In the brilliant “Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” the Prefect (Jonathan Pryce) of a city under siege by the Turks has brought before him a valiant, heroic soldier (Sting) who singlehandedly took out several Turkish cannons. The Prefect promptly has the stunned soldier executed, contending that his heroism served as a bad example for lesser soldiers who would be incapable of duplicating his feats.
And you laugh at the satirical content of the notion…until you read the following from the preferred news publication of peterdavid.net, “The Week”:
“A California sixth grader was suspended from school for performing cartwheels and handstands in the schoolyard. Eleven-year-old Deirdre Faegre ‘created an unsafe situation for herself and others,’ said principal Denise Patton. She explained that other, less skilled kids might try to imitate Faegre and get hurt. In that case, Faegre said, the school should also ban basketball.”
Suddenly it’s not as funny anymore.
PAD
• 
No problem with basketball, but can we negotiate the banning of algebra? It gave me brainache for years and yet haven’t used it once since I left school.
John
If everyone’s special, then no-one is.
Harrison Bergeron sends his regards.
Pete, do you have a link for this article? I find the news extremely upsetting, especially in light of the fact that I’m a politician. I don’t want OUR schools to act the same way.
In the Uk we had a school ban Conkers, unless protective gear is worn.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/3712764.stm
This reminds me of a great Kurt Vonnegut short story that I am blanking out on the name. It deals with a society in which anyone exceptional is forced down. Does anyone remember the title?
From the NBCTV4 site …
11-Year-Old Declares Victory In Battle Over Cartwheels
Principal: ‘It Made The School Look Bad’
POSTED: 9:51 am PST November 16, 2004
UPDATED: 10:05 am PST November 16, 2004
LOS ANGELES — Deirdre Faegre, 11, is declaring victory over the administration at San Jose-Edison Academy charter school in West Covina, Calif., in their struggle over cartwheels.
“I actually won the battle,” Deirdre, suspended for one day last week for refusing to stop doing cartwheels and handstands, told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune after school principal Denise Patton told her she could practice her stunts — but on the playground, which is supervised, and out of the quad.
“You should always stand up for yourself if you want to make a change,” said the sixth-grader.
Patton told the Tribune she is pleased to have reached an agreement with Deirdre that will keep her safe and happy.
“I’m just happy we have been able to find a viable solution,” Patton told the newspaper.
Deirdre — and the school — earned international fame last week when news of her suspension came out.
“Only in America,” was the headline over a story about the suspension in the sports section of The Times in London.
“There were a lot of kids telling me how cool it was at school,” Deirdre told the Tribune.
For Patton, news of the controversy was more of a mixed bag. She said she received e-mails from throughout the nation condemning her decision because, she said, a lot of news organizations told one side of the story.
But once she appeared on NBC’s “Today” show, she received just as many apologies.
“It became a crazy story because of the half-truths,” Patton told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “It made the school look bad … but there’s been overwhelming support from the staff and parents.”
******************
Oops, sorry, that’s
http://www.nbc4.tv
“For Patton, news of the controversy was more of a mixed bag. She said she received e-mails from throughout the nation condemning her decision because, she said, a lot of news organizations told one side of the story.”
For example, the people writig this article.
Not that I’m one to support inanity…
But the stories that I read stated that she was suspended because she refused to obey school staff. I agree that it’s silly to stop gymnastic activity during recess, when baseball, kickball dodgeball (in my day, anyway) monkey bars, just plain running…
But the point, I thought, was that she was told to stop something, and didn’t. Failing to obey school staff gets you in trouble. Whether the staff was correct or not is a matter for the parents to bring up.
And before y’all jump on me with the “oh yeah, well, what if the staff was abusing the girl, should she obey them then?” comments, just…don’t. We’re talking about a playground activity that the staff considered dangerous, potentially to her and to others. She’s out on the playground, no mats, no gymnastics coach, and she could, foreseably, hurt herself or someone else. Time and place for everything…Gymnastics in the gym, properly supervised.
Now, again, it’s not like she was dropping a triple lutz (yes, that’s ice skating, you get my idea) or vaulting 30′ off the bars, but I can see how SOME might view it as inappropriate during recess.
Of course you all realize the next step. Peter must stop writing. It is not fair that he can write better than I. Plus most of his literature requires thinking. We must put a stop to it. 🙂
Like it was said in ‘The Incredibles:’ When everyone is special, then no one is.
You know, back in my day as a kid. We used to ride our bikes and skateboards without helmets or knee pads. We’d play on playgrounds of hard blacktop and swing on the swings as high was we could and then jump off. We’d climb on the monkey bars over the same hard blacktop.
Nobody ever said a word against any of that.
Are kids today made of glass or something?
But the point, I thought, was that she was told to stop something, and didn’t. Failing to obey school staff gets you in trouble. Whether the staff was correct or not is a matter for the parents to bring up.
I’ve always been a firm believer that whenever an authority figure is an idiot, they forfeit all of their authority.
Den wrote…
I’ve always been a firm believer that whenever an authority figure is an idiot, they forfeit all of their authority.
If that isn’t inviting this to become another political thread, I don’t know what is =)
It’s interesting that the one article mentions another side of the story, but I can’t figure out what that could be. Of course, the school would have the right to ask the girl to stop if her actions were overly dangerous, as has been mentioned, but I’m not sure “cartwheels and handstands” qualify.
This reminds me of a great Kurt Vonnegut short story that I am blanking out on the name. It deals with a society in which anyone exceptional is forced down. Does anyone remember the title?
Sounds more like every Ayn Rand book written.
Yup, Harrison Bergeron (Bergerson?) is the name of the short story by Kurt Vonnegut.
“The thrill of defeat… the agony of victory.” 😉
“This reminds me of a great Kurt Vonnegut short story that I am blanking out on the name. It deals with a society in which anyone exceptional is forced down. Does anyone remember the title?”
“Harrison Bergeron,” as Ralf Haring alluded to above. I think they made a movie sometime in the 90’s.
Apparently, the Man of Steel is not exempt from this thinking either: http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99996679
PAD, I want to thank you for turning me on to The Week. You mentioned it a few months ago, and I’ve been buying it ever since. It’s a wonderful news magazine!
Den,
I had the same blacktop and no helmets/pads for skateboarding. It also reminds me of Brad Stine’s comedy routine “Put a helmet on!” where he pokes fun at how “safe” we’ve tried to make things.
Helmets for bike riding
Anti-bacterial wipes
and so on. If you haven’t seen it, it’s recommended.
Are kids today made of glass or something?
In our society, yeah.
The title “Only in America” seems to be quite appropriate.
She’s out on the playground, no mats, no gymnastics coach, and she could, foreseably, hurt herself or someone else. Time and place for everything…Gymnastics in the gym, properly supervised.
But telling a kid to stop doing cartwheels during recess? Gimme a break.
If you don’t want kids to get hurt, don’t let them have recess at all – simply running across the playground and tripping and falling can just as easily hurt a kid as farking up a cartwheel.
Another thing to consider is the possibility that the principle chose this course of action not out of fear for the children’s safety, but fear of lawsuits. You Yanks seem to be pretty trigger-happy with those things at times.
As a teacher, I can sorta very vaguely see the “she was told not to and she did anyway” argument — but that’s grounds for an office chat or a detention at most, not suspension. Even if their reaction was vaguely legitimate (and I have a lot of problems considering a cartwheel during recess out of bounds from a safety POV, unless she was doing it over a firepit), it was way, way out of proportion.
Craig nailed it pretty well, I think — recess has all sorts of activities which are inherently risky. Banning cartwheels is just high-level idiocy.
TWL
Reminds me of the whole Incredibles shtick.
The title “Only in America” seems to be quite appropriate.
I would have titled it “Only in California,” the state that brought us the ban on dodgeball and drivers licenses for illegal aliens.
Yup, Harrison Bergeron (Bergerson?) is the name of the short story by Kurt Vonnegut.
“The thrill of defeat… the agony of victory.” 😉
—Addiontional informantion, The easiest place to find “Harrison Bergerson” is in “Welcome to the Monkey House”, a handy little book that collects a lot of Vonnegut’s short story all in one place.
Of course, if anybody out there doesn’t know that maybe the fair thing to do would be for the rest of us to forget it as well.
Only in California would be more apt.
This is the kind of hippy dippy “We play t-ball but no one keeps score’ liberal BS that makes the Red States vote Republican.
And I live in a Blue State, I voted against Bush. But this stuff screams of Political Correctness Gone Mad
And it is Bergeron not Bergerson, unless my memory for useless trivia has finally gone kaput.
I think this is a case of a story that gets twisted around until it makes a point that someone thinks should be made. It reminds me of a classic story of pointless of Army bureaucracy. During WWII, soldiers under one command were ordered to alternate the way they laced their boots. On even days, the laces had to go straight across, on odd ones they had to be criss-crossed, that sort of thing.
Which certainly _sounds_ like either pointless bureaucracy or egotistical “You’ll do it because that’s an _order_, soldier!” micromanaging, but there was actually a good reason. Soldiers were issued two pairs of boots, and they tended to wear one pair and keep the second pair polished up and pretty for morning inspections instead of breaking them in properly and actually using them. So the order sort of forced them to wear both sets of boots and keep them both in good shape.
Reading the administrator’s side of the story, I have no doubt that this was a simple safety issue which was compounded by (a) a subsequent discipline issue and (b) a suspension that should have been a detention, or better yet, a talk with the kid’s parents.
But I guess people want an excuse to talk about how The Exceptional Members Of Our Society Are Kept Down. There was a time back in grade school when our class was ordered, ordered, ORDERED not to run up and slide across the frozen water next to the swings during recess. The principal was just being a killjoy and we were write to say so. Still, wow, I don’t think it was a reason for anybody to start quoting Ayn Rand…
Den wrote:
> We used to ride our bikes and skateboards without
> helmets or knee pads. We’d play on playgrounds of
> hard blacktop and swing on the swings as high was
> we could and then jump off. We’d climb on the
> monkey bars over the same hard blacktop.
>
> Nobody ever said a word against any of that.
>
> Are kids today made of glass or something?
At the risk of sounding like I’m aping what apparently is being said in The Incredibles (which I haven’t yet seen), it really does have to do with liability.
It’s a combination of lawyers and insurance companies. A wonderful playground in a public park in Belleville, Illinois, for instance, with a cool three-story rocket-ship shaped sliding board, built in the ’50s, was torn down and replaced with a modern, plastic, cork-mat-surfaced playground with nothing taller than about eight feet.
There was nothing structurally wrong with the old playground, it had been designed and built to last, and the city had been careful about maintenance — but the insurance premiums became beyond what the city thought the taxpayers were willing to bear. It was less expensive to raze and newly construct and thereby pay a lower premium than just pay the premium on the older playground.
To be consistent, let’s ban Peter David, Alan Moore, Kurt Busiek, Neil Gaiman, Judd Winick and Jeph Loeb from writing, and Alan Davis, Arthur Adams, Adam Hughes, Brian Bolland, Carlos Pacheco, et. al., from illustration.
Rob Liefeld, on the other hand, should be safe. 🙂
Posted by Mark L: It also reminds me of Brad Stine’s comedy routine “Put a helmet on!” where he pokes fun at how “safe” we’ve tried to make things.
Or, as Crow T. Robot says: “What’s the point of a helmet in skydiving? In case you land on your head?”
The thing that seems to be overlooked in the article (and the posts here)is the that girl wasn’t getting in trouble for doing cartwheels on the playground, but in the “Quad” or commons ground outside the cafeteria. She’d been asked to stop the activity (when not on the playground) and repeatedly ignored the teachers/administration.
This was not an isolated incident, but a pattern of repeatedly ignoring the warnings.
jeff
Peter and all,
Apparently you’ve all missed the point of the story. The girl was suspended, not for doing cartwheels etc. in the gym, or at recess, but for doing them in or near the lunchroom during lunch.
Now, I think that suspension in this case is a bit harsh, but this point DOES completely change the story from “isn’t this a stupid thing to do” to “maybe they were just trying to keep her from knocking other kids around and she wouldn’t listen.”
Personally, I subscribe to the Jeff Foxworthy school of parenting: When I was a little boy, we had a 100lb TV on a five-pound TV tray. My dad’s theory was. “Let him pull that on top of himself a few times, he’ll learn.”
In all seriousness, if a kid can’t get scraped up knees, a black eye, or a broken bone or two, they’re too dámņ insulated from life.
Glad to hear that you’re a fellow The Week reader. It’s easily replaced NewsTime as my weekly news mag.
This sounds like an odd case, but surely this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. The punishment was harsh, and the reasoning for it was a little off, but overall the point didn’t seem to be a bad one. Both sides twist it in their favor. Also, the girl feels she has won since she can now do cartwheels in the playground so it wasn’t just an issue of where she was doing them.
At this year’s cheerleader tryouts at my local high school, the girls were not allowed to do backflips because others that couldn’t do them would get hurt trying. Not really sure how one can acquire a skill without trying and failing a few times…
This also reminds me of one of the few times I got detention at school. I was running at recess on the playground. I had just transferred to the school, and I was in the third grade so I had no idea that running would be against the rules. Some other kids from my class were racing and I joined them. I still remember the teacher telling me that I should know better, but I really didn’t know any better.
The punsishment seems way out of line…but then again, at my school we are yelling at kids to not run down the halls, which seems less dangerous than doing cartwheels. We have 2600 kids and it gets chaotic even when they aren’t doing gymnastics. There was an incident last year where a kid almost died during horseplay (a freak thing, they hit a window and a piece of glass severed her femoral artery. Luckily the ROTC teacher was able to save her life).
That said, the sentiments expressed by PAD are correct, if not necessarily in this particular case.
PAD,
Thank you, thank you, thank you for bringing this up. This Political Correctness To The Insane Extreme is both depriving our children of – well, a lot of things that are fun to do during childhood AND leaving then woefully unprepared for the challenges of the real world.
Michael Barone has a new book out, titled “Hard America, Soft America” where he puts schools in the soft category and warns that they leave young adults unprepared for the hard world awaiting them in the workplace.
“The education establishment has been too concerned with fostering kids’ self-esteem instead of teaching then to learn and compete,” he says in the book.
PAD, and everyone else,
Once again, the story gets misreported. The girl has been doing this on cement and concrete floors all year. She has been told numerous times to stop, and she refuses. If she gets hurt, her parents are going to sue the school. If she cracks her dámņ skull, it will be a huge mess. Once again, when a student does something that she has repeatedly been told not to do, she is directly disobeying her teachers and the administration of the school, and deserves to be punished. The issue isn
Michael Barone has a new book out, titled “Hard America, Soft America” where he puts schools in the soft category and warns that they leave young adults unprepared for the hard world awaiting them in the workplace.
So we should teach our kids to lie, cheat, and steal. That will definately prepare them for corporate America.
Sounds like a plan. 😉
“Posted by: Rob Ellis at November 24, 2004 10:12 PM
PAD, and everyone else,
Once again, the story gets misreported. The girl has been doing this on cement and concrete floors all year. She has been told numerous times to stop, and she refuses. If she gets hurt, her parents are going to sue the school. If she cracks her dámņ skull, it will be a huge mess. Once again, when a student does something that she has repeatedly been told not to do, she is directly disobeying her teachers and the administration of the school, and deserves to be punished. The issue isn
True story…
I work at a TV station, and a couple of years ago, I had to run a special weather cut-in (tornados in the area) with the meterologist on camera and the various graphics and maps. Normally the production dept. would do this and make it all fancy with the chromakey wall, wipes, special opens, the whole nine yards. Yet, in Master Control, I managed to do the cut-in with all the effects (except for the chromakey). I even managed to get the name key on the screen with the meterologist. This was due to planning in advance on my part, plus my previous experience as a technical director.
My boss, who happened to be sitting next to me at the time, said “that looked great, don’t do it again”.
We have people in our dept. that don’t know how to use the equipment to it’s full potential, and it was easier for him to tell me not to do so, than it would be to try to teach them.
This really is a society that works harder on pushing folks down to the lowest common denominator rather than try to raise folks up to their potential.
I was a fat kid at school – I couldn’t do cartwheels, or parallel bars, or kick a ball at football. Nor could I skate, run worth a dámņ, or fight …
Lots of other kids could.
Bášŧárdš.
I am glad to hear that American schools have seen sense and stopped these fit, active rotters from cartwheeling all over the place.
Next – ban the footballers playing in the playground – one of those balls could break loose and hit someone you know. And all those swine who can swing the swings really high, they’ll laugh on the other side of their asphalt scarred faces when they come off…
Stop ’em playing baseball too – that’s just asking for trouble – you know those things are gonna go through a window or something.
My freinds, by this time next year we could have a playground full of quiet, well behaved kids who do exactly as they are told, sit quietly and make no noise.
Admittedly they will be twenty stone lard-butts, but that’s a price worth paying to have a society of quiescent, obedient children, isn’t it ?
Remember the slogan of Fat Obese Kids Against Fitness ( FOKAF ) – it’s all very funny, until someone loses an eye !!!
Rob Ellis:
>Once again, the story gets misreported. The girl has been doing this on cement and concrete floors all year. She has been told numerous times to stop, and she refuses. If she gets hurt, her parents are going to sue the school. If she cracks her dámņ skull, it will be a huge mess. Once again, when a student does something that she has repeatedly been told not to do, she is directly disobeying her teachers and the administration of the school, and deserves to be punished. The issue isn
“Michael Barone has a new book out, titled “Hard America, Soft America” where he puts schools in the soft category and warns that they leave young adults unprepared for the hard world awaiting them in the workplace.”
“So we should teach our kids to lie, cheat, and steal. That will definately prepare them for corporate America.
Sounds like a plan. ;)”
Actually, the problem is that too often the schools teach them that if they DO lie, cheat, and steal they will get a slap on the wrist and all will be forgiven. In the real world they will be fired and/or have the living snot beaten out of them.
The problem with the principal using the justification that others could get hurt trying to imitate Deirdre is that she just opened the door to being sued by anyone who might get hurt trying to imitate, for instance, a cheerleading stunt. That’s because cheerleading is a sanctioned school activity so one could make the case that the school was negligent in not banning it for the exact same reasons that they banned Deirdre’s cartwheels. One may try and make the case that cheerleading stunts are supervised and done by “professionals” and that the average person would know better than to try and imitate them; well, that applies to movie and TV stunts as well but that doesn’t stop them from being sued when someone hurts themselves recreating something they watched.
A particular example I remember concerns a college football movie that was made in the 90’s (I don’t remember it’s name because I never watched it). During the previews, there was a scene where some of the players were lying in the middle of the road on the lane division line, at night, as cars sped by them; now some real life kids got seriously hurt doing the same thing and blamed the movie producers. I don’t remember how exactly the issue resolved itself in the end, but I do remember reading that, because of this, that scene was cut from the final print of the movie.
Now for those who asked about the Harrison Bergeron movie, it was a Showtime production back in 95 that stared Sean
If you don’t want kids to get hurt, don’t let them have recess at all – simply running across the playground and tripping and falling can just as easily hurt a kid as farking up a cartwheel.
As a matter of fact, a number of schools have, apparently, cancelled recess.
I have to say, the comments expanding upon the news item beyond what was initially reported are pretty interesting. I can see how the argument can be made that the problem wasn’t the girl’s behavior, but her refusal to obey instructions of the teachers.
Nevertheless, I still think the principal brought a lot of it on herself in even opening her mouth over concern about imitative behavior by other kids (which she did, apparently, say). That’s the thing that catapulted it to national attention.
The bottom line is that the girl had NOT hurt anyone. So the school was essentially disciplining the girl, not for having done something unsafe, but because of their perception that there was potential for unsafety. That’s just too ephemeral a notion to make the kid a disciplinary example. It’s an elementary school, not the army.
You can argue that, if the school waited until it happened, they might be leaving themselves open to litigation. Well, here’s news: The day they opened the doors of the building, they left themselves open to litigation. That’s just the way it is. The fact is that kids ARE much more likely to injure themselves playing basketball. They can trip, slam into each other, get a split lip from a ball, jam a finger, get an elbow in the mouth. Basketball is a constantly shifting series of events, any one of which could lead to injury. One girl doing controlled cartwheels simply isn’t on the same level of presenting a hazard.
It has to be all or nothing. Either do away with any manner of physical activity on the premises, or let kids be kids.
PAD
“If you don’t want kids to get hurt, don’t let them have recess at all – simply running across the playground and tripping and falling can just as easily hurt a kid as farking up a cartwheel.”
“As a matter of fact, a number of schools have, apparently, cancelled recess.”
Oh, well, thank God, because in a society where doctors are expressing concern over growing obesity and a rise in juvenile diabetes, the last thing we want to do is encourage kids to burn off calories in free play.
PAD
I was going to offer up the Puyallup, WA, school district as an example of political correctness run amok. After all, they forbade any mention of Halloween this year, as a) the portrayal of witches as twisted, hideous, evil creatures might offend the (tiny) Wiccan community, and b) some of the children couldn’t afford costumes, and they might feel bad.
Then I remembered the incident in ’02, when a high-school senior caught some flak in national news after posing for his yearbook picture in blackface. Nobody in the school seemed to understand why it might be offensive.
So, maybe they’re not excessively PC – maybe they’re just stupid.