A friend of mine sent along this link to an indystar.com article that talks about a kid who put urine in a teachers coffee pot and is now potentially going to be expelled from school. There are a few immediate reactions this causes from me. The first is to think (semi-fondly) of the pranks I pulled in school, not all of them good-natured pranks even. I didn’t do them because I was a bad kid, but mostly because I was just “having fun”. I didn’t think of consequences, I just thought it’d be funny. I can easily see this kid having also not really thought of the consequences but rather thinking it’d be funny, someone would take a sip and spit it out and all would be OK.
Why would a kid fail to realize the huge health implications of such a stunt? Well, for starters, because he’s in 8th grade – he likely knows it isn’t GOOD for a person but beyond that doesn’t think about things the way grown ups do. I don’t know the kid, or the situation well enough to say for certain, but I would chalk this up to a stupid childish prank.
Should the kid be expelled for it? I don’t think so. Everyone makes stupid mistakes, and certainly the kid is probably thinking “That, was incredibly stupid, why did I do that”, or something along those lines. If he’s not now, he will be. I don’t think we should expell our children from school as a punishment, though. That will 1.) set him behind in school and 2.) seriosuly harm his efforts to get a good education in the future should he want one. While yes, I think everybody should be held accountable for his or her actions I’m not sure expulsion is the correct method to use. It seems kind of backwards to me.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he shouldn’t be punished. He should be, both at home and school. The school should make him do after-school punishment, either of a detention type thing or a after-school work thing like cleaning bathrooms or something (under proper supervision). At home, the parents need to take charge and instill proper values. Grounding is a good sound option, as long as you take away all TV, computer, game console system and phone priveledges ( yes that means cell phones too, take them away). Also, no going out or hanging out with friends. If they have toys, take those away too. Make sure he knows that he’s being punished for what he did, don’t make grounding the non-issue that many kids find it to be today.
The simple fact is that parents need to take more control over their kids and large sections of our educational system need vast improvement. For any teachers out there please don’t take me the wrong way – I don’t fault teachers for the deficiencies of our educational system. Teachers offer a valuable service and aren’t paid nearly enough for it. I think this is a larger societal problem, but that’s best left for another post sometime in the future.
[tags] childish prank, over-reaction [/tags]
I say keep the boy in school, put him in detention for at least a month, and have him scrub bathrooms and other gross messes for at least two months. Combine that with what you said about grounding and removing ALL fun, should be more than enough to both punish and teach a very valuable lesson on respect and responsibility.