I don’t know if the rule applies then. You don’t know if the rule applies then. The officials at the game probably don’t know. Since the worst outcome is a delay in a game, what’s the big deal?
I find it hard to believe you don’t see the difference between working hard for a reasonable outcome–which may include using rhetoric to present your position in the best possible light–vs. outright lying to the school board.
Let me make it clear: I expect the school administration to work hard to come up with a reasonable solution to whatever problem they perceive is occurring on the playground. Their solution has been to ban tag, which is neither reasonable nor the product of hard work. IMO the principal should be made to answer before the school board for such a ludicrous policy, but since it’s “just tag”, it will simply be filed as another example of wacky school rules, the kind of thing designed for punchlines on Letterman or Leno, then promptly shrugged of as just “another one of those things”. But IMO it is indicative of a general trend in educational administration, which seems to be governed by a “path of least resistance” philosophy, and it is this philosophy–not the organization–that I have contempt for.
Furthermore, episodes like this contribute to the PR problem teaching as a vocation has in the US today. In fact, the only time you hear about teachers in the media is (1) when they participate in non-sensical policy decisions like this, or (2) when they’re carrying a protest sign as their union demands a raise. Before that comment gets mis-interpreted, let me make it clear that many–make that most–teachers do heroic work in public schools, and are generally underappreciated given the conditions they often have to work under. They deserve better than to work for an administration that saddles them with PR blunders like this. Really, does anyone have a better opinion of teachers after reading a story like the one in the OP?
The last time I had someone do this to me was 7 years ago, twice: “hey, you’re both 33yo, single girls, you have a lot in common!”
Me: engineer. Nerd. Hadn’t been in town for twelve years, then spent the last two at home (very at home) helping care for Dad. Had lived abroad on my own for 4 years. Traditionalist in politics, not at all in social subjects.
The two women with whom our widowed mothers decided I should have play dates?
Had had the same friends since kindergarten. Had never been more than 100km away except for vacations. Lawyers. One worked in city hall; the other one hadn’t done a day of honest work in her life (she sold insurance to people who bought it as a bribe for her father, who was a city hall employee). The first one was apolitical; the second one was a socialist because she felt she had so much in common with the peons of the world (did I mention not a single day of honest work? yes I did).
And my solution when my classmates wanted me to play and I didn’t feel like it was to plunk down. Trying to convince the 3-5 kids in each class of 40 who didn’t feel like playing on a given day that they had to would have been way too much work, there was never more than a half-hearted attempt at it. We had about 400 kids in the yard at the same time and the breaks were only half an hour. No time to go bothering people when you want to play tag or churri-ba.
I don’t have a worse one. I’d bet most people take it as evidence of whatever they believed in the first place.
Yes, I’m beating a dead horse, but here’s yet another example of how lazy school administrations end up passing silly rules rather than deal with a problem.
Details on the earlier incident can be found here. That student was an avid trapshooter who submitted a yearbook photo in which he posed wearing a trapshooting vest with his broken-open shotgun wrapped over his shoulder. Everyone–including the school–agreed the photo was not threatening, but the school balked because the photo “could send the message that the school endorses guns.” The National Rifle Association supported this student’s lawsuit, but once the judge ruled that it was student editors who rejected the photo (not the achool administration), making the decision not to include the photo an editorial protected by the first amendment.
By no means am I saying there’s a simple solution to this issue. But I have to wonder why the administration bothered to make a rule in the first place, given that they won the earlier case. My read on this: The school was annoyed they had to go to court, so they decided to enact a full-scale ban. They knew they couldn’t single out guns, so they just banned all “props” in photos (are kids who play in the band forbidden to pose holding their instrument?). Administrative laziness, again, trumped common sense, and soon led to these predictable yet ridiculous results.
I also predict that, like the case with the “tag” ban in Colorado, it will remain merely an item to be laughed at on the back page; after all, who wants to work up an outrage over something as trivial as a yearbook photo? But incidents like this seem to pop up quite frequently, and if we ignore them all, are we in danger of dying the death of 1,000 cuts?
Well, here is a different perspective on the issue you raise in this paragraph:
Our local school board president (or maybe the district superintendent) was addressing the parents about five years ago and made an interesting observation. The district had only had two or three lawsuits served on it from its founding in the late 1940s through the middle 1980s, and those were insurance suits regarding attempts to collect specific damages for accidents with school buses or property and I am not sure that any of them went to trial. BBeginning in the late 1980s, the school system began being served with one or tweo suits a year, often over grades, scheduling, dress code and the like until, at thepoint of his address (2002?) the district was seeing a half dozen to a dozen suits a year. I don’t think that more than three of them have actually gone to trial. (At least, they have not made the local papers if they did.) However, the district has passed a long list of rather silly rules to pre-empt more such suits, hoping that if the rules are sufficiently clear, the cases will be dismissed (or the prospective plaintiffs will find it more difficult to find a lawyer). The speaker was quite frank in admitting that the rules were silly, but noted that they rarely got sued twice for anything they handled in the rule book. (He also noted that they did not make up a new rule for every lawsuit, but there were enough issues that the rulebook continued to grow.)