accepting responsibility

A dark night of the soul in the sixth grade for Beagles, reeling from the injustice and the hypocrisy of the blue jeans incident, and those mysterious changes taking place in his body and his mind as he emerged into manhood, calmed by the ways of nature, realizing among the birds and the bees and skittering little deer, the correct path, and marching on to Beaglesonia where, unable to solve the problems of the world, he is at least able to tend to his local garden and make that better,

I remember the discussion on sin.  What I was thinking was there were times when we knew what we were doing was wrong, but we did it anyway, like maybe cheating on a test, or getting too much change from the clerk and putting it in your pocket, or exceeding the speed limit, or knocking off a Seven Eleven.

I was talking about it in the sense of Accepting Responsibility.  Kind of taken from this book, The Lost City (Alan Ehrenhalt, say the word Old Dog and I'll drop it off at the Ten Cat tonight) which explored the ways the country has changed since the fifties, using as examples areas of Chicago, one of them the hood just south of Gage Park.  His tenet was that in the old days people sinned, but they knew they had sinned, and they had to atone for that.  Contrast that to this modern day where everybody claims to have PTSD or something happened to them in their youth, or something, so that if they did wrong it was somebody else's fault, and they are as pure as god made them.

Those report cards followed the same format from 1 to 8.  I picked that particular card, third grade I think, randomly, but they were all similar.  The parental units were upset, but then they were always upset, it was just something that was wrong with me, like having a club foot or webbed fingers, they got used to it.  One thing I will give them credit for, though I didn't feel that way at the time.  They always took the teacher's side and not my side, and they were right in doing that.

As a substitute teacher I had no access to a kid's permanent record.  I would always write a note to the teacher before I left about how the day went and maybe I would mention a bad kid or two,l but I suspect it was either a kid who was always bad so it didn't make any difference or it was a kid who was not normally bad, but acted up in the peculiar situation of having a sub, and in that case his misbehavior would be excused.

There was one instance I remember, Washington Irving School by Western on the south side of the Eisenhower, a long day with the obstreperous upper grades, kids filing into the classroom and one of the boys trips one of the girls, and right in front of me, and she took a pretty good sprawl.  "Goddamn," I said, which was one of maybe three times I swore in seven years of subbing.  Horseplay goes on, but she wasn't laughing, she was pissed, and so was I, so off to the office he went.  As I was punching out at the office at the end of the da, one of the clerks said there was a phone call for me.  What the fuck?  It was the parent of the kid, hadn't I been mistaken?  No I was not.  And then she came up with she heard that I was swearing a blue streak.  I had already punched out, I was off the clock, I hung up on her.  Nothing ever came of it.

Anymore comments on the Tonti Elementary School Code of Conduct?  Anything that seems reasonable?  Anything that seems unfair?  Another weekend lays (lies?) before us, we shall have time to ruminate.