American professor thanked after asking his students to write their obituaries

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MIAMI | An American psychology professor lost his job after giving his students a peculiar essay topic: “Today was the last day of your life, write your obituary”.

Jeffrey Keene, 63, explained on Facebook that he wanted to link his course to an exercise intended to prepare students for the risk of intrusion by an armed individual into their high school, near Orlando, Florida.

< p>He asked his students to write down their “impressions” related to this simulation and to think about the causes of the repetition of the killings in the United States, their possible remedies and therefore, to imagine their post-life biography. mortem.

A small note specified “thank you for realizing (…) that it is absolutely not a question of disturbing you”.

On Tuesday he was fired. In a press release, reproduced by the American media, the school authorities accuse him of having given “inappropriate homework” to his students.

He defended himself on local television channels. “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.

His dismissal “stunned” him, he added on Fox 5: “I was talking to the students about the world they live in, about guns, shooters…”

Firearms became the leading cause of death for American minors in 2020, with 4,368 deaths, ahead of car accidents and overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

< p>Bloodbaths in schools represent only a tiny portion, but they mark the spirits more.

The United States was particularly shaken by the carnage committed in 2012 in a school of Sandy Hook, Connecticut (20 children killed), and in May 2022 in Uvalde, Texas (19 children and two teachers).

Yet a majority of Americans remain very attached to the right to carry a gun and do not want to hear about reforms, even minimal ones.

Two elected officials from Tennessee have just been expelled from the local parliament for having joined demonstrators who came to demand, in the hemicycle, better gun regulations, after a shooting at a Nashville elementary school.