Ding! My phone rings with yet another video of a school fight. Too often, a fight breaks out in the hallways of Wilde Lake High School. Even if I don’t watch the fight, I always know it happened because of the 5 different video angles that get sent around the school.
Students brawl, swing, and hit each other. Teachers try to stop the fight, but they can’t make their way past the vultures that circle around and cheer as they press record. Among the countless videos I’ve seen throughout my time in high school, most have one aspect in common – the sound of laughter and cheering. It’s absolutely disgusting. The most disturbing part of a school fight is knowing I share classrooms with students who get a thrill out of watching others suffer, and who get even happier sending the video they took into their group chats
School fights can be eye-catching, and some may say that it’s instinct to join the crowd out of curiosity. However, it’s sadistic to enjoy watching your peers fight.
Students record fights and send them into their groupchats. It’s rewarding to be the student with the best angle to send to friends. It makes them happy when someone asks them for the fight video. But a short thrill over being the best videographer shouldn’t overshadow the fact that students love watching videos of their peers suffering. These students are also perpetuating the stereotype that Wilde Lake students are feral and wild.
Wilde Lake staff has been severely injured in school fights while students watch behind their screens.
Just within the last three years, a Wilde Lake teacher broke his nose while trying to de-escalate a school fight. A teacher who was intervening to protect the students involved ended up with a broken bone. He didn’t deserve the injury, but he risked his safety for his students. In return, students pressed send on videos of him intervening. The heartlessness students exhibit is horrifying.
Unfortunately, this is a less severe case. According to the Washington Post, Lawrence C. Hoyer, a science teacher, “collapsed and died” on May 13th, 1997 “after he broke up a lunchtime fight among several girls in the parking lot of Wilde Lake High School.” A teacher died for students who thought it was funny to throw punches and tell their friends about it. It’s soul shattering how we as students take our teachers for granted, and even more heartbreaking that we continue to record and laugh at fights when a teacher has lost their life in the past.
With such horrific outcomes, we must reconsider our response to school fights. Instead of gathering and crowding around a fight, students should try to clear out the hallways and go to their classrooms so administrators can quickly and safely handle the situation. The more that students crowd around a fight and block staff members from safely and efficiently breaking it up, the more chances there are for the fight to escalate to a lethal degree.
Secondly, we need to stop being heartless. We need to stop recording fights and laughing at pain. It’s not funny. What students decide to record may be more than a two-minute long video of an immature fight. We don’t need to record severe injuries to staff that they didn’t deserve.
As we approach adulthood, we need to start acting our age. We are old enough to understand how we should respond to situations like fights. No amount of curiosity and amusement justifies risking the safety of others.
