A small clique of boys show up one morning very similarly (and somewhat thuggishly) dressed, enough that it seems unlikely to have been an accident, and rove down the school hallway, doing I don’t know what, intimidating people? But isn’t that what they try to do differently dressed? In an arbitrary show of authority they’re pulled aside, sent home to change, and the principal tells everyone over the P.A. system that we don’t do “dress-alikes” here, you will be sent home, etc. And I wonder, is that a thing?
The next morning — thanks in no small part, I’m sure, to facebook and txt messenging — several hundred students show up in red t-shirts. The administration pretends not to notice.
And it’s symbolic middle fingers all around, in the cauldron of mutual oppression that is the school building.
A school uniforms joke is hiding in here somewhere.
There was clearly a better reaction to be given to the first incident, one that didn’t acknowledge the gimmick the students were attempting to exploit. Probably meeting them in the hall and employing a little clever derision would have done the trick: three sentences, a mocking look, implying “you’re really dressed like that?” Instead, the principal made a not-thing a thing. If there could be principles to practical judgment, “inaction is a good default” would be up there.
Seems a certain kind of thinking might be at fault here, one in which inaccurate, law- and media-driven distinctions foul up one’s reasoning. Kids dressed alike hearken a gang or gang-like activity; therefore, discipline must be clear and public, both to send a message and to protect one from liability. Whatever capacity one might have to understand these particular people as particular people is pushed aside. Instead, one reasons from the premises that they are the signs or symbols of easily broadcasted concepts. I wonder, could the principal have even imagined what silly desire would have motivated that display?
Am I a horrible teacher to secretly admire the passive resistance?
You know they were hoping they’d get sent home :P
Horrible teacher? No way. Reflexively hostile to authority? Possibly. There are worse things.
[...] Pollack, a (soon-to-be-ex) teacher in Jackson, Mississippi, tells how the student body collectively reacted to the administration’s undue concern about what a group of boys wore one day. [...]