. But I did sometimes allow class discussion.

If the topic of gun control came up in my classroom, I’d ask my students to imagine I’d come to class in a menopausal rage.

“If I had a knife, and I threw it at John there in the back row, and it stuck right in his head, what would y’all do?” I’d ask.

Students would laugh, scream, squeal, or pick at their fingernails, but one would finally say “We’d jump on you.”

“Exactly,” I’d say. “Now imagine I came into class with a semi-automatic weapon and started mowing y’all down in one magnificent menopausal moment. What would you do then?”

I wouldn’t make that argument in a classroom today; in fact, I never made it again after Sandy Hook. But there’s another reason teachers shouldn’t have guns besides being driven mad by menopause or by having read too many crappy essays.

Teachers are human beings, and human beings fuck up.

In all the talk about the right to bear arms and the Constitution, this simple fact never seems to come up — that human beings are fallible. We do things we don’t intend to do. We lose our tempers, and we lose our minds. All of us.

Yesterday, a teacher and off-duty police officer accidentally fired a gun while teaching a public safety class. As far as I can tell, he isn’t menopausal. Thankfully, there were only minor injuries. . .

You can read the rest of this post (minus the f-word), if you like, on Medium. 

 

6 thoughts on “Menopausal Moments: One Reason Teachers Don’t Need Guns”

  1. I am gun carrying female fully in menopause absolutely sickened by reading this. You’ve just stated no female should be a teacher as menopause occurs- a female has no mental capacity to carry on duties and is capable of becoming mentally deranged and giving her a right to defend herself she’s not a vengeful personality needing mental attention. Carrying a gun IS a responsibility as IS teaching children and maintaining life through hormones is NOT a restriction.

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    1. Thank you for sharing your reaction to this piece, Susan. I think you misunderstood my point about women in menopause – I certainly don’t think menopause is a bar to teaching. In this piece, the kinds of crazy things we (I include myself because I’m postmenopausal) can do or say under the stress of menopause is simply an example of the main point: human fallibility. I believe humans are fallible, that we make mistakes, that we all say or do things we later regret. Hormonally induced or otherwise. You and I can certainly agree to disagree about that.

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  2. avec votre permission, j’utiliserai votre argument pour un prochain billet de blog (avec mention de la source, bien sûr) car il me semble en effet être le plus valable, nous sommes faillibles 🙂
    comme je vois que nous allons sur les mêmes blogs francophones, je me permets de vous écrire en français, je maîtrise mieux cette langue que l’anglais.

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  3. Pingback: U comme unique argument – Adrienne

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