I grew up in Pottsville, PA - just a bit up 81 - and went to Catholic School. Not even the sadist nuns who ran that asylum forced us to smile!
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Of course you’re right. Just grumping about how “corporate” our country has become…
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Yeah, it’s disturbing as hell.
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G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate for everyone!
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Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy
It’s not your style
You’ll look so good that you’ll be glad
You decided to smile
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…school administrators are extremely vigilant about punishing students who question their own authority.
The kids can’t even question their own authority?!
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Perhaps I’ve just had atypically bad luck; but my experience has been that school counselors are basically an early introduction to the joys of dealing with HR; and offer a very similar combination of treacly touchy-feely and devotion to interests at best orthogonal and at worst adverse to yours.
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I really have to try watching Firefly again.
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The school district is denying it, for whatever that’s worth (not much, I suspect):
If it’s a unwritten rule created and enforced solely by the school principal, then I’m not sure what they’d even know about it. I mean, OK, it’s not official district policy, but that doesn’t mean the story is in any way untrue. The paper got the information from “several” teachers at the school, so presumably it wasn’t just invented out of thin air.
Probably the student who already left due to being bullied, if anyone. She may have been the only one who really had it enforced on her, singled out because she was being a “problem,” and harassing her in this way was the principal’s way of dealing with her. (“See, we’re looking out for her mental health!”)
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The principal’s name is Hassler.
Swear to god, if this were fiction it would get thrown out of an editor’s office for being too blatant.
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I would think in this day and age considering the recent trends telling upset and distraught students to “be the solution” would be something an administrator would dread saying.
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I just bet they fucking are; having that nonsense as an official policy would just be begging to get sued.
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A smile likely earned you a beating, eh?
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And I thought the one semester my high school tried to enforce a rule about guys tucking in their shirts was authoritarian bullshit.
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How’d that work out for them? Not well, I gather; since you said “that one semester…”
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They dropped it after the 1st semester and then tried to enforce it again after I graduated. I’d heard teachers discussing among themselves about how much they hated enforcing it. The more reasonable teachers would put minimal effort into enforcing it, like telling you, “the administration wants you to tuck in your shirt,” but they wouldn’t make you do it. I recall they also had a policy about keeping your facial hair well trimmed or shaved.
All these types of policies were in the name of limiting disruptions, with no self-awareness that enforcing them caused disruptions or that coed high schools full of hormonal teenagers cannot practically be purged of disruptions without purging the students.
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