Cake face
I keep seeing this image of my son at age 5….
I had just finished icing a cake for someone’s birthday, probably my son’s, and I was out on the front porch watching the neighborhood kids play in the front yard.
M had gone into the house to fetch a toy, and when he came back outside, looking as innocent as could be, I had to keep myself from laughing.
“Did you touch the cake?” I asked.
“Me?” He looked stricken, and then added for good measure, “What cake?”
My eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why is your face all covered with chocolate frosting?”
“I dunno.” He shrugged.
He had walked through the kitchen on his way to wherever and couldn’t resist the newly frosted cake. He had stuck his finger in the frosting, at the bottom -- “where you wouldn’t notice it” -- and taken a lick. The brown frosting smeared above his lip and halfway across his cheek was more than condemning. And pretty freaking funny.
M scuffed the toe of his Power Ranger shoe on the cement. “Sorry, Mom.” His playmates were beckoning for him to hurry up.
“It tasted really good, though,” he added. And then he patted me on the arm. “You did a great job!”
Fast forward to last Friday when I got a call at work from my son’s assistant principal. My son, now six feet tall and a freshman in high school, was being suspended from school for a day for violating the school’s computer/technology policy.
All of the students in his high school are issued laptop computers as part of a special state grant project. My son, the total computer/video game freak, was practically beside himself with glee the day he brought his computer home. He had to show me each and every feature of his new laptop, and then he asked me if I wanted to watch a DVD with him.
He said they had told them in assembly that one of the features of the new laptops was the ability to watch DVDs.
My initial reaction as the killjoy parent was: “Why on earth do they need to watch DVDs in school?”
But then I thought, Chill out. Whether kids watch DVDs at home on their laptops or not is a parental issue, not a school one. I could always step in and say, “No, you can’t watch a DVD now. You need to do your homework first.”
Plus, when your fourteen year old son asks you if you want to watch a movie with him, you say yes. Because the offer doesn’t come very often. And usually what he wants to watch is not at all what you want to watch. I told him, “Sure!” And he said I could pick the movie; did I have something from Netflix?
He put the DVD into his laptop. Nothing happened. The DVD would not play. He fooled around with the DVD player for a few seconds and then decided the video wouldn’t play because the Region Code wasn’t set and he couldn’t set it. You had to have admin permission to set it, he said. He was very disappointed.
I told him to ask the IT people at school the next day why it wasn’t working and what he needed to do to get it fixed. He did this, and came home saying they said there was a “glitch” with the computers, which they would try to fix.
So, I thought nothing of it when a week or so later my son came home saying he could now watch DVDs on his laptop. I just figured the school had fixed the glitch.
Well… it ends up that my son and his friends had “fixed” the glitch on their own. One kid had searched the Internet for how to set up admin accounts on a Macintosh computer. They had then gone in and created their own admin accounts and set the Region Code so they could watch DVDs.
Of course, setting up their own admin accounts was in blatant violation of the school’s policy on computer usage – a policy to which they had all signed their names before being issued their computers. Never mind that all they had wanted to do was watch DVDs on their laptops, a privilege they were told they should have anyway.
Never mind that they could have watched DVDs on any number of other devices – DVD players, Playstation 2s, other computers, etc. They were determined to get DVDs to play on their laptops.
M was very up front with me about having his computer confiscated in school.
When I threatened at dinner to take his laptop away if he didn’t start turning in his homework on time, he said the IT guy had beaten me to it. He had come into M’s 6th period class that very day and taken his and another kid’s laptops. When I asked him why, he shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Did you download anything onto your computer?” I took my prosecutorial tone.
Downloading games or software from the Internet was a big no-no and something I had strongly – and repeatedly! -- counseled my son against doing before he had received his computer.
“No!” he said, egregiously offended. “Of course not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah…. Don’t you trust me?”
“Well, what could you have done then to get your computer taken away?”
He shrugged. “It might have something to do with the DVD player.”
“What do you mean? I thought you said they fixed the DVD player.”
“Well, I said the DVD player was fixed.”
He then told me how he had seen his one friend watching a DVD during study hall one day – a vision that made me frown as I thought people should be studying in study hall, but whatever – and had asked him how he had gotten it to work. His friend had showed him how he had done it on his computer, and then his other friend, the one who had gone online to find out about setting or changing admin accounts, walked him through, step-by-step, how to set up his own admin account on his laptop and then set the Region Code.
“But you’re not allowed to mess with the admin accounts!”
My son was unperturbed. “We were only fixing the computers so we could watch DVDs. We weren’t doing anything wrong. They told us we were allowed to watch DVDs.”
“But you’re not allowed to set up your own admin account. Period.”
“Yeah, I get that,” he said, frustrated with my obvious stupidity.
I fail to understand why schools think suspension is an effective form of punishment. A day’s suspension is a day off from school. To M, then, this would be like a vacation day. To me as a concerned parent it meant he would be missing yet another day of school; he had missed far too many already due to a football injury and subsequent doctors’ appointments and tests.
“Oh, we’ll make sure he gets all his assignments from his teachers,” the assistant principal reassured me. “He won’t be missing anything.” Oh, no, just a whole day’s worth of teaching and hands on exposure to learning. Clearly, he could do all this on his own!
“I hope you know,” I told my son’s guidance counselor on the morning of M’s suspension – because I had had to stay home from work to supervise M and make sure he was actively engaged in doing all those school assignments and homework and had requested an appointment with my son’s guidance counselor since I wasn’t at work, anyway – “that I could make M scrub toilets with a toothbrush, and he would still view this as a day off from school. As a vacation day.”
The counselor actually laughed. He seemed to find this an amusing concept, like I should think of even harder punishments so my son would rue his day away from the hallowed halls of learning, even though, according to the assistant principal, a day away really would have no impact on his learning since he could simply teach himself and do all of the work at home.
My younger son had pitched a fit that very morning before I sent him off to school. “It’s not fair!” he wailed. “M gets to stay home. He gets a day off. I want a day off from school, too! I deserve a day off.”
The guidance counselor grinned at me from amongst all of his inspirational posters. “Well, you can tell M that this suspension will go into his permanent record. When he applies to colleges, they will see that he was suspended for a day when he was a freshman.”
I stared at the guidance counselor.
Like that was going to motivate a fourteen year old who didn’t really think he had done anything terrible? Like he was even thinking about college as a ninth grader?
Whenever I mention the topic of college, my son usually responds with, “What makes you think I even want to go to college?”
“And what makes you think you wouldn’t be going to college?” I ignore his use of the word “want.”
“Because,” he tosses his long bangs out of his eyes, “I am going to create my own country, and in my country, I won’t have to go to college.”
Rrrright.
While I think my son “gets” that he violated the very computer policy he had signed his name to and was being punished for that violation, I also think he sees it as being more about “his getting caught.” I probably shouldn’t have told him that when asked by the guidance counselor how he knew the boys had set up their own admin accounts, the IT guy had said simply, “Informants.” As the sole person responsible for randomly checking over 600 laptop computers, there was no way he was going to find all computer policy violators. Apparently, he relied heavily on word of mouth and “informants.”
The other morning when the topic of his suspension came up at the breakfast table, my son said, “Well, it wasn’t my fault I got suspended.”
“Oh, really?” I asked. “And whose fault was it?”
M shrugged. “Whoever turned me in.”
I was not sure whether he was being serious, or just pushing my buttons (something he likes to do quite regularly, it seems). Since it was about 7:15 in the morning and I was only on my first cup of coffee, it was not a wise time to test me. I proceeded to go into a lengthy diatribe about being responsible for one’s actions and taking responsibility for one’s mistakes. This diatribe would have gone on much longer and lasted all the way until I dropped him off at the bus stop, but we passed two of his schoolmates along the way.
I rolled down the window. “Would you guys like a ride?” I asked sweetly, in a tone of voice 180 degrees different from the one I had just been using with my son. Luckily for my son, they said yes. Thus, he was spared even more emphatic, four letter word-laden lecturing on the concept of doing the right thing and being a responsible person.
“You guys have a great day!” I announced cheerily as my three occupants disembarked at their bus stop.
“You, too!” they all chanted back cheerily.
Oh, and did I mention that the IT guy told me that, yes, they were supposed to be able to play DVDs on their laptops but that the Region Code thing was a glitch? They just hadn’t figured out yet how to fix the problem on everyone’s laptops all at the same time. And if M had simply come to him with a DVD – because a DVD needed to be in the laptop in order to adjust the settings – he would have gone in and fixed it for him?
I want to start my own country, too.
I had just finished icing a cake for someone’s birthday, probably my son’s, and I was out on the front porch watching the neighborhood kids play in the front yard.
M had gone into the house to fetch a toy, and when he came back outside, looking as innocent as could be, I had to keep myself from laughing.
“Did you touch the cake?” I asked.
“Me?” He looked stricken, and then added for good measure, “What cake?”
My eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why is your face all covered with chocolate frosting?”
“I dunno.” He shrugged.
He had walked through the kitchen on his way to wherever and couldn’t resist the newly frosted cake. He had stuck his finger in the frosting, at the bottom -- “where you wouldn’t notice it” -- and taken a lick. The brown frosting smeared above his lip and halfway across his cheek was more than condemning. And pretty freaking funny.
M scuffed the toe of his Power Ranger shoe on the cement. “Sorry, Mom.” His playmates were beckoning for him to hurry up.
“It tasted really good, though,” he added. And then he patted me on the arm. “You did a great job!”
Fast forward to last Friday when I got a call at work from my son’s assistant principal. My son, now six feet tall and a freshman in high school, was being suspended from school for a day for violating the school’s computer/technology policy.
All of the students in his high school are issued laptop computers as part of a special state grant project. My son, the total computer/video game freak, was practically beside himself with glee the day he brought his computer home. He had to show me each and every feature of his new laptop, and then he asked me if I wanted to watch a DVD with him.
He said they had told them in assembly that one of the features of the new laptops was the ability to watch DVDs.
My initial reaction as the killjoy parent was: “Why on earth do they need to watch DVDs in school?”
But then I thought, Chill out. Whether kids watch DVDs at home on their laptops or not is a parental issue, not a school one. I could always step in and say, “No, you can’t watch a DVD now. You need to do your homework first.”
Plus, when your fourteen year old son asks you if you want to watch a movie with him, you say yes. Because the offer doesn’t come very often. And usually what he wants to watch is not at all what you want to watch. I told him, “Sure!” And he said I could pick the movie; did I have something from Netflix?
He put the DVD into his laptop. Nothing happened. The DVD would not play. He fooled around with the DVD player for a few seconds and then decided the video wouldn’t play because the Region Code wasn’t set and he couldn’t set it. You had to have admin permission to set it, he said. He was very disappointed.
I told him to ask the IT people at school the next day why it wasn’t working and what he needed to do to get it fixed. He did this, and came home saying they said there was a “glitch” with the computers, which they would try to fix.
So, I thought nothing of it when a week or so later my son came home saying he could now watch DVDs on his laptop. I just figured the school had fixed the glitch.
Well… it ends up that my son and his friends had “fixed” the glitch on their own. One kid had searched the Internet for how to set up admin accounts on a Macintosh computer. They had then gone in and created their own admin accounts and set the Region Code so they could watch DVDs.
Of course, setting up their own admin accounts was in blatant violation of the school’s policy on computer usage – a policy to which they had all signed their names before being issued their computers. Never mind that all they had wanted to do was watch DVDs on their laptops, a privilege they were told they should have anyway.
Never mind that they could have watched DVDs on any number of other devices – DVD players, Playstation 2s, other computers, etc. They were determined to get DVDs to play on their laptops.
M was very up front with me about having his computer confiscated in school.
When I threatened at dinner to take his laptop away if he didn’t start turning in his homework on time, he said the IT guy had beaten me to it. He had come into M’s 6th period class that very day and taken his and another kid’s laptops. When I asked him why, he shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Did you download anything onto your computer?” I took my prosecutorial tone.
Downloading games or software from the Internet was a big no-no and something I had strongly – and repeatedly! -- counseled my son against doing before he had received his computer.
“No!” he said, egregiously offended. “Of course not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah…. Don’t you trust me?”
“Well, what could you have done then to get your computer taken away?”
He shrugged. “It might have something to do with the DVD player.”
“What do you mean? I thought you said they fixed the DVD player.”
“Well, I said the DVD player was fixed.”
He then told me how he had seen his one friend watching a DVD during study hall one day – a vision that made me frown as I thought people should be studying in study hall, but whatever – and had asked him how he had gotten it to work. His friend had showed him how he had done it on his computer, and then his other friend, the one who had gone online to find out about setting or changing admin accounts, walked him through, step-by-step, how to set up his own admin account on his laptop and then set the Region Code.
“But you’re not allowed to mess with the admin accounts!”
My son was unperturbed. “We were only fixing the computers so we could watch DVDs. We weren’t doing anything wrong. They told us we were allowed to watch DVDs.”
“But you’re not allowed to set up your own admin account. Period.”
“Yeah, I get that,” he said, frustrated with my obvious stupidity.
I fail to understand why schools think suspension is an effective form of punishment. A day’s suspension is a day off from school. To M, then, this would be like a vacation day. To me as a concerned parent it meant he would be missing yet another day of school; he had missed far too many already due to a football injury and subsequent doctors’ appointments and tests.
“Oh, we’ll make sure he gets all his assignments from his teachers,” the assistant principal reassured me. “He won’t be missing anything.” Oh, no, just a whole day’s worth of teaching and hands on exposure to learning. Clearly, he could do all this on his own!
“I hope you know,” I told my son’s guidance counselor on the morning of M’s suspension – because I had had to stay home from work to supervise M and make sure he was actively engaged in doing all those school assignments and homework and had requested an appointment with my son’s guidance counselor since I wasn’t at work, anyway – “that I could make M scrub toilets with a toothbrush, and he would still view this as a day off from school. As a vacation day.”
The counselor actually laughed. He seemed to find this an amusing concept, like I should think of even harder punishments so my son would rue his day away from the hallowed halls of learning, even though, according to the assistant principal, a day away really would have no impact on his learning since he could simply teach himself and do all of the work at home.
My younger son had pitched a fit that very morning before I sent him off to school. “It’s not fair!” he wailed. “M gets to stay home. He gets a day off. I want a day off from school, too! I deserve a day off.”
The guidance counselor grinned at me from amongst all of his inspirational posters. “Well, you can tell M that this suspension will go into his permanent record. When he applies to colleges, they will see that he was suspended for a day when he was a freshman.”
I stared at the guidance counselor.
Like that was going to motivate a fourteen year old who didn’t really think he had done anything terrible? Like he was even thinking about college as a ninth grader?
Whenever I mention the topic of college, my son usually responds with, “What makes you think I even want to go to college?”
“And what makes you think you wouldn’t be going to college?” I ignore his use of the word “want.”
“Because,” he tosses his long bangs out of his eyes, “I am going to create my own country, and in my country, I won’t have to go to college.”
Rrrright.
While I think my son “gets” that he violated the very computer policy he had signed his name to and was being punished for that violation, I also think he sees it as being more about “his getting caught.” I probably shouldn’t have told him that when asked by the guidance counselor how he knew the boys had set up their own admin accounts, the IT guy had said simply, “Informants.” As the sole person responsible for randomly checking over 600 laptop computers, there was no way he was going to find all computer policy violators. Apparently, he relied heavily on word of mouth and “informants.”
The other morning when the topic of his suspension came up at the breakfast table, my son said, “Well, it wasn’t my fault I got suspended.”
“Oh, really?” I asked. “And whose fault was it?”
M shrugged. “Whoever turned me in.”
I was not sure whether he was being serious, or just pushing my buttons (something he likes to do quite regularly, it seems). Since it was about 7:15 in the morning and I was only on my first cup of coffee, it was not a wise time to test me. I proceeded to go into a lengthy diatribe about being responsible for one’s actions and taking responsibility for one’s mistakes. This diatribe would have gone on much longer and lasted all the way until I dropped him off at the bus stop, but we passed two of his schoolmates along the way.
I rolled down the window. “Would you guys like a ride?” I asked sweetly, in a tone of voice 180 degrees different from the one I had just been using with my son. Luckily for my son, they said yes. Thus, he was spared even more emphatic, four letter word-laden lecturing on the concept of doing the right thing and being a responsible person.
“You guys have a great day!” I announced cheerily as my three occupants disembarked at their bus stop.
“You, too!” they all chanted back cheerily.
Oh, and did I mention that the IT guy told me that, yes, they were supposed to be able to play DVDs on their laptops but that the Region Code thing was a glitch? They just hadn’t figured out yet how to fix the problem on everyone’s laptops all at the same time. And if M had simply come to him with a DVD – because a DVD needed to be in the laptop in order to adjust the settings – he would have gone in and fixed it for him?
I want to start my own country, too.
posted by delta at 6:00 PM
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