Friday, July 12, 2002

Utter. Fucking. Bullshit. Was checking out my morning news when I ran across this interesting article at Salon.com: L is for lawsuit.
Angry that little Johnny flunked, increasing numbers of parents are suing teachers. Hey, here's some news if your kid skips class, fails tests and doesn't try to take make up exams to bring their grade to passing: Your kid is a fucking dumbass.

I know, some of you are thinking that sometimes life deals you a strong blow and it's hard to take care of things, especially with the social pressures of adolesence. Yet, I do recall my high school teachers cutting me enough slack to get it done, giving some kind of interest in my success...so what does that mean for all you pansy ass parents crying foul? You're all jackasses.

"One solution is to completely standardize education -- testing, grading and discipline -- so that there is no wiggle room in the system for outraged parents and their lawyers. But that resolution already has prompted other kinds of parent lawsuits -- in California and Texas -- that claim that the system is too rigid, and discriminates against their children's special needs."

Here's a special need: Show some interest in your child's studies. I understand that all children have different needs and some suffer from learning disabilities outside of what they can control. They have every right to participate in curricular activities of teenagers their own age, but knowing that off the bat, that means you have made the sacrifice to work harder than other parents to have your child succeed. Next time you ask a blue-blooded lawyer to get your kid to graduate because he/she is short of a full stack, remember that.

"Finally, the students risk both the quality of their education and their faith in the system. Kids with lackluster achievement records who nevertheless head off to college with satisfactory grades thanks to Mom's strong-arm tactics are probably not going to make it far in higher education. Their classmates, who actually worked hard for their grades, will probably be demoralized too.

"It undermines the hard work of other kids in the classroom, when they see standards change for one student. It erodes the standards, when we really want students to know that standards are meaningful. And for students involved, it really cheats them of a meaningful experience," says Mitchell. "Sometimes failure is the best teacher a student could have."

As stated in quote from the article, yes, it does hurt the confidence and initiative of regular hard working kids. Now, to tell you the truth, I was not all that driven in High School, yet I never asked for any preferential treatment. I knew exactly how the system worked and had to either work against it, around it, or with it. All my friends did the same and all of them graduated to become sub-par citizens (hahaha). Deal with it.

Of course, that's just my opinion.

posted by HZA | 9:30 AM | email | archive