Casual Sundays & School Violence

The State | 10/22/2004 | Casual Sundays make their way to church
My question of the day: why is this "news"? For most of the churches we've been visiting the past few months, "casual dress" has been the norm - not something you do as a gimmick to "reach this group of people". Probably just me, but I don't see where there needs to be a split between the sacred and the secular, between "Sunday clothes" and the work week attire. If the first thing I notice about you is the way you're dressed, and if I then pile all kinds of judgments on you because of it, and if I then tell you that I won't judge you this one Sunday a month when I'll be dressed casual, too (so it must be okay and "holy" when we all do it as a tool for "evangelism")..... I'm probably reading too much into this, right?

WLTX News 19 | Student says Teacher Threatened Classmate
I remember one teacher in high school who would've made this parent get bunched up, too. If you fell asleep in his class, you were beaned with an eraser, flying from across the room. Chalk was known to perform as projectiles, too. And then there was the one time when one of the young ladies in class wore make-up for the first time, which earned her the quip: "tramp and a painted hussy." Ahhh, those were the days. Honestly, I write (for better or worse) this way because of the two years spent as a student in this man's class. There was no question of his love for teaching young minds full of mush, and of his love ultimately for us as his students. Having said that, threatening a student with scissors is a different matter. If it were my child, my first questions - giving the teacher every benefit of the doubt - would be "what had you done to provoke this?" and "what had been done by anyone else to provoke this?" and "was the teacher just having a really bad day?". None of those excuse the reaction, but we're all human, we all make mistakes, and heaven forbid all of our mistakes should be broadcast on the local news tonight.