Sunday, February 19, 2012

Update time: And the girl was suspended for how long?

A couple posts back, I told you an all-to-typical story of an encounter I had with an 8th-grade female student in the hallway outside my classroom where she slung the F-word at me and refused to identify herself to me. Just to refresh everyone's memory (BAD LANGUAGE ALERT!):
...The student refused to give me her name. I repeatedly instructed the student to not walk away from me and to tell me her name. The student repeatedly refused. In all, I asked the student at least 15 times to tell me her name, and she refused. The only things she said in response to my request was, “Get away from me,” and “I ain’t tellin’ you my fuckin’ name.” By this time, the student was walking down the outside stairwell on west end of the building. I couldn’t follow her, as my classroom door was open and my 8th period students had already begun to enter. As the student continued to walk down the stairs away from me, I informed her that her refusal to identify herself to a staff member at this school could get her suspended, and her response was to tell me, “I don’t care; fuckin’ suspend me then!”
In that post, I mused about what would have happened to this girl in American schools decades ago, and what her likely punishment would be today. I hate how right I was.

The punishment this student received was... wait for it....

One (1) day of suspension.

One day. People want to know what is wrong with our educational system today? That about sums it up.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

She laughed at that, not caring in the least.

Anonymous said...

That girl had an important lesson reinforced for her that day: a lesson that, obviously, she had already learned in the past. There is nothing that she cannot get away with at school; no behavior that is not tolerated; no language that is unacceptable. She will continue her attitude and actions until sometime in the future something drastic happens. Then she will cry, scream, and rail against the system, and declare that it is all unfair and everyone is against her. Payback's a bitch and it is much easier to learn and accept when it happens at the age of two.