Last Sunday's Zits demonstrates an unfortunate trend I've seen in this comic strip: Jeremy as blaming his parents for not ensuring that he does something that is clearly his own responsibility. I don't think this is a realistic portrayal of adolescent attitudes. Rather, I think it's a portrayal of a flawed adult conception of what they think adolescent attitudes must be.
When I was 15 (the same age as Jeremy), I wouldn't wake up right away to my alarm and my mother would try to wake me up, but I wasn't depending on her waking me up - in fact, I was rather resenting it. I was fully aware of my tiredness level and what time it was - my alarm was a radio so I could still hear the news and weather and timechecks as I zoned in and out of sleep - and I was taking all these factors into account when deciding when to get out of bed. I really resented my parents completely disrespecting that, as though I was walking through the world completely oblivious to my responsibilities and wouldn't fulfill said responsibilities without constant nagging.
I also resented the fact that my school required a note from parents if students were late - even if we arrived literally 10 seconds after the bell. I understood why it was supposed to be important to be on time so we didn't miss any classes, but again I wanted the liberty to take responsibility for my own actions. I wanted to be able to be late for class and accept the academic consequences if I chose to do so, but I wasn't able to because school policy wanted my parents to take responsibility for my actions.
Actually, now that I think about it, the school was really trying to invent artificial consequences through outsourcing to parents. The official line was that we had to be on time because of the academic consequences of missing class, and the social conseuqences of our teachers and classmates perhaps perceiving our behaviour as disrespectful. However, these consequences are actually negligible, as the consequences of minor lateness generally are in real life. So, to enforce a value that they arbitrarily decided to deem more important than it really is, the school added the artificial consequences of making us get a note from our parents, thus handing some of the responsibility for our actions over to our parents (because they have to go to the trouble of writing a note, and if they think they're expected to justify their kid's actions they'll be more likely to try to manage kid's actions themselves) and preventing us from being able to take responsibility for our own actions.
2 comments:
I don't think the rules or consequences were designed for the students who had a desire to take responsibility for their actions.
They were for the kids who continually disrupted whatever small bit of learning might be going on by rolling into class 10 or 15 minutes late every morning. I don't think the contrived rules or overblown warnings about consequences had much impact, but the school administrators were duty-bound to at least make an attempt.
I think if there were students who actually did want their parents to have responsibility for the student's actions (and I cannot fathom a 15-year-old actually thinking this way), it would be more effective to just have them take the consequences themselves than have to get a note from their parents. Natural consequences would teach the student about natural consequences, and they could decide for themselves whether the consequences are negligible. Artificial consequences would simply teach the student that consequences are arbitrary annoyances invented by grownups to make your life less fun.
I also think that if learning can be disrupted by something as simple as a student walking into class late, the teacher is doing something wrong.
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