Or maybe you’re not reading them exactly, and maybe they phrased themselves carefully. They didn’t say, “This was not a single incident.” Reread what they did say, and notice the difference, a difference that allows them to stay on the correct side of a technical legal distinction (as opposed to the other sort of legal distinction, I suppose).
Actually no. They reversed the suspension. All we know is that a 6 year old pointed his finger like a gun.
Now maybe he bit off little Susie’s nose and that was left out of the picture but based on what we know this was an overreaction that got reversed. So either the original suspension was bullshit and the administrators were wrong or the school was blowing off a lawsuit to save money. If that’s the case then the other kids don’t matter.
…right, because if they were trying to avoid a lawsuit from some insane parents in an effort to save money, that money they’d have saved would have come out of their special Hookers and Blow account, not out of their, y’know, education fund.
the school system will have lawyers on retainer and probably wouldn’t have to use their hooker and blow money.
Barring information to the contrary the child did nothing wrong and the suspension attests to that.
Yogi Berra.
It’s called a self fulfilling prophecy, you tell a kid they are “bad” “quiet” “loud” “shy” “helpful” etc, they mimic the expected behavior either good or bad.
I remember in my child psych course reading that these ideas had been debunked. Kids don’t live up or down to your expectations of them to any significant degree.
I think you can’t fix stupid. And zero tolerance bullshit like that is the epitome of stupid.
Cut off his fingers. That’ll learn him. Let’s see him try and make a fake gun then.:rolleyes:
nm
Wasn’t there (at least) one famous study where the teacher was told the kids in the class were gifted and by the end of the year, presumably because the teacher had worked harder, been more creative, had higher expectations, or had done something, the kids actually did improve on a number of measures of intelligence, creativity, etc.?
(I recognize that study is actually demonstrating the self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon operating in the opposite direction to that which I was referring to above. Still, it does illustrate the potential power of labeling.)
Yeah, there was, but what I read suggested that the famous study was pretty badly flawed, and that whatever effects teacher expectation had are pretty minimal and ephemeral. No cites, sorry.
nm
Did anyone else notice that no other punishments were mentioned? Where’s moving their desk away from people? Where’s standing on the wall at or not being able to go to recess? Where’s detention, whether during lunch, recess, or after school? Where’s overnight suspension? Where’s flipping in-school suspension? I see no escalation of punishment. It’s just talk to kid with different people and then, boom, suspension. That’s ridiculous.
About as ridiculous as making up some imaginary straw person who the kid traumatized. At least kids at that age know the difference between fantasy and reality…
Yes. Have you read the thread?
We can be certain that a newspaper account driven primarily by the family’s complaint would include a comprehensive list of all the actions taken by the school, of course.
you mean the newspapers that quoted the school?
Yes. Why? Do you think that any article gives a full and complete quote of all that a subject said? That’s exceptionally naive.
This is complicated by the fact that the school has to be guarded in revealing information about a student, where there is no similar restriction placed on the family. I’m surprised that the school said anything at all, and they are certainly not going to provide a student’s full record to a media outlet.
The argument I challenged was that the newspaper based it’s information on the family’s word. That was false. Now you’re moving the goal post so as to state the newspaper misquoted the school’s position in some biased way. When you get to your final destination with the goal posts send a postcard. The discussion has already run it’s course based on the information at hand which culminated with the school retracting it’s suspension.
That’s not an argument I made. I
said an account driven primarily by the family’s complaint. This is the way of all such stories, since schools are not in the habit of publicizing the activities of students.
It does not appear that you grok the meaning of the phrase “moving the goal posts.”
Nevertheless, to be perfectly clear, my point was and still is that the absence of details regarding all of the disciplinary procedures that may or may not have occurred is not surprising, since 1) newspaper accounts are unlikely to want to include that level of detail, 2) schools are going to eschew such a level of disclosure of detailed info regarding a student, and 3) the motivation of the family is to make the school look as bad as possible, so they are not going to include details that run counter to this.
I’ve already said that, as described, it does seem like an overly rapid response to get to suspension in one day, if that is really what happened. I just think it’s foolish to have anticipated that a great deal of detail would have ever been available in one of these types of cases.