Teaching my students to fear death

I felt a bit strange on Tuesday sending a student out of class to speak with our Teaching Assistant for laughing while saying “kill teacher.” This same student had recently written for a sentence-writing assignment “The rope keeps Anna2 in place,” referring to one of his classmates. Before that drew a picture of himself shooting me in the head. 

When I was in elementary school, in the wake of Columbine, I was frequently sent to the guidance counselor for making inappropriate comments around death. When going over the differences between wants and needs, I remember asking “well, why do we need to live?” I was threatened with expulsion for repeatedly saying some variant of “I killed your man” when playing chess. 

I understand the concern of teachers to limit students’ more morbid, potentially threatening speech. This student of mine, though, is clearly comfortable with laughing about death and dying. Is this necessarily a bad thing? In Vietnam, unlike in America, gun violence is not an issue, and school shootings are unheard of. I have zero fear this student will actually try to shoot Teacher Jon. He’s just playing. He sees the way death is portrayed in movies and video games and does not understand the complicated boundary we’ve erected between acceptable and unacceptable jokes about death.  

When we hear of a therapy or psychedelic that helped a hospice patient overcome their fear, of death, we recognize this culturally as a victory.  

Is fear of death a something positive to be sought? Are we doing a disservice to children by forcing them to speak as though they fear death?