My teenager received a suspension last week. It was a stupid thing. He and his friends discovered that erasers + metal rulers + friction = burning hot rulers and then promptly burned each other with them. Not smart. The Fairfax County school system has a zero-tolerance policy in terms of violence against students regardless of the circumstances. Typically any violation demands a 10-day suspension. Luckily, the principal recognized the lack of malicious intent and dialed back the punishment a bit. I’m grateful for that. My kid can’t afford to be out of class for t10 days, and he did deserve to learn a lesson. While I’m a bit reticent to look a gift horse in the mouth, I did have an issue with the way the suspension was carried out.
One of the boys involved in the physics “experiment” is on the football team. The principal delayed the boys’ suspension until this week he said because they had tests they shouldn’t miss and so they wouldn’t miss the football game.
WTF?!
You worry about the messages our kids are getting about the value of sports over an education or say anything else, and then Penn State happens.
Photo credit Patrick Mansell
Students marching and turning over news vans, people crying over an 84-year-old coach who can barely enunciate his words and in the middle of it all my head is bursting at hearing the following sentence:
“A witness allegedly saw Sandusky raping a boy in the locker room shower.”
Am I the only one hearing this?! Someone saw a boy being raped and did nothing to stop it?! Even if the child wasn’t mine and I would have put my fingers through the eyeballs of the monster who dared to touch a child.
Outrage doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction not only to the incident but to the blind eye turned by a multitude of people.
And all to protect a football program?! (I think I just broke my keyboard hammering out those words.)
What are we teaching children? My kids watch the news. They listen to their principals’ reasoning for delaying their punishment. As a society, we’ll have no one to blame when our kids grow up not understanding the difference between football and wrong.
Amie Adams is mother of three boys. She grew up playing sports and values athletics for the lessons it can teach, but she has a brain. When she isn’t here raging against the news, she is taking photographs or writing on her personal blog MammaLoves…
