Harder than watching border crossings?

September 26, 2006 - 4:22 PM by Sarah

As part of his volunteer work for his local police force, Bet Shemesh soccer dad Gavriel Raanan will be doing guard-crossing duty near his children’s school every Friday. He’s written an entertaining post about the 1 1/2 hour training course. Sounds like fun. How do we sign up?

The main thing I learned about being a crossing-guard is that it is seriously dangerous, and the odds are quite good that I could be killed by a derelict driver or angry and impatient parent whose kid is going to be late unless I stop traffic NOW. Looking on the bright side, though, I learned that under such sad circumstances, I would in fact be fully insured, provided I was killed wearing the proper, police-issued vest.

At first I thought this simple fact of my likely demise might rescue me from a longer evening of instruction — after all, if I’m just going to get run over, what more do I have to learn? But it turns out that there is only a CHANCE I’ll get killed, and that if I approach the dangerous cars and pedestrians with the proper sense of paranoia coupled with a bit of false bravado, I might somehow make it. The trick, as I understand it, is getting the mix of paranoia and bravado just right. After watching maybe a half hour demonstration about eye contact, hand-waving, and dominance rituals, I can now say that a good-crossing guard (one who plans to survive) has to approach his or her cars and kids the same way a lion tamer would deal with four simultaneously advancing lions while armed with nothing but a large salami to scare them back into the corners of the cage. It can work, as long as we keep the salami moving. And if not, so they reminded us, at least we’re insured.

crossing guard