School Safety

Summer vacation was fast approaching and my school was doing a few minor renovations here and there. They moved the IT office upstairs across from my office, and they were sprucing up a couple old offices and the lower hallway with some new design touches.It was all very nice, considering my school is pretty old and could use a new look here and there.

One morning I was walking past the office renovations on the first floor towards the stairs when I noticed a pneumatic nail gun just lying unattended on the ground right in front of a first grade classroom. As much as I knew leaving a tool like this laying around in an elementary school was a bad idea, I can't say I'm surprised.

It seems to my American mind that renovation and construction might be better done when the students were actually not in the school. And if you can't avoid that, at least tell the workers not to leave deadly tools on the ground for 5 year-olds to trip over.

It also seems to my American mind that encouraging students to carry around X-acto knives and box-cutters in their pencil cases might be a bad idea too. Regardless, have any student show you what they have among the pencils and pens and Big Bang stickers and there you'll inevitably find something that is illegal to bring onto a plane.

While I'm thinking of it, students haven't seemed to get a grasp on how to properly handle scissors. I remember learning to hold and pass scissors with my hand around the blade, finger grips out so as not to accidentally cut someone if the blades open. I don't think Korea's gotten that concept yet.

There's a lot that seems obviously dangerous to my American mind over here in the land of the morning calm. And maybe I'm really over-thinking the nature of school safety here. That would be yet another distinctly American trait. After all, I've never heard of a kid getting cut by the knives they sharpen their pencils with, or falling off the roof when they have to crawl out the windows to clean up the trash. Hell, even when one middle school student was getting a little wild with her knife and I told her to relax and she made stabbing motions at me (apparently something funny here in Korea, rather than criminal over in America), I never got cut. Maybe I am being a little overly critical here. After all, despite a pneumatic nail gun lying around on the ground, how many elementary school students could actually lift it and figure out how to use it, right?