An American psychology teacher lost his job after giving his high school students a very particular writing prompt: “Today was the last day of your life, write your obituary.”
Jeffrey Keene, 63, explained on Facebook that he wanted to tie his course to an exercise aimed at preparing students for the possibility of an intrusion by an armed person at his school, located in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida.
The teacher asked his students to write their “impressions” related to this simulation and to think about the causes of the repetition of the massacres in the United States, their possible solutions and to imagine their post-mortem biography.
A small note specified: “Thank you for realizing (…) that this is not at all about annoying you.”
On Tuesday Keene was fired. In a press release, reproduced by the US media, the school authorities accuse him of having given an “inappropriate duty” to his students.
“It wasn’t to scare them or make them think they were going to die, but to help them understand what’s important in their lives,” he said on NBC.
“I was talking to the students about the world they live in, about guns, shooters…”, he said on Fox 5, after declaring himself “astonished” by his dismissal.
Firearms were the leading cause of death for American children in 2020, with 4,368 deaths, ahead of car accidents and drug overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
School killings represent only a small portion of that total, but they are particularly shocking.
In recent times, the United States has been shocked by the massacres at a school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut (20 children killed, in 2012), and in Uvalde, Texas (19 children and two teachers killed, in May 2022).
However, most citizens remain very attached to the right to bear a gun and do not want to hear about reforms in that area.
Two legislators from the state of Tennessee (south) have just been expelled from the local parliament after joining protesters who demanded, in the compound, greater regulations on firearms, after a massacre at an elementary school in Nashville.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
