What on earth are people doing at that school? Administrators are not even doing their job and properly, it shouldn't have gone to the principal. Last but not least, the principal shouldn't even have asked to get this written up! OMG right?! What were they thinking? Link: Mom calls out school officials for confiscating 11-year-old’s 'inappropriate' drawing (yahoo.com)
I think it boils down to intent. It's too bad teachers have been cowed into inaction, but I don't blame her for elevating it. The issue, that is.
Different school district, same culture. After sixth grade I pulled my youngest out of the collective mess of US K-12 education and have never regretted it. And he was in a "good" school that had been perfectly okay for his oldest sibling just eight years before that.
I did something similar when I was a teenager. The teacher handed my products to my father, and I got a beat hardly.
In defense of the school/principal: that is clearly Piggie from the Elephant and Piggie series of books by Mo Willems. Piggie is female and, so far as I know, has never worn a tie in any of the books. It certainly is possible that the artist decided to take a little artistic license and add a tie. However, that is a REALLY good Piggie. It’s not a very good tie. I think it looks more like genitalia than a tie, TBH. Unless, of course, the kid isn’t a great artist and just traced Piggie and added a tie as best she could. Also, that is not a bow tie. A bow tie does not have a projection that hangs down over much of the torso. If it’s a bow tie, then it’s a bow tie with a penis attached. Just sayin…
I don't quite understand, Datby. What did you draw? Was it something innocuous like a bow tie - or something inappropriate? It seems your father and the teacher clearly thought it was inappropriate. What's YOUR side of the story? If it was inappropriate and you got punished - too bad. It happens frequently, with teenage boys, in particular. They don't usually do it on something the teacher is bound to see, though. That's asking for trouble. (I remember all about this kind of thing.) This girl drew a bow tie and her mother says that's what it is, to her. And that her daughter shouldn't have been called out.
It looks like the kind of bow tie that Colonel Sanders wears. Not the kind that goes with a tuxedo. I have no idea what its name actually is.
I once drew a *cool* design I came up with in school. It started as a square with line segments connecting the midpoints of each side to the midpoint of its opposite side. Then, I erased half of each side, from midpoint to corner. I thought it looked so dope that I copied the design all around my binders and notebook covers. When I showed it off, some of my classmates were horrified. You see, we had different rotations in our history classes. I wasn't scheduled to learn about World War II until the second half of that year.
I'm kinda surprised, Maniac. I guess schools have changed a lot, over the years. When I was nine - my first school year in Canada (Grade 5&6 class) - we learned about that symbol. I know it wasn't part of a history lesson, because all we did that year was "New World Explorers." But one day, our teacher mentioned that symbol, told us about its Indian origin and the terrible things it denoted in Europe in the 30s and 40s, before and during WW2, which was a recent memory for him. He'd served, then, with the Canadian forces. (This class was in 1952.) He summed it up - this is what it looks like, this is what it meant a few years ago - and why we never want to see it again. I think that was a good age to learn that. I'd had some clue about the Holocaust before, in England. I don't think it was in school - more likely from my parents. I'm guessing they don't get to these important things in school quite so soon, any more - at least over here. They should.
When I was in fourth or fifth grade, one of the books we read that year was "Number the Stars". I don't think we went very deep into the history or symbolism, but we definitely learned something about WWII that year.
