Should Goldilocks Be Arrested?: Current MFA Student Nathaniel Foster on Teaching for Northwestern’s Summer Forensic Science Program
When I started my position this summer as an assistant teacher of forensic science for Northwestern’s Center for Talent Development, questions such as “Should Goldilocks be arrested?” were casual hypotheticals posed by the middle schoolers attending the two 3-week classes I helped to teach. Not surprisingly, middle school-aged kids often asked questions that surfaced organically from a position of humor, curiosity, or challenge. They were wondering how I, a former LAPD officer – now medically retired, might react to various fictional scenarios.
In this particular case, they wanted to know how I would react to Goldilocks’ antics if I had ventured into the woods and been waved down by a family of concerned bears who then frantically explained that a human child had broken into their home, eaten their food, and fallen asleep in one of their beds. Neither the students nor I were prepared for a serious and complex conversation based on a question initially asked in jest. We unintentionally turned the simplest childhood tale into an intellectual thought experiment where the students dissected, debated, and determined what should or should not be done with a lost child accused of a plethora of low-level crimes.
I could have dismissed the question as a waste of time and brain power, but instead I approached it with seriousness. I introduced the concept of letter of the law versus spirit of the law, i.e. the balance between enforcement being carried out as a law is written or applying a set of policies or moral judgements at the sole discretion of the law enforcement officer. One is the simple path: you break the law you go to jail. The latter is considerably more complicated, fraught with legal and career danger, and often has unforeseen consequences, i.e. essentially looking at the why behind a crime instead of taking the minor offense at face value. In every scenario, spirit of the law means choosing the legal grey area either with good intentions for the benefit of all involved or because it’s the easiest way to shirk responsibility and avoid filing a report.
What I began to understand about these questions is that these gifted, high-performing middle schoolers sincerely wanted these conversations to be a part of their time in the course. Therefore, after their assigned lab work was completed, and the lectures on blood spatter, tire tracks, fingerprints, et cetera were done, we utilized downtime as story time.
Most days the kids would come to me and request stories from my days as an officer. They’d ask for humor; other times they’d request something more somber, often they asked for traumatic experiences. Stories that they hoped might, in their words, “traumatize them.” Despite my reservation to engage a group of middle school students with situations that for me were all over the emotional, social, and legal spectrum, I obliged many of the requests. In truth, I honored their requests because there was a strong desire, a clear motivation on their part to shape the world into an image they had for it. Naturally, I began to hear the same questions from different voices, “Why haven’t these problems been solved?"
While telling them different stories from my years in law enforcement, my hope was to offer them insights and show from a different vantage point various issues and societal problems that are deeply human. Ideally, they will go on to solve problems themselves. These students are children whom I hope will one day become politicians, lawyers, doctors, engineers: leaders in their respective communities. People who when armed with the right tools and insight should be well equipped to solve the problems they see around them.
And no, “Goldilocks should not be arrested,” said a middle schooler exercising the spirit of the law.