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Learning French is like masturbating for 6 months straight without ever climaxing.

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Originally posted by ANTHONYT:

Hello,

This is off-topic, but I have noticed that you mention masturbation... a lot.

It's certainly your right to do so, but I wondered if you were unaware of it, and might enjoy the opportunity to broaden the scope of your metaphors and analogy.

--Anthony

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:

I don't buy it Story - most of the evidence *I* have seen is contrary to that, and besides lemme point it out to you this way...

See that airport shakedown, THAT is what Zero-Tolerance looks like when it's pointed at YOU.
Does that mean most of the folk inflicted by it can't behave, or is it in fact a massive overreaction to a negligable threat in order to appease agendas ?

Before you light into me over the usual, lemme clarify my position on this a bit.
I mislike Zero-Tolerance not only cause it's based on lies, and deliberate, intentional, willfully-ignorant misconceptions(1)... but ALSO because it takes the form of discipline out of the hands of the staff on site, the same way mandatory sentences take decision making out of the courts hands in a manner I feel unconstitutional.

HOWEVER, there's also a looming danger in allowing staff on site to make those decisions in that they may try to fulfill personal grudges and the like - folks think bullying magically ends when people graduate and it don't, oft-times the bullies wind up in positions of power in the community and use those to continue the aggression: that is pretty much was Blake vs Lower Merion was all about, the school admin considering his family to be of a lower social "class" and unwelcome, which was ever more evident by the crap they pulled on the siblings, and some of their own comments, yadda yadda...

Instead of Zero-Tolerance or carte blanche, I favor creating a set of uniform guidelines for school conduct and punishment on an appropriate scale with some built-in fudge factor for mitigating circumstances - while this will not wholly eliminate abuses and excesses, it would cut them down significantly, and provide a stable structure and more level playing field.
That said - there MUST be student input on the matter, because if they feel part of the process there's a lot less likely to be backlash and sabotage as there would be if it were yet another matter imposed on them from on-high, sans consent or input.

Ain't that I think public schools are a font of evil - so much as they're totally broken in a fashion which has essentially reduced them to the same fell social order of the penal system, and this is wholly unacceptable.
I'd like to fix them, but I'd also like to see other options for kids who don't do well in such a rigidly structured system.

(1) Regarding such myths - in almost every case I treat these in the same dismissive fashion, because all too often they're foisted off deliberately by agendas.

That whole we're all ravening beasts held in check by the iron fist of government notion, for example, always, always offered by someone who out of the goodness of their own heart (yeah,right!) intends to BE that iron fist, but if we fail to buy into it and drink that koolaid, they don't get the power they desire to use and abuse.

Same goes for "all kids are lying manipulators" - for a fact, kids can't lie for shit, most of em cannot for the life of em maintain a deception for even a short time without resorting to another and another till it collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness - they learn THAT crap from us, with our endless doubletalking hypocrisy, and being punished for honesty.
Or "all teens are sex-crazed maniacs" - which is also horseshit, given the comparative rarity of actually getting to first base even with most of em, for all the TALK otherwise, and that's just what it is, talk...
But it's a useful crowbar to demonize them with, so we don't have to admit they're human.
Or the full circle irony of "my teen doesn't obey, they're on drugs!", which has come now all the way around to "my teen doesn't obey, they SHOULD be on drugs!", which is even more ironic since in some cases we're talkin about the SAME DAMN DRUGS, as if being packaged by Big Pharma makes it any damn better ?

So this whole "thier parents don't abuse them enough, they're running wild" bullshit means no more to me than any other obvious bullshit - firstoff, they're CHILDREN, or Teens, which is somewhere BETWEEN child and adult, and this is a progression instead of a goddamn ON/OFF switch no matter what the law says, and some kids take more or less time in that progression, they're not all built to the same specs and pretending they are is ridiculous - as well you also have the damn unrealistic expectations of adults on top of a society that never gives them a fucking chance to concentrate without throwing distractions at them - something which medication is only the barest temporary fix for and moderately destructive in the long term since via that dependence they never DEVELOP the ability to focus without that particular crutch, which also has backlash effects regarding impulse control as well.
Take fifty of those "running wild" children and find out how many are "on something" - consider what happens when that suppressive affect wears off, neh ?

As for the more, err... "vicious" misbehavors, violent ones - consider THIS analogy.
Guy buys a puppy - people tell em dogs are untrustworthy, vicious, need be cowed and broken.
So the guy regularly abuses the dog to break its will, force its obedience.
The dog eventually mentally snaps and goes after the guy.
The guy points a shaking finger at the dog and screams "See, he TURNED on me, they were right!!".
And the "advice" given to the guy is usually that he was too much of a wuss, that he didn't hit the dog hard enough, often enough, that he didn't really cow it or break its will...

Now, swap out guy for parent, and dog for kid - and THAT RIGHT THERE, is exactly the fucking model promoted by this myth making bullshit, courtesy of psychos like Dobson, Ezzo and the like, a model might I remind you proven to be downright abusive if not outright lethal.

Sure, there's kids who act out - but there's generally a reason involved, and to make automatic assumptions cause you've been told by very untrustworthy people to make them, that's a fools gambit.
And yes, there's folks who fail pretty bad as a parent - but why exactly does that make it some kind of okay to take it out on the kids who are victim of an incompetent parent, why ?
Just cause they're easier targets with no legal rights, hmmm ?

Anyhows, a standardized discipline code with some leeway in it would be a damn good first step, both cost-effective and wholly sensible - problem is, again and as usual, that whole admission that children are persons, human beings with rights - and that's a damn big hurdle, most days.

-Frem

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
http://www.alternet.org/education/154541/barely_literate_how_christian
_fundamentalist_homeschooling_hurts_kids?page=entire


Barely Literate? How Christian Fundamentalist Homeschooling Hurts Kids
The Religious Right touts homeschooling as the "responsible" educational choice. But what about the kids whose parents opt-out of the system -- and out of educating them, as well?


Take Vyckie Garrison, an ex-Quiverfull mother of seven who, in 2008, enrolled her six school-age children in public school after 18 years of teaching them at home. Garrison, who started the No Longer Quivering blog, says her near-constant pregnancies – which tended to result either in miscarriages or life-threatening deliveries – took a toll on her body and depleted her energy. She wasn’t able to devote enough time and energy to homeschooling to ensure a quality education for each child. And she says the lack of regulation in Nebraska, where the family lived, “allowed us to get away with some really shoddy homeschooling for a lot of years.”

“I’ll admit it,” she confesses. “Because I was so overwhelmed with my life… It was a real struggle to do the basics, so it didn’t take long for my kids to fall far behind. One of my daughters could not read at 11 years old.”

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
6 - I think your choices are good ones for you, and for all the women you might encounter.

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:

I don't buy it Story - most of the evidence *I* have seen is contrary to that, and besides lemme point it out to you this way...

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Originally posted by Storymark:
My experiences are what they are. I don't require your acceptance of this.

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