Hello everyone and welcome back! I’m so happy that you’re back. Sorry I haven’t posted in a long time. My students in my AP history class recently took a practice AP test, so I’ve been grading essays all week. Students aren’t the only one with homework! School is hard for teachers too. It’s honestly so exhausting sometimes, but hard work always pays off. The AP test is coming up soon in May, which is only two months away. When I see my students come out of the test smiling and confident in their performance, I’ll know I’ve done my job right.
I read another interesting post by William Martin (I’m sort of a big fan now), this one titles “Scandalous College News” (the link will give you access to his work) and this post is just some of my thoughts and reflections on that. Basically, some students in the student governing body at Ryerson University abused their power and charged $250,000 of personal expenses on the school’s credit card. This was very inappropriate and in response, the school shut down the student government and took control of it themselves.
Like William, I also think that the response of the school was inappropriate. I don’t think dissolving the student governing body is the solution. The solution has to fit the problem and the problem is the lack of responsibility in a couple of students. All of the students in the governing body should not be punished for the actions of a few. This is called collective punishment, which is actually a war crime as dictated by the 1949 Geneva Convention. (not that anyone asked, sorry I’m a nerd :)). Instead, a better punishment would be disciplinary action against the few irresponsible students to make sure they don’t do something like this again. These students need to understand that there are very real consequences for their actions. This was no small mistake, this was a $250,000 mistake. They spent other students’ tuition money. These hooligans need to be dealt with in a strict and appropriate manner. If not, they might not realize the severity of their mistake and commit a similar crime in the future. One time, a couple of years ago, I was directing a production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as our fall musical which opened in November. One day, we came to rehearsal and we realized that Belle’s iconic yellow dress was missing. After a couple days, we managed to find it. It turns out that somebody in the technical crew stole the dress to wear as their Halloween costume. The technical director, production manager, and I all unanimously agreed to drop that student from our production and forbade them from participating in any of our productions for the next 2 years.
I think our swift and harsh punishment was very effective. Not only did it prevent that student from stealing again, it also set an example to the other students in the production. We had no other incident after the theft of Belle’s dress, and that was years ago. But even students that were not in that production know that story and they know that we are no-nonsense directors. Although a stolen Disney dress is very different from a stolen $250,000, I think that Ryerson University should adopt a similar swift and strict disciplinary strategy to prevent anything like this ever happening again. What do you all think? How were you disciplined as a child? Did it work? How should we control deviant behavior in the youth? What is effective and what is not?
notyourgrandmothersblog 