Brickbat: Double Secret Rules

In Michigan, officials at Lakeview Middle School decided they were not going to allow students to wear T-shirts honoring  a classmate who had just died after a battle with cancer. But they did not inform students or parents of their decision. So at least a dozen students showed up for school wearing those shirts only to have administrators tell them to changes clothes, turn the shirts inside out or put tape over the classmate's name. After an outpouring of criticism by students and parents, administrators said they would allow students to wear the shirts.

Comments

[Snark Plissken]

or put tape over the classmate's name

Hooooly Sheeeit. It's like one giant Milgram experiment now...

[RBS]

Sounds like the administrators knew there would be some backlash but their inner bureaucrat would not let them make any exceptions to the School Policy.

[Bardas Phocas]

Exceptions were made.
Anarchy ensued!

[db]

The students should screen print a bunch of "We Never Cared About Caitlyn" t-shirts and send them to every school administrator and present some to the school board members at the next board meeting.

[SugarFree]

^THIS^

Use shame as long as they still possess any.

[Doctor Whom]

Shame, no; embarrassment, yes.

[db]

Or maybe all the sports teams' players should put tape over the school name on their uniforms at their next games.

[Bee Tagger]

I like this idea.

[Eduard van Haalen]

"Dont cheer your team - keep your school spirit in your heart!"

[Fatty Bolger]

Jones said the district's decision was based on its "crisis management plan," which she said is "based on a lot of research and expert opinion." The plan specifically bars "permanent memorials" on the research-backed belief that memorials can remind students of their grief and, for some, can make it worse.

Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of bullshit reasoning is that? And last I checked, T-shirts were not "permanent memorials" anyway.

Maybe they should take her name and picture out of the yearbook, erase all traces of her, and make her a nonperson who must never be mentioned again. That way nobody has to be "burdened" with grief over the loss of a classmate and friend.

[WTF]

Maybe they should take her name and picture out of the yearbook, erase all traces of her, and make her a nonperson who must never be mentioned again. That way nobody has to be "burdened" with grief over the loss of a classmate and friend.

I see a great future for you as a public school administrator.

[Pro Libertate]

Ye gods. We should promptly forget and not suffer when people we care about die? No, that' s not totally inhuman or dangerous.

[cavalier973]

But...but...it's research! SCIENCE! What are you, some sort of flat-earther Creatard?

Go to the back of the class!

[Pro Libertate]

People with no family, friends, or possessions suffer less. Therefore, people should not have family, friends, or possessions.

[Doctor Whom]

Let's outlaw cemeteries. Research and expert opinion say so.

[Eduard van Haalen]

Its not as if the students sre calling in "grief counselors" or proposing dumb laws, which seem to be most school admins' response to tragedy.

Does "rrsearch" show that the healthist eay for kids to process their grief is to get harassed by assholes when they try to honor their friend?

And I just remembered the part in huxley's Brave New World where the govt has kids gawk at the dying so as to be inured to death and not get all hung up about it.

[Heroic Mulatto]

And I just remembered the part in huxley's Brave New World where the govt has kids gawk at the dying so as to be inured to death and not get all hung up about it.

Doesn't this event prove that we Americans are at the other end of that spectrum? I can't think of a more thanatophobic culture than America. We shove our elders in hospitals and nursing homes so they don't daily remind us our own mortality. I personally know of a couple that waited almost a week to tell their 7 year old daughter that her grandmother died. Instead of dying "good", comfortable deaths after a period of calm introspection and contact with those we love, many of us insist (or our loved ones do the insisting for us) on being hooked up to tubes in a vain effort to squeeze a few more weeks after a terminal illness has been diagnosed.

And while I don't advocate the government from forcing kids to engage in marananussati, the Buddhist contemplation of death, as a practice, becoming inured to our own mortality is a hell of a lot more sane than our current cultural practices.

[Eduard van Haalen]

Huxley had a world where strangers could gawk at the dying in the hospitals but survivors werent supposed to make a big fuss over their dead or dying loved ones. Its all Nature. Thats why the protagonist was called a Savage, because he clung to outworn attitudes like mourning one's mother.

Once we start approaching death, not from the standpoint of What Does It Mean but from the standpoint of How Does It Make Us Feel, especially where child-survivors are concerned, were going to end up with a ceftain degree of minimization and denial in the interest of sparing survivors tender feelings.

[Fist of Etiquette]

You can celebrate life by following the rules. And by putting out of your mind any classmate whose death competes in students' attention with the learning and growing process.

[amelia]

You got it. Mourning prevents kids from "accessing the curriculum."

[JidaKida]

Sounds like a solid plan to me dude.

http://www.Privacy-Web.tk

[Lady Bertrum]

What a bizarre response from the school. Why not give them some time to process the death and celebrate the life? T-shirts seems benign. In high school, we lost a classmate to a motorcycle accident. We had a school-wide assembly in remembrance. It definitely interfered with academics for a day or two, but geez, he was 16 years old, it was a small town and everyone knew him.

[Heroic Mulatto]

When I was a freshman, a senior and fellow band member died in the school gym after a game of basketball due to a heart problem no one ever knew he had. Not only did we have an assembly, but school organized the band (all 140-sem-odd of us) to play "Danny Boy" at his funeral.

[Eduard van Haalen]

That was unconstitutional! Have you noticed the religious verses in danny boy?

But seriously, good for your school.

[Heroic Mulatto]

Even worse, we attended his Mass at St. Catherine's and he was buried in a Catholic cemetery.

It was a different time.

[Ted S.]

but school organized the band (all 140-sem-odd of us) to play "Danny Boy" at his funeral.

Now this is just torture.

[Rich]

Jones said the situation was handled "compassionately." She said, for example, that students who were asked to turn their shirts inside-out were told to keep Caitlyn's name "close to their heart."

Oh, bite me, Jones. "Compassionately", of course.

[Eduard van Haalen]

I thought the conventional wisdom was that it's unhealthy to bottle up your grief, you have to let it out. These morons can't even keep their own stories straight.

Anyway, another persons death isn't about you. You honor the dead because honoring the dead is the duty of a civilized community, not because you're using the mourning process as some kind of personal therapy. But if you feel better giving public honor to the dead, thats a GOOD thing - a sign of maturity.

[Eduard van Haalen]

Do they encourage students at school sporting events to keep their school spirit in their heart? I suspect not, because they have public displays of the stuff they really value.

[Suthenboy]

Wow. Research huh? My studies show that most research is bullshit.

Lately my opinion of academia has become very low. Too much govt money, too much politics, and too many people claiming to be intellectuals who would be better suited to garbage collecting or running a grocery store cash register.

I mean no offense to any of the people here who teach. Well, maybe Tulpa.

[Eduard van Haalen]

Garbage collectors should be able to tell junk from non-junk. Cashiers are part of a market economy. Are you sure we want academics are capable of doing such jobs?

[Eduard van Haalen]

Are you sure ee think

[Heroic Mulatto]

Someone hated his English professor.

[Eduard van Haalen]

I should have said liberal sociologist types, and dont blame my english teacher for my touch screen.

[Heroic Mulatto]

I'm just busting your balls.

[Heroic Mulatto]

I mean no offense to any of the people here who teach. Well, maybe Tulpa.

It should also be noted that "American" is a secondary school math teacher.

[Suthenboy]

No shit? That, my friend, is frightening.

[SugarFree]

But only for White Children. The Third World Races lack the ability to learn White Math. Except the Asians. Asians are honorary Whites because the wife he purchased is Asian.

[Heroic Mulatto]

Except the Asians

East Asians. American condemns to mud-peoplehood the race that invented the concept of zero, laid the foundations of Boolean logic, the standardization of Base-10 for everyday operations, trigonometry, ... damn I'm tired, you read the rest.

[SugarFree]

Ah, yes. I forgot it's only the "good" Asians he likes.

[Lord Humungus]

You know who else had a double-secret rule?

[UnCivilServant]

Alexander and Clapper?

[wareagle]

every time you think educrats have reached peak retard, they demonstrate that the term may, in fact, be unreachable. It's like they look for ways to make the public system look worse than it already does.

[SugarFree]

Peak Retard is like Warp 10, if we ever reach it we readjust the scale in recognition that there is just so much more retard out there than we can possibly imagine.

[Doctor Whom]

Who says that public schools don't teach anything? They routinely provide valuable lessons in the ways in which authority can be abused.

[Eduard van Haalen]

At my high school the school paper ran an editorial claiming that the school had not properly honored a dead student. The only way I knew about the editorial is that our teacher denounced it in class on the grounds that the school HAD in fact honored the student.

[Midnite]

Administrators who make asinine decisions should be forced to sit in stocks outside their schools so that the public can properly express their outrage.

[Ted S.]

Once again, the State (here in the form of public schools) is the biggest bully of them all.

[Jack Holby]

[chanting] Her name is Roberta Paulson.

[kevrob]

The kids should have worn black armbands.

See: Tinker v. Des Moines

Publik skrools are so rule-bound and overlawyered that even if I wasn't a libertarian I'd be in favor of dismantling The Blob.

Kevin R