agonyaunt | (no subject)

Dear Care and Feeding,

My younger son, Evan, recently started his sophomore year in high school. I was stunned when he was suspended for a week over an assignment he’d turned in. One of his classes called for an essay to analyze a plan that went wrong, starting with why the plan was adopted, what flaws were inherent in its assumptions or execution, the consequences of the failure of the plan, and how the plan could be improved.

Evan chose to wrote about his school’s zero-tolerance for fighting policy. He thinks the policy was adopted because the school’s administrators are stupid and wanted to rid themselves of trying to figure out who’s responsible when an incident occurs. This policy, Evan says, increases violence, since if a kid can get suspended for even being near a fight, they might as well be violent once a fight starts. He points to several kids who were suspended, and one expelled, for being in the vicinity of a fight—or even attacked—and notes that this is both unjust and damaging to their education. His suggestion for fixing things involves giving the school staff brain transplants from the principal’s cats, which he declares would enhance their intelligence.

I am beside myself that Evan could be so disrespectful and insulting to his school’s administration. But no matter what sort of discipline I apply at home (he’s been grounded for the foreseeable future, and I’ve started monitoring his internet usage), he remains stubbornly defiant that the policy is terrible and the principal et al. are idiots. My husband has been absolutely no help at all—not going quite so far as to openly agree with Evan, but making it perfectly clear that he does in fact sympathize with him. I don’t know how to regain a handle on this situation.

—Furious Mom

Dear Furious,

Look, he’s been suspended for a week (for what it’s worth, I am in agreement with Evan that suspension from school is an inherently destructive punishment; nevertheless, he has been punished). I don’t think your grounding him for the foreseeable future is going to do anything useful in this situation—in fact, I think your overreaction is probably making matters worse. (I think the school’s suspending him has had the same effect, but that’s another matter altogether.) Have you had a conversation with him about what he wrote? Are you throwing the baby away with the dirty bathwater (as his school has)? I don’t know what his father is thinking, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he were proud of Evan for his gutsiness in using this assignment to critique a school policy, however flawed his logic may be.

Between your overreaction and your husband’s underreaction—not to mention the school’s knee-jerk, counterproductive suspension policy—I don’t see how Evan is going to learn anything from this experience. Instead of piling on the punishment, have you considered having a real conversation with your son about what he wrote? I’m curious about whether you disagree with his premise (that the school’s zero-tolerance policy is a failed one), and whether you can have a conversation with him about the challenges his school faces in dealing with violence, and what ideas he has about what would help. Lecturing him about respecting his elders (and authority) will get you nowhere. As will punishing a high school sophomore for his literally sophomoric sense of humor.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/11/mother-son-relationships-parenting-advice-care-feeding.html

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I suspect the suspension is less about disagreeing with the policy and more about things like brain transplants from cats. That said, that, too, is a stupid reason to suspend someone.

What kills me is that this was a teachable moment. Audience! Think about who you're trying to persuade, and what tactics will work. Insulting those very people is not really a good idea. What should have happened was that Evan should have been required to rewrite it with arguments and tone that would (hypothetically) have made school admin listen.

That said, that, too, is a stupid reason to suspend someone.

Unless the boy was proposing to actually do it, and had the scalpels and cats ready, because then it's animal cruelty.

Agreed completely. The mom should be at the principal's office defending him with receipts from the ACLU, not agonizing about her kid being disrespectful. Disrespectful is bad, but the proper response to saying something insulting about the staff - not even to them directly I assume, unless the teacher who assigned the essay was included in the group? - is not suspension, it's probably something like detention!

That said, I find it interesting that in the good advice about actually talking about his ideas, it didn't occur to the columnist or apparently anyone else in the situation to look into what actually does reduce school violence. I guarantee this is a subject with a lot of scholarship on it, and so-called "zero tolerance" policies in various forms have been used across the US for decades, so if there's any evidence they work or that they are strongly counterproductive, surely that should be the focus of the conversation and not just like, "tell me about your feelings and brainstorm about harm reduction as a purely imaginary exercise".

Yes!

All of this.

He completed the assignment (in a snarky, disrespectful, and hilarious fashion, for which I frankly commend him), no one was hurt or threatened, this is not a suspension-appropriate situation.

The appropriate consequences would have been to assign him to actually research what DOES work to reduce school violence (since the data is out there), and complete the assignment as given.

I'm not sure how teachable the moment is - the impression the absurdist conclusion of the essay gives me is that Evan thinks it doesn't matter what he says or how good/bad his arguments are, the adults are crazy and will levy bullshit penalties regardless. Which... they did.

The missed opportunity I see is for LW and their partner to prove Evan wrong about *all* adults being unreasonable and talk through his issues with school policy, support him in his reasonable complaints, and *then* maybe point out that the brain transplant thing wasn't going to get any good result. Maybe nothing would! But it's possible something might, especially if his parents backed him.

Instead LW is playing right to Evan's worst expectations. Adults *are* crazy and punishment-happy and never on his side. :(

Yepppppp :(

I've been thinking the kid went wrong at cat-brain-transplant as well, but if he'd called his essay "A Modest Proposal," I'd think he was substantially the winner and every adult in this story is missing the point by a country mile.

True, that. A candidate one brought an assignment to an interview in which she had students make a brochure for a fictional organization. One student made up a club called One Beer Monday, in which members gathered every Monday to, well, you get the idea. Everyone else on the committee was praising the satire, and I was just like, "No! This is a good idea.