Monday, March 27, 2006

Give this woman a parenting award

- Badtux the Head-shaking Penguin

Comments:

Oh come on now, you can't tell me that you were such a goody-goody that you never ditched school, even once? For a lot of people high school is Hell, and ditching school from time to time for general sanity purposes is sort of like those "sick days" that you occasionally take from work when you're actually playing golf or hanging out at Red's.

In other words, I don't see the kid ditching school as an indictment of the mother. I see it as a case of a kid being a kid.

The mom's reaction to the kid ditching school, on the other hand... uhm...

-Badtux the Scholastic Penguin
# posted by BadTux : 28/3/06 8:10 AM  

I don't know. I spent more time in school than I had to: speech competitions, musicals, bands, newspaper. But then again, I didn't have cable.
# posted by NewsBlog 5000 : 28/3/06 9:23 AM  

They didn't have cable when I was a kid either. When I was a kid, we had to haul our stone tablets and chisels to school, and home entertainment was playing with sticks and mud in the back yard.

I despised school. It was full of conformist suck-ups, jerks, bullies, and meaningless rote "learning". I usually had read the textbooks from front cover to back within the first three weeks of school, and the rest of the school year I was bored stiff. Half the time I was slumped in my chair half-napping. The teacher would call on me, sure she was going to catch me out as unprepared, and I'd answer the question using almost the same words as the book. Everybody was convinced I was a stoner because, like the stoners, I just didn't give a shit. Reality was that I didn't need whacky weed for that, just eyes wide open.

Years later I regretted not taking advantage of the extracurriculars in school. But frankly, I didn't like most of the kids who were into stuff like that. They were preppies who talked about nothing but school and what college they were shooting for, and I was, well, I was grunge before grunge was cool.

But you can't blame my parents for the fact that school bored me stiff and was a generally hellish experience. They sent me to the best schools they could afford, and the schools put me into their most advanced classes. It's just that today's schools are set up as prisons, not as places of learning, and even the best teachers rarely had any lattitude for students who were, let us say, out of the ordinary. Prisons are about ramming square pegs into round holes, after all... not about finding square holes to put those pegs into.

- Badtux the "Everything I learned, I learned on my own" Penguin
# posted by BadTux : 28/3/06 9:37 AM  

I never missed a day, but then, I lived in the sticks, there wasn't anywhere else to go, and if I stayed home, Mom would either feed us sick fare: black tea (plain) and dry toast, and we had to stay in bed, no tv; OR she would *find something for us to do* (the dirtiest chores she could think up). School was so much more fun than that! I ended up joining the library club, and could get a pass to the library just about anytime, since I was usually honors.

I had a friend who nipped skipping class in the bud. The first time her kid did it, she went to school with him for 2 days - followed him around to all his classes, (and for icing on the cake, she wore dumpy clothes, and generally made it very embarassing) the second time, it was 4 days. There was no third time.
# posted by SB Gypsy : 28/3/06 11:12 AM  

I skipped school some, but was never had cuffed. But if the Mom is off her rocker.
# posted by Ole Blue The Heretic : 28/3/06 1:28 PM  

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