Short Shorts: An Apology Of Sorts

So, there's me hungover on Sunday subjecting myself to Sitemeter to see which two of my four daily hits weren't mine. For some reason, though, there's been a large, phallic spike in my hits for the weekend. I check the usual suspects... Yes, there's "Kylie", "Shat" & "Prince Charles" on my blog and, well, that's quite the Google magnet.

After getting SiteMeter to track referrals, it turns out that Making Light has linked to me. Me! After the initial joy, though, it turns out that something I linked to is quite dodgy. Teresa explains why in the article linked to above. As always this is a great article and makes much of something I'd not really processed past the "nice piccy" level.

Theresa says:

Here’s the missing part of the flowchart’s model: Suspending a student is a nontrivially consequential action. The students most likely to get suspended are also likely to have fragile and uncertain school careers. The loss of daily continuity and classroom instruction time can break them. So can the trouble they get into while idle. If you suspend them, they may flunk out, or stop coming, or tangle with the law. At that point, everything suddenly gets much harder for everyone concerned— except, perhaps, for the school that did the suspending.

And, for me, this is the point. Suspending a student shouldn't normally be simple. It's quite a drastic measure that needs all sorts of checks and balances to ensure that it's not abused[1]. If the process is trivial, then people will think of trivial ways to abuse it.

Apparently, Common Good are calling for the law to be reformed. In this case on the grounds of complexity, but mostly, it seems, to stop the rich from taking responsibility for their actions and products.

Private Eye's recent Secret Diary of A School Teacher does paint a picture of a place where easier expulsions seem almost welcome, though.

[1] Conisbrough narrowly avoided having their school being taken over by the Vardy Foundation, not because of parent action (60% of them wanted it), but partly because neighbouring schools realised that they would be left with Northcliffe's cast-offs. Something those schools would have to do when Northcliffe's school board was taken over by people eager to get rid of problem students.