One more for Monday.

[kyburg]

Two for the kids - and for the question - what would you do?

His dad immediately stepped out of the line, jammed his fingers into his son's collar bones until he winced in pain, and threatened him. "If you so much as make a sound or come off of that wall again, I promise you're going to get it when we get home." The boy again cowered against the wall. This time, he didn't move. He didn't make a sound. His beautiful face pointed down, locked to the floor and expressionless. He had been broken. And that's how his father wanted it. He didn't want to deal with him, and breaking him was the easiest way.

Single parent Dad blogging. Outstanding. Share with a friend.

Remembering how excited I was to start teaching....Remembering the email that stopped it all. Two years ago this week. A parent whose child had chosen to read Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles, and how that parent sent an email to the superintendent, the board members, the principals, and me saying that I taught “soft pornography.”

You can't fight City Hall with six knives stuck in your back.

Discuss amongst yourselves. Share.

Comments

[zpdiduda.livejournal.com]

I spent much of yesterday thinking about (and being inspired by) "Single Dad"'s blog post about "the disease of perfection". This one, though, started out great but left me rather discomfited. Here's the text of my comment to Dad's post:

----------

Do you know the damage you do by not playing with your children every day? ...

Dan,

You had me until this line. After this, although I had been touched to the core by your earlier"perfection" post, my concern continued to grow about this particular bandwagon.

Yes, a child might conceivably be unhappy if his Dad only plays with him six out of seven days, although I doubt it. Much more to your point, even a single experience of a father's fierce anger might cause a child lasting emotional injury. Unfortunately, though, these occasional incidents of anger DO happen in just about any family, with just about any parent. Why? To paraphrase a wise man's words, NONE OF US ARE PERFECT.

I fear that you weaken your mission by railing about the lasting damage that a single thoughtless action can accomplish while failing to acknowledge or factor in the human imperfection that you described so effectively in your prior post. It's important to teach the parent who uses anger as a stock technique for child management or who never plays with his child that he's doing incalculable damage to that child. If I scream at my child from exhaustion, futility and anger after a single rough day at work, though, and send my child quivering into the corner, am I a terrible parent who has scarred his child for life? Does your approach increase the likelihood that I will hide my bad act in shame? I should be reminded of the damage that I could do or have done, but I also need to know that even those of us who try always to do right by our kids can't or won't always do so, and that others have been there too and understand. I need to move forward, to let my child know that I too can be imperfect and that I was so with him, to apologize, to learn techniques for doing better next time, to reinforce my own self-worth as a parent, and Sto reinforce my child's self-worth and his knowledge of the love between us. If you're saying that by my single scream I've broken my child irrevocably, what next?

[lesliepear.livejournal.com]

Wow - you founds some good stuff!

[djdig.livejournal.com]

The censorship post has been taken down. What happened?

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

It was a whopper. I strongly suspect she fears being Googled again - since she's lost work over it already.

A real shame.

[turandot.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of glad I read it last night. Pity she decided to pull it. What happened to her probably happens more often than we'd like to think, it's just that few teachers have the courage to fight that fight as long as she did.