{"id":4860,"date":"2011-01-30T23:22:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-30T23:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=4860"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:36:26","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:36:26","slug":"day-79-zombie-sign-definite-throw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=4860","title":{"rendered":"Day 79 – Zombie Sign (Definite Throw)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I bought this goofy “Zombie Free Zone” at Big Lots a few years ago on clearance after Halloween.\u00a0 I thought it would make a good decoration for my classroom.\u00a0 And, in my mind, it held a hidden meaning:\u00a0 “zombies” were those students who go through the school day (and life in general) in a fog (perhaps chemically induced!) accomplishing little more than taking up space.\u00a0 I have had my fair share of “zombies” in class and wanted to declare my room off limits to them. Most students liked the sign, though I rarely explained it’s meaning.\u00a0 A few students HATED it and would turn it around to face the wall whenever they could.\u00a0 It creeped them out. It IS a creepy looking thing.\u00a0 I have been meaning to throw it away ever since I returned from Haiti – but I just didn’t\u00a0think to do it from day to day.\u00a0 But Friday I finally remembered and brought it home with me to Throw.\u00a0 And honestly, I had students begging me for it as I left the building!\u00a0 I had to tell them that I was determined to throw it away.\u00a0 A few asked me why and I was more than happy to explain… Zombies to us are just harmless staples of horror movies.\u00a0 Nothing more than Hollywood fantasy.\u00a0 But in Haiti I met an old man who has written a book on Voodoo practices and he told me about meeting an actual zombie.\u00a0 It was a woman who had been dead for three years.\u00a0 I asked him how he knew it was a zombie and he chuckled and gave me a look that meant “what a ridiculous question!”\u00a0 An American friend who is very familiar with Haiti said that he does not believe zombies are people who have physically died and then been brought back to life by the spirits, but are rather people who have been drugged into a stupor by a witch doctor who may even go so far as to bury the comatose victim and later dig him or her up.\u00a0 Either way, the point that nobody in Haiti disputes is that there are such things as zombies and their role is to serve the witch doctors.\u00a0 Upon my return, the sign hanging in my classroom struck me only as a mockery of a mysterious and evil reality.\u00a0 I just decided that, for me, it’s not something to joke about and it’s not something I would want to pass along to some teenager to hang in his bedroom!\u00a0 So it’s in the garbage can where it belongs.

\u201cFools mock at sin, but among the upright there is favor.\u201d (Proverbs 14:9)<\/strong><\/blockquote><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I bought this goofy “Zombie Free Zone” at Big Lots a few years ago on clearance after Halloween.\u00a0 I thought it would make a good decoration for my classroom.\u00a0 And, in my mind, it held a hidden meaning:\u00a0 “zombies” were those students who go through the school day (and life in general) in a fog […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4861,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4860"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4862,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4860\/revisions\/4862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}