- You’d think, you’d really think, they’d learn to use PGP.
- Police pepper spray a second grader. “I think there is a problem, but it’s with school and Aidan,” Mandy Elliot [his mother] said. “It only happens at school. It doesn’t happen at soccer. It doesn’t happen at swimming. It doesn’t happen with babysitters, with family members.”
- “How slavery really ended in America.” (NY Times link)
- Deathbed confessions work better if you confess to somebody honest, rather than a fellow member of your gang of crooks. And if your country has an actual, you know, justice system. (Odd timing. I was already composing a blog about deathbed confessions when I read that the Connick v. Thompson case started with one. Soon. Maybe tomorrow.)
- Oliver reports that rare thing, a good bit of government news. (Scroll down.) The obnoxious 1099 requirement of ObamaCare is finally to be repealed. Halellujah!
- From Dana in yesterday’s comment section: The Four Seasons of Seattle Weather. Hysterically true. (And where I live, it’s wetter and gloomier. Considerably.)
“I think there is a problem, but it’s with school and Aidan,” Mandy Elliot [his mother] said. “It only happens at school. It doesn’t happen at soccer. It doesn’t happen at swimming. It doesn’t happen with babysitters, with family members.”
Perhaps the same can be said of this epidemic of bullying. It’s not found in civil society, only in the day-prison called the public school.
If my name was Aidan I’d flip out too.
Sounds like a kid who would do FAR better homeschooled. If he is truly only having problems at school, then something may well be going on there, too, that is not being dealt with.
Aidan is a ticking time bomb….eventually even pepper spray isn’t going to stop him….I have a feeling we’ll hear another story about him, in the future, and it won’t be a very good one either……
Aidan is exactly like my son at that age. He was willful, short fused, emotional, and prone to demonstrations of violent acts (but not actual violence). Punishments and reprimands went straight to his soul, and he’d explode with defiance rather than take them. If we escalated the battle, in an attempt to win it, it would spiral completely out of control. We learned if we stayed calm and let him work through his anger, we could talk to him rationally afterward.
I won’t go into all of the problems with school…let’s just say their ‘command and control’ approach to kids conflicted with his personality and resulted in one explosion after another.
Today, he is 20, generally thoughtful, respectful, and pleasant to be around. His behavior calmed noticably when he graduated from high school. No more school, much reduced emotional roller coaster.
Aiden can be fine. Self control must be learned. Most of us learn by punishments, some of us fight the punishments and learn only by rewards. Knowing when to use one or the other is a nuanced thing, something ‘no tolerance’ schools know little about.