I can’t help but note that it says “up to” 10 days — which (a) rules out nineteen days, but (b) doesn’t seem to rule out nine days. Or three days. Or, y’know, zero days.
An employee is having problems with her 6 year old son, who just had a 3 day suspension from kindergarten for hitting a kid who called him a name. He has other behavior issues as well. She has refused the teacher’s suggestion of having him tested (whatever that means).
She told me she had her dad talk to him about fighting. “He told him to never throw the first punch” and I was smiling and nodding my head “but if someone hits you first, you give them a beat down they won’t ever forget, and you don’t stop until they are down and stay down”.
Again, this is a six year old.
This.
I just grew up in a different culture than a lot of people. I had a rural upbringing. And it was the 90s. I used to take a pocket knife to school with me for fuck’s sake. It was a different time.
The way the fight went down was actually kind of sad. She had a bunch of kids with her. I was a born-again Christian at the time so I spent the whole time prostyletizing to all present. Then when she actually hit me, I immediately kicked her in self-defense. When the pain sank in, I looked up at her in surprise and said, “Wow, that really hurt.”
It was the most dispassionate exchange of blows you can imagine, because neither of us actually wanted to fight. She was a bully three years older than me who talked big, but she had never been in a fight either. She was only there to impress her friends, who wanted us to fight so bad they started lying to her about things I’d said.
After shuffling around a bit, I said, “I really don’t want to fight you,” turned and went back into the house, where my parents proceeded to lecture me about my holier-than-thou attitude and basically told me I brought it on myself.
It’s rare for that that statement to be meant literally.
Yeah, that’s crazy.
When I was little I got picked on a lot. I always stood out because of the way I talked and acted. I read a lot of books and had a big vocabulary and was generally awkward socially. There was also a time when I had no friends at school. I was also not very big (though I wasn’t particularly small, just a bit smaller than average, which is still true).
Once at recess when I was (I think?) in 5th grade, a much bigger kid challenged me to a fight. I didn’t want to fight him. He was much bigger than me, and I wasn’t a violent kid. I just wanted to be left alone. I turned away and he kicked me and knocked me to the ground.
There’s one thing he wasn’t counting on though. I wasn’t big or strong or a trained fighter. But I’d been picked on for years and had at that point fucking had enough. I got up and snapped. I leaped on him and grabbed his throat and pinched his carotid while jamming my thumb knuckle into his trachea. I did that while he struggled to get me off him. Once he did, he staggered away grabbing his throat.
A friend of his attacked me after that, and I did the exact same thing with the same result. Same throat grab.
I then left to get away from everyone and a third kid came at me with a baseball bat. No joke, he had a damn bat. He swung it at me, I dodged, snatched it from him, and swung it back, hitting his arm. He stumbled away, holding his arm.
The fourth and final kid charged me and I kicked him in the stomach, and he fell to the ground.
I had no combat training. I was smaller than all those kids. I wasn’t violent. But I was basically pushed into becoming a berserk maniac who wasn’t taking any more shit. After all the fighting (which took place over the course of a couple minutes) I ran away balling my eyes out. I was jittery and sick from adrenaline and fear and anger and hated myself. I remember almost throwing up but I didn’t.
Shortly after I was taken to the principal. All 4 other kids were there. They wanted to report me for attacking them. I was an honor student who’d never been in trouble before. The principal didn’t have trouble figuring out what had really happened. The biggest shock was that I was sitting there seeing all these bigger kids hurt when I had barely had a scratch.
I didn’t get in trouble, none of us did. I got a warning, we all did, and nothing else came of it. Weirdly I had no reputation after that of any kind. Even though this happened at recess in front of dozens of other kids. It’s like everyone wanted to pretend nothing happened. None of the other kids had serious injuries (even the guy I hit with a bat) which was lucky for everyone.
I’m not proud of anything that happened. It wasn’t a badass thing to do. I snapped and they were just kids after all, and none of them expected me to do any of that, no kid would. This wasn’t a revenge fantasy thing. The kids weren’t even really bullies or troublemakers. I have no idea why that kid wanted to fight me because we’d never had problems before. I’d been picked on for years but not by him or anyone else that attacked me that day. It was just some weird thing that happened once.
If my school had a zero tolerance policy I’d hate to think what would have happened to me or anyone else involved. Instead, nothing happened, which was apparently for the best.
Don’t worry, talk show host Stephen Colbert has not been arrested. Who believes this idiocy? I mean, I know intellectually that fake news is a thing, but it still amazes me when I run across a story.
Anyone with two braincells not fighting it out for third place would know this is hardly true. JAGs are lawyers and don’t have arrest powers over anyone in the military, never mind some random civilian. It would be like the DA accompanying the cops when they raid some place.
Note, this did happen here back in the Arpaio days, county DA Thomas Andrews tagging along to he could show the voters he was tough on crime. Instead they told him to get another job even before they finally told Arpaio the same thing.
That it was shared only 200 times is not particularly impressive.
Oh but the news is so real and raw, though.
One time in middle school, a kid tried to kick me, for no reason (I think he was trying to show off a move he learned from a video game). I grabbed his leg. And then, of course, he tried to kick me again, with the other foot. Which ended about exactly how you’d expect.
I never bothered reporting it to any teacher, because I figured he had already gotten exactly the amount of punishment that he deserved.
Were any of the participants African-Americans? Because, the story I posted involved a scary dark-hued lass. That might be a significant element. If it was a fair-hued lass defending herself, that would have been another thing entirely.
I gave a kid a bloody nose once too, but it was technically an accident. Him and his sister were both bullies and their mother watched me after school so I had to deal with them every day.
One winter the kid came up behind me and tried to stuff a snowball down the back of my shirt. I slammed my arm back as hard as I could, thinking I was going to catch him across the chest and push him away, but I ended up slamming my arm into his face instead.
I have no regrets.
Naturally, I was the one who got in trouble.
Yes, the last person involved in the fight was.
I got into a fight in 7th or 8th grade with a girl named Marta. She had been my friend and now I can not recall what happened that caused our disagreement. I was quite a bit smaller than her and I did not want to fight her. I was scared, but my peers were pushing it so we set a time and place after school. We tussled quite a bit and then she took off running because somehow I had bloodied her nose.
She lived right across the street and she ran home with me chasing after her. She beat me there by seconds and slammed her glass door shut. I hit it and broke it. She called the cops and a cop showed up and put me in his front seat and drove me to the station. He called my mom, but I didn’t get in too much trouble. The cop even told me that he knew Marta had a reputation for doing bad things and he could understand why I did what I did.
It’s embarrassing what we do sometimes.
Nope. It’s embarrassing to humanity how many shitty Martas are in the world. You ought not be embarrassed at any point in the process. Not then, not now.
It is shitty Marta and her (probably) shitty parents that deserve all the embarrassment and all the blame.
Choose you off! After school! Lindbergh Park!!!
Brings back memories of big verbal fights, but we had very little actual physical combat.
As a point of information, there is a Shawnee, KS and a Mission, KS. The post office and the school district are named Shawnee Mission.
I know I’ve shared this before, but my then first grader came home one day and told me it was OK to hit someone ‘if they hit you back’. He may have meant ‘hit you first’, but we did have a talk about it.
I can’t tell from the article whether the woman died as a result of the slapping, or because she had stopped using insulin for her diabetes.