Before anyone criticizes you for this word choice, I want to preemptively defend you: brownshirts is a perfect word to use for these people. If you step out of line with the wrong word, just like Hitler’s thugs of yore, they criticize you. And recalling the events of Kristallnacht, they might call you names. No wonder you live in terror of their tactics; verily, you are akin to a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Sports is just entertainment as well.
That was the point.
Seems reasonable to me that a school gets to choose who gets which awards.The mother in this story just unilaterally decided that what her son did was good enough. Sure, change the system to be more inclusive if you want but I can’t really support her just slapping a letter on her kids jacket and expecting everyone to accept it.
Again, though, I think we need to separate out the award from the symbol of the award. The wearing of the letter jacket is a form of communication: it says that the award was given. The school does not need to police this form of communication, any more than it needs to police students bragging in the hallways that they got all As on their report card.
They don’t need to, no. I just don’t agree that they’re all a bunch of insecure douchebags if they do.
I think the important thing about letters is the should only be given out in activities with cuts. You’re not good enough to play varsity football off to jv with you. You can’t march in a straight line or know an A from a C you’re out of the band. Participation trophies are dumb but a school letter should imply a level of actual achievement beyond I showed up and tried real hard.
At my high school (15 years ago) we only had one non-athletic letter and it was for the band our band was so small that they couldn’t cut or they would run out of people I don’t think that’s worthy of a letter. They may have had some internale mechanism for sorting out who got a letter but I never asked. On the other hand our track team didn’t have junior varsity but you had to score 10 points for the team in meets over the season to letter. I only scored 9 as a freshmen and so was not able to earn a fouryear lettermen award there were only 2 kids from my class of 135 who were able to earn that and it makes the achievement worth more then if it was a I showed up and tried real good for 4 years.
For the special ed kid I don’t think he should get a letter for what I assume is a non cut sport and if I was in charge I would take back letters from everyone who isn’t showing that they are better then somone else at their chosen activity. If the dram club has two production one for the kids who can’t act and one for the ones who are good, I dont care if you’re tree number three in the good production at least you are good enough to not be the lead in the bad production yiu should be eligible for a letter. I think academic letters are dumb since there are may other awards for good academics while there is a competition I think of letters as for non-academic activities and if people want they can put their SAT score or GPA pin or patch on their jacket to show that they were good at multiple things simultaneously but I wouldn’t give them a letter.
Says who? :dubious:
Who else is telling this kid he can’t wear the jacket if it isn’t the “letter police”? If, as you and I agree, Bob can wear his borrowed jacket then clearly wearing a letter jacket does not indicate athletic participation then how is letting this kid wear one a problem? You can’t determine who earned any letter anyone is wearing anyway without asking them where they got it.
PS: No need to tell me what it was like 30-40 years ago. I was there.
If the school doesn’t want people wearing unawarded letters, they could just… not sell them.
I know! Isn’t it so upsetting that there are people who want to be inclusionary and raise awareness that some words make others feel inferior or subjugated? Just like Hitler, I’m telling ya.
The kid has Downs. Let him wear the damn letter. If it helps, think of it as him wearing a school spirit t-shirt. Perhaps the varsity kids could feel proud that another student wants to emulate them.
It doesn’t say where she bought the letter from. Unless it was a custom design, you can buy letters online based on (several) standard templates.
I know where I coach, the school does not sell letters.
Checking out the video again, it says that when the school “recogized him for his participation” Mom bought him the letter. So they probably did give him some token, just not the same token as the varsity players.
I see both sides of the letter debate. I think all kids should be able to feel included, should be able to have tangible signs of their real achievements and efforts, and should be integrated into the school community.
I also think that it’s important that we’re lauding real effort and accomplishment, not just being in the vicinity, because letting people buy awards does devalue the award. But this devaluing doesn’t really impact the ones who earned the award. It impacts those who bought them. Buying an award for a kid with developmental disabilities may not signal inclusion for the kid; it might just signal condescension.
So, I think the goal of inclusiveness should be pursued with a real, well-thought policy, not a scattershot “buy your kid a varsity letter he didn’t earn the normal way” policy. This should be a sign to the school system that there is a gap here and it’s in everyone’s interests to figure out how to integrate the community better.
I wish I could Like this post.
Giving letters to the Special Needs kids is vastly more honest than carrying on like it’s some Lifetime Achievement Medal of Specialness. In the space of four years, everyone except the Special Needs kids is going to stop being impressed by a high school letter jacket for the same reason no one cares who won the spelling bee in fourth grade.
If every kid on the team who “earned” a letter didn’t immediately offer the Special Needs kids their own jackets - then they have been criminally failed by the adults in their lives.
If it is so meaningless, then why do you care so much if the kid gets to have it or not? I’m not following your logic at the moment.
I should clarify: a letter jacket is meaningful to the people wearing it to the extent that they find it meaningful. I think the kid should get to wear one for basically the same reason that I think gay people should get to get married: because he wants to, and it doesn’t harm anyone else.
I’m fine with someone attaching meaning to their own letter jacket. I’m really not fine with people attaching meaning to other folks’ wearing of a letter jacket to the extent that they want to prohibit others from wearing such a jacket.
In your opinion, should the kid also be given A’s, put on the dean’s list and given entrance to Yale?
It does not help to think of him as wearing a t-shirt; what would help is giving him a t-shirt instead and accept him as he is instead of pretending that he is something he is not and and can accomplish things he can not.
Where will the ridiculousness of this logic end? I had a bad knee in high school; I worked really hard, but could not make the track team - should people like me also get a free letter too? This post makes me sad because I think in our society we’ve gotten so far from being able to separate the value of people from the value of accomplishments that this nonsense actually resonates with a fair number of people.
Gay marriage is not analogous to me; if gay people get married, they are married with the same rights and responsibilities as anyone else that enters into a marriage. If the special needs kid gets the letter, he is not on the team, and does not play for the team. The letter signifies that someone is on the team, mostly what I see in this thread are just semantic arguments.
That is a pretty ridiculous analolgy.
No. But if the kid tells someone in the hallway that he got A’s, was put on the dean’s list, and was given entrance to Yale, he doesn’t need to be sent home until he admits otherwise.
The analogy extends precisely as far as I said:
- Does he want to wear the letter jacket?
- Does his wearing the letter jacket harm anyone else?
The answers to these questions are precisely the same as the answers to the analogous questions about SSM:
- Do some people want to marry a person of the same sex?
- Does their getting married harm anyone else?
Obviously the situations are dissimilar in myriad ways. But the answers to these two questions are what shape my opinions of both matters.
Show me a way in which his wearing the jacket actually harms anyone else–not just some stupid “it dilutes their accomplishment” nonstarter of an argument–and I’ll reconsider.