From “I Don't Like Mondays” to “Pumped up Kicks”: Rampage
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From “I Don’t Like Mondays” to “Pumped Up Kicks”: Rampage School Shootings in Young Adult Fiction and Young Adult Lives Gwynne Ellen Ash & Jane M. Saunders Children's Literature in Education An International Quarterly ISSN 0045-6713 Child Lit Educ DOI 10.1007/s10583-018-9351-0 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self- archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Children’s Literature in Education https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9351-0 CONTINUINGEDUCATION From ‘‘I Don’t Like Mondays’’ to ‘‘Pumped Up Kicks’’: Rampage School Shootings in Young Adult Fiction and Young Adult Lives 1 1 Gwynne Ellen Ash • Jane M. Saunders Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract This essay considers 12 books of contemporary young adult fiction, published in the United States between 2000 and 2016, with plots directly related to rampage school shootings. It compares the shooters’ psychological types, ages, races, genders, roles, motives and the narrative points of view in the books with dominant cultural scripts for rampage school shootings and explains how the fic- tional texts confirm, critique, or extend these scripts. Keywords Young adult literature Á School shootings Á Cultural scripts Á Content analysis Á United States Gwynne Ellen Ash teaches courses in literacy and children’s and young adult literature in the College of Education at Texas State University, in San Marcos. She studied children’s and YA literature both during her M.A. in English and her Ph.D. in reading education. A former middle school teacher, she is particularly interested in how children’s and YA texts portray the reality of students, teachers, and schools. Further work examines characterizations of teachers in children’s books and the representation of teacher caring in books for middle and high school readers. Jane M. Saunders, also at Texas State University, teaches literacy courses and integrates children’s and YA literature into her instruction. She taught middle and high school English language arts, and her doctoral studies focused on Curricular/Critical Studies. & Gwynne Ellen Ash [email protected] Jane M. Saunders [email protected] 1 Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA 123 Author's personal copy Children’s Literature in Education Although infrequent, rampage school shootings loom large in the lives of students and teachers in the US.1 Lockdown exercises happen at least as often as fire drills, engendering more fear than preparation for potentially life-threatening events (Hall, 2014). Programs to prepare students for school-shooting scenarios give educators and students active response strategies: first to run, then to shelter in place, and finally, with no other options, to fight (Borum et al., 2010). In addition to practice drills and news reports, youth also encounter shooters in fiction. In this paper, we examine how rampage school shootings are portrayed in 12 young adult texts published in the United States between 2000 and 2016.2 Our analyses identify the shooter’s psychological type, age, race, gender, role, explanations/explications of the shooter’s motive(s), and the narrative point(s) of view of the texts themselves, which are then compared to cultural scripts of school shootings in popular culture and media.3 We argue that the young adult fictions take up and challenge the cultural scripts through a variety of strategies. For example, some authors complicate the idea that bullying is the only motivation for school shootings and instead construct the narrative through multiple perspectives to provide a nuanced representation of the causes as well as the devastating aftermath. To better understand the ways in which young adult authors, such as Todd Strasser, Marieke Nijkamp, and others intervene in cultural scripts, we first turn to the broader history of school shootings in the US. Four Decades of Rampage School Shootings On 29 January 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on Cleveland Elementary, a school near her California home. When asked why she did it, she replied, ‘‘I don’t like Mondays.’’ Spencer reportedly said a switch in her brain flipped, so she decided to shoot. The Boomtown Rats subsequently made Spencer’s chilling line famous in their song about the shooting, ‘‘I Don’t Like Mondays’’ 1 Rampage school shootings are defined as those where the shooting (1) took place on school grounds or at a school event; (2) claimed two or more victims; (3) was conducted by a student or students enrolled at, or recently enrolled at, the targeted school; and 4) targeted at least some victims at random (Newman et al., 2004). Following this definition, books in which only a single targeted revenge killing and the suicide of the shooter were planned and/or carried out, such as Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock (Quick, 2012), were not considered. Books written for adults, such as We Need to Talk About Kevin (Shriver, 2003), Nineteen Minutes (Picoult, 2008), Project X: A Novel (Shepard, 2005), or Hey Nostradamus! (Coupland, 2004) were also excluded from the analysis (for a recent analysis of texts like these, see Linder, 2014 or Phipps, 2015). Books where adult perpetrators took a class hostage, such as The Taking of Room 114 (Glenn, 1997), were not analyzed either. 2 Additional criteria for selection included having a plot directly related to a rampage school shooting (as defined by Newman et al., 2004), classified as PZ (Fiction and juvenile belles lettres) by the Library of Congress classification system, and still in print. 3 The texts were evaluated using inductive content analysis, a qualitative research methodology, to look for representations of both shooter and shooting characteristics across the texts (Krippendorff, 2013; Schreier, 2012; Zhang and Wildemuth, 2009). In particular, researchers were using a cultural scripts lens, for critical content analysis (Galda et al., 2000; Beach et al., 2009). Books were coded by both researchers according to evidence related to shooters’ psychological types, demographics, motives, and narrative points of view. Variations in coding were resolved through consensus. 123 Author's personal copy Children’s Literature in Education (Geldof, 1979).4 Spencer was later found to have a brain injury, which may have compromised her functioning; she was also diagnosed as psychotic (Bo¨ckler et al., 2013, pp. 251–253). Nevertheless, public response to her act was overwhelmingly to question, ‘‘Why?’’ because people could see no reason, as echoed in the lyrics of The Boomtown Rats. In 1979, at the time of the Cleveland Elementary shooting, there was little discussion in popular culture of rampage school shootings; only one published novel focusing on a school shooting, Rage (1977) by Stephen King (written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), was marketed to adults rather than youth. Although there have been school shootings throughout the history of the United States, rampage school shootings are a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the late 1970s, incidents were described as ‘‘isolated’’ (Rocque, 2012, p. 305). However, in the two decades between the 1979 shooting at Cleveland Elementary School and the one at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado in 1999, nearly 60 rampage school shootings occurred, an average of three a year. By the 1990s, investigation of school shootings focused on bullying and anti-bullying programs and curricula were widely implemented in schools.5 Nevertheless, more than 115 school shootings occurred in the US in K-12 (ages 5–18) schools in the 17 years between Columbine and 2016 (an average of over seven rampage shootings per year in that period), and 175 in the 37 years since the murders at Cleveland Elementary, an incident rate that accelerated over the nearly four decades (Rocque, 2012, p. 305). Fighting bullying did not stop or even slow down the killing.6 In February 2012, Thomas ‘‘T. J.’’ Lane, who had been raised in an extremely violent and abusive household, yet who was not, by all accounts, bullied at school, walked into his high school cafeteria, killed three people and wounded three others. In December 2012, 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the deadliest shooting in a K-12 school in the United States to date. The presumed connection between bullying and rampage shootings lay in the larger cultural script about school shooters; the cultural script was less related to who school shooters actually were than who people thought they were. This cultural script has been questioned by, among others, young adult authors in their characterization of shooters and their motivations. Following Columbine, King removed Rage (1977) from print because the shooters had discussed the novel as an inspiration for their violence in their diaries and writings (Walker, 1999). No young adult novels dealing with school shootings were published in the years leading up to Columbine, but in the 17 years since, there have been a dozen. It was almost as if before Columbine authors were afraid to write about school shootings, and then after Columbine, they were afraid not to do so. Todd Strasser (2000) comments in his Author’s Note to Give a Boy a Gun, one of 4 For the full lyrics, see https://genius.com/Boomtown-rats-i-dont-like-mondays-lyrics.