This is not a "cute" story. It's an infuriating story about a school climate gone mad. And, although I suspect an organizational psychologist could give a nuanced analysis of the situation, that's not my area of expertise, so I'm just going to tell the story.
Elder offspring was sent to the Vice Principal's office yesterday. When the office called Dr. Free-Ride's better half about the incident, the crime they reported was "saying the B-word".
I should say right now, if you're in earshot of an elementary or secondary school as you're reading this post, please don't read it out loud! I would hate to be responsible for your incarceration in the Vice Principal's office.
So, Dr. Free-Ride's better half actually had to go to the Vice Principal's office yesterday, largely because elder offspring was hysterical and unable to put together a coherent sentence to convey the kid's-eye account of the incident. Needless to say, the Vice Principal interpreted this as elder offspring "knowing that was a very bad thing to say". The Principal, thankfully, was much less willing to convict on such flimsy evidence. Dr. Free-Ride's better half was able to calm elder offspring sufficiently to return to class. After school, a more composed elder offspring was able to communicate these details:
A kid at elder offspring's lunch table said, "Ooo, someone at Table 5 said the B-word!"
Elder offspring: The B-word?
Kid at lunch table: Yeah, B-I-C-H.
Elder offspring is at an age where one is encouraged to connect the spelling of a word with its pronunciation, and so, pronounced the word -- at which, the kid who had just spelled it out said, "Ooo, you said the B-word!!" and reported elder offspring to a lunch monitor, resulting in the imprisonment in the Vice Principal's office.
To my mind, this suggests that elder offspring's hysteria was due in large part to being set up by a "friend" and punished on the basis of zero independent evidence. Also, the mere uttering of a syllable -- a word not in one's vocabulary, whose meaning one does not know -- seems to have taken on undue significance in the hierarchy of Very Bad Things One Might Do in The Lunchroom.
Listening to these details of elder offspring's account later, Dr. Free-Ride's better half couldn't help but point out, "You know, that's not even how the B-word is spelled."
Elder offspring: I know, it's spelled B-I-T-C-H.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Erm, I thought you didn't know the B-word. How would you know the correct way to spell it?
Elder offspring: That's how it was spelled in the note they used to send me to the Vice Principal's office. I assumed the lunch monitor knew how to spell it.
Neat, huh? In the process of punishing the kid for uttering a word, they manage not only to convey that this word has so much power that it will drive any adult in earshot absolutely nuts, but they also reinforce the correct spelling of the word.
Now, I anticipated that schools would be places where a certain category of vocabulary would likely push all the wrong buttons (where "wrong" indicates anything likely to result in a phone call to a parent from the Vice Principal during the school day), and so have been following the strategy of not using any of the words in this category around my kids. If we hear them while out and about, I ignore them, as if they were the squawkings of seagulls, because making a point of noticing and reacting to these words identifies them, for the bright young empiricists in my care, as words that have power. Verily, they do have power, but for the sprogs that potential power lies mainly in getting them in trouble at school.
I can't help wondering if the powerful bad words are made more powerful in the schoolyard by the school's hair-trigger reaction to them. Each adult (over-)reaction is just more evidence to the kids that these words provide them with power -- and, there's precious little power kids have relative to adults in the elementary school power structure.
Also, the school has as one of its explicit goals training the children to be literate. That means the F-word carved into the playground slide is perfectly intelligible to the majority of the kids who slide down it. Elder offspring knows it's a bad word on the testimony of a friend. Elder offspring did not know what it meant, but knew enough not to utter it.
In the aftermath of the B-word incident, Dr. Free-Ride's better half and elder offspring looked at dictionary definitions of both the B-word and the F-word and had a chat about how words can become emotionally charged. Our best guess is that taking a matter-of-fact attitude toward words it the only way to defuse -- at least for our kids -- the extra power the "bad" words have acquired.
The other big lesson from this incident? Elder offspring now understands that working under the assumption that most of the authority figures at the school are irrational probably leads to better predictions than modeling authority figures as rational.
And, elder offspring knows better than to trust that kid at the lunch table ever again. There are some choice words I might use to describe him ... but I won't.
A school administrator might be reading this.
What about the other derivatives and their use? ie: The Vice Principal appears to be a real F*&kwad. Someone needs to knock some f*&ing sense into the the Vice Principal using a birchwood cane.
If you REALLY want to get mean, you could say "The Vice Principal really pulled a Rumsfeld", and they "Acted like a Bush"!
ps: It could be worse: When I was a kid I called my big sister a "hor". (I thought this meant like "horror movie "!
Fortunately I was able to define my term prior to adult blowup!
It can be very ... interesting ... to examine what kids learn in school and to compare that to the stated curriculum. It's also interesting to compare actual outcomes to what our culture proclaims about the purpose of schools and education.
Exactly what kind of "interesting" it is depends a lot upon whether one has school-age kids, of course.
Cheers
We've had lots of conversations with our kids about teachers, coaches, and playground monitors who can seem logical one minute and bizarre the next. School is quite good at teaching kids to be skeptical of adults.
I recall the grimace that my high school Latin teacher had, upon reading Caesar's Gallic Commentaries with us, when the sentence to be translated was something about the troops wanting to build a fire, so Caesaar sent them to find faggots. He didn't smile, though -- he just stared at us. We got the message.
So... no violence or even hostility involved, not even any "insubordination"... not even using the word at or about someone... unsupported word of one kid against another... and it becomes an School Crime, worthy of sending them to The Office until their parents redeem them? And if the kid freaks out at being Sent To The Office, that's evidence of "willful malice"?
In this day and age, that kind of overreaction is at best pathetic, and quite likely an abuse of power. Definitely an abuse of common sense! Hey, maybe they can't find time to sand the Bad Words off the playground equipment the kids use daily, but they can sure terrorize some child who's rumored to have actually pronounced one in the lunchroom!
It's fair to say that the school's policy does not perfectly reflect the priorities in the Free-Ride household. Given the ways policies function once they've ossified, I'm even willing to bet the policy does not perfectly reflect the priorities of the adults charged with enforcing it.
I'm trying to think of the situation in those terms rather than attributing abuse of power to any of the individuals involved, largely because this is the school we're in and we're many years from being through it. Suffice it to say, if I had written this post yesterday afternoon (when the incident was still fresh), it would have been a lot angrier.
But, I'm also keeping a much closer watch now on issues of fairness in the enforcement of policies at the school.
You know, something nearly identical happened to me in second grade. The only difference is the word. We were at the lunch table, someone started talking about "the S word". Somehow I figured if I left the I out of the middle it wouldn't be swearing. (Hey, it works in text, right?) "Sht" says second-grade me. It sounds more like shushing than a "bad" word. And yet..."lunch lady! she said a bad word!!"
Thankfully, no principal's office, but I had to go talk to the teacher while the rest of the class sat quietly. I was quite hysterical but managed to explain my case and she let me off the hook.
I had never been in trouble before and I was terrified and yet also angry because I didn't do anything wrong. And what if I had said the whole word? Why IS that such a big deal? I think you're right: if we make a big deal about something kids pick up on it. Unfortunately the "bad word" meme is so widespread among schoolkids that I don't think it will disappear any time soon.
Elder offspring now understands that working under the assumption that most of the authority figures at the school are irrational probably leads to better predictions than modeling authority figures as rational.
I do hope you made this explicit, as it's the only thing to come out of the incident described that is worth the hassle.
The sooner a child understands how much of life is going to be defined by the need to deal with irrational actors, the better.
When I was in seventh or eighth grade (an utterly miserable couple of years for me, btw), I was reading a library book in the cafeteria one day. One of my classmates looked at the book, and saw that it included one character describing something as "unbe-f*cking-lievable." This occasioned much hooting and hollering, and they took the book to my father, who taught sixth grade in the district, and was on cafeteria duty at the time.
They showed it to him, saying, "Look what Chad was reading!"
He glanced at it, said "So?" and gave me the book back. Pretty much completely defused the whole thing.
Some of the other teachers probably wouldn't've been as sensible about it, but I really appreciated that.
It took me a while to realize that the B-word is bad because, years before arriving in the States, I knew the proper definition of it: female dog. The B-word is on every page of every program of every dog show.
Also, the B-word is becoming "cool" recently. There have been endless discussions on this on 'Bitch, Ph.D.' blog.
Each adult (over-)reaction is just more evidence to the kids that these words provide them with power -- and, there's precious little power kids have relative to adults in the elementary school power structure.
-and-
Elder offspring now understands that working under the assumption that most of the authority figures at the school are irrational probably leads to better predictions than modeling authority figures as rational.
Yup. I really have a problem with an educational system 1) that puts no power in the hands of those who are being educated, and 2) is rigid in a way that promotes irrational thinking.
Grrrr.
Elder offspring now understands that working under the assumption that most of the authority figures at the school are irrational probably leads to better predictions than modeling authority figures as rational.
I wish I had learned this earlier. Some folks never learn it. Really, wider distribution of this concept would significantly cut down on abuses of power (though I usually truncate it to :"You don't always have to listen to some shmuck in a suit (robe, lab coat, etc.))
I'm reminded of an organization that I used to belong to, which basically had two rules for continued membership:
1. Do not be excessively annoying.
2. Do not be excessively annoyed.
It took a while for people to figure out the second one, but it was very powerful. A sense of proportion seems to be largely missing from modern American society (and particularly, school administration).
W the C: Except "shmuck" will get you in as much trouble as the B-word (assuming the person hearing it knows what it means).
I remember that when I was a kid I was very baffled by "bad" words. I could say "poop" but not "shit"? Etc. Who decided which were the bad words and which were not? Wasn't it all just arbitrary? I guess it still all seems a bit arbitrary to me, although as an adult I recognize that various words do have serious emotional significance attached to them, in spite of the arbitrariness of the attachments.
It should be noted that only putative adults attached emotional significance to the B-word and the other words noted.
The children have learned that authority is irrational, that you can cause enormous harm by reporting another's speech, and that there is no penalty for perjury.
So, Elder Offspring was sent to the Vice Principal's office for saying the B-word? The bastards!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Bob
In my secondary school, we used to say "cough, cough" to imply that someone was lying. The implication was that they were choking on a big lie. But one teacher whose mind was dirtier than ours decided we said it because it sounded a bit like "fuck off" and told us off for it.
The injustice rankles to this day, even though I now swear rather a lot.
My younger brother had a similar incident when he was in second grade. He and his friend were discussing what they would do if they had 'pirate powers' and my brother said he would "put a curse on the girls' bathroom." Another one of their classmates overheard the conversation and reported to the teacher that my brother was planning to write a curse word on the wall of the girls' bathroom. He was sent to the principal, but rather than calling my parents, he was just forced to write a note home detailing what he did wrong. Obviously, no one actually asked him if he committed the crime he was being accused of; his note just gave the details of the pirate story. Neither the principal nor the teacher actually read the note before sending him home with it, so when my brother got home and gave my parents the note they were very confused. They decided to call the teacher and find out exactly what was going on. When they heard the teacher's report they immediately read her my brother's note and pointed out to her that my brother didn't even know what curse words were. She apologized and said she must have been mistaken. We all had a good laugh, but I remember thinking even then (I was in fourth grade at the time) how unjust it was that he wasn't even questioned or told what he did wrong.