Collective Punishment in Schools

Art

Thanks Moonbear I'll do that.
Life was a lot simpler last school year when she was at a girl's only school. Why do they have to grow up

I'm glad somebody recognises and appreciates my sensitive side

Moonbear

I'm sure there are other fathers here who have survived teenaged daughters and can give you pointers about proper technique for glaring at the young men appearing at your doorstep.

SticksandStones

The key is to be cleaning a gun when they come over. You don't even have to own bullets for it. Just have a gun (handgun, shotgun, rifle, doesn't matter) and be cleaning it when someone comes a-callin'.

At least that's what a friend of mine's father does.

ShawnD

Hey does anybody else remember Full Metal Jacket where everybody was punished for stuff Pyle did wrong, and in the end he killed the drill instructor, but only after he was physically abused by everybody? Oh wait, what thread is this?

Art

Guns are illegal here in Ireland but I wonder if a black balaclava and a Sinn Fein armband would have the same effect

Mk

Art's daughter is pure awesome!

PURE AWESOME!!

Have her hand-in the essay.
If you can't attach the document on PF, you can upload it here:
http://www.scribd.com/

Office_Shredder

The gun doesn't need to be real Art. It just needs to look real

Moonbear

Art, she might want to add a reference to this article in her essay.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usjusticeoffbeat

There's now official legal precedent against collective punishment.

Mk

Awesome, Moonbear!

BobG

Sometimes you just have to take the risk.

As long as you give her some back up, it should turn out alright. I'm not even sure why you would assume the teacher would get upset. She might - probably a better chance than the average teacher - but I'm not sure I'd say the chance is better than 50%.

It reminds me of when my daughter's teacher gave her a punishment of writing "I will not chew gum in class" some incredibly high number of times. I thought that was pretty lame and pointless. I changed the punishment. She was learning the keyboard, so I had her type the lines instead. It was pointless to have her type the same lines that many times, so I came up with a bunch of different ways to basically say the same thing, but in a way that managed to use every letter of the alphabet (that wasn't all that easy a thing to figure out). She had to type the same number of lines, but would actually get something out of it. I told her to tell her teacher to call me if she had a problem with it.

Wound up that her teacher loved the idea. In fact, she started laughing when Rachel explained what the heck she turned in.

Well, she thought it was funny until the next kid chewed gum in class, anyway. Instead of "I shall not chew gum in class", she assigned him to write "I shall not masticate in class". With the limited vocabulary of middle school students, that wound up creating a big crisis involving the kid, teacher, the kid's parents and the principal.

Davidanstey

When I was twelve and during my first day at a USA school I was paddled by my form teacher. Once he entered the classroom he noticed obscene words on the blackboard. Only a few moments before the board was clean so he knew it had to be someone in his form class. The culprit didn't own up so we were all paddled which was permitted at the private school. I had been paddled only hours earlier but that was for misbehaving at home. This was a hard paddling and once the teacher had finished my buttocks were bruised.

zomgwtf

Hmm I think collective punishment is useful in some cases.
For instance in my first highschool gym class if the teacher were to walk in and students were not participating in the warm up we would all be punished with laps, push ups, suicides... combinations of. It made us pretty physically fit and it made our class a pretty tight group of guys.
At the beginning we collectively hated the idea of course and we loathed those students who would be too lazy to do the warm-ups however by the end of the year it didn't matter. Just another day in gym and besides the punishments became less and less frequent as we were able to force those who would normally have been lazy to continue.

I remember the first time it had happened... we were supposed to do laps around the gym until he returned to the gym. He had gotten a phone call and was out of the gym for 20 minutes... when he returned there were a few students who were walking. Well that was cause for all of us to do push ups on his counts... was brutal. We made a way to see if he was going to be coming back who ever was running towards the entrance door would see him and would signal for everyone to start running, he was smarter than that though. We had a viewing area on the second floor into our gym, so he would go up there sometimes to see if we'd slack off while he left.

By the end of the semester though I didn't mind when I noted the improvement in my fitness tests.

EDIT: Bonus points to David for necroposting. Sorry, I didn't notice until after I posted.

Newai

The penalty for necroposting is a temporary ban on all PFers.

lisab

Whew, I thought we were all going to be paddled.

Char. Limit

Hmm... did we ever get to see that essay?

I suddenly want to read it.

Newai

I think that was tried before but apparently some people liked it too much, which led to too many forum-wide bans.

Pythagorean

I would personally feel obligated to let my daughter turn in the essay despite the risk. Please keep us posted!