General Chat

Mildred ... look back to your first post ... WHOSE parents brought the government into it?

Could it be ... the parents of the child who broke the rule?

Who made a mountain out of that mole hill?

Whose fault is this whole honking idiotic thing?

The parents who sent their child to school to do something that they must have known was against the rules?

"Putting those restrictions on the subject has most likely cause more upset then there would have been if the child could have chosen his own party friends."

Why do you keep saying this when YOU HAVE TO KNOW IT IS FALSE?

The child COULD HAVE CHOSEN his own party friends.

NOBODY ever told the child he could not choose his own party friends.

Why do you keep on and on and on saying something that is not true????

how absolutely pathetic
ive never heard such a load of old cobblers in my life

they certainly need to get a life these people concerned,
why did the kids complain if theyd fallen out,
sounds like a load of brats to me

Joy, for that school in question I think that will have to be the sensible option now.

Putting those restrictions on the subject has most likely cause more upset then there would have been if the child could have chosen his own party friends.

Because of a mountain made out of a mole hill
Now all three kids will now never get over it & as a consequence probably never be friends, , bringing in the government has put paid to that along with the adults feelings on it..

But this wasn't in the UK ...was it? Was it not in Sweden or somewhere...?

Anyway, there are ALWAYS two sides to a story - and as I said earlier I think - there are many possible scenarios that my be involved here.......it is very easy to read into it something that causes outrage and indignation. Newspapers are pretty good at doing that.

Sorry Kathryn I forgot to come back to the thread when you answered.

Thanks I understand it now................I don't see what it has to do with the thread either, but that's just me.

But in the UK, as said a thousand times Kathryn, children DO hand out birthday party invites on school premises.

They also have parties/discos in school (not in the curriculum)...yes they go to school to learn, but school isnt a prison and there is also the social aspect of school & its community which is just as important as the academic side of things.

yep i get your drift.wonder what the outcome will be.??i think sometimes common sense goes a long way.giving invites outside of school saves upsets.

Well, Deanna, you wouldn't hand out wedding invitations in church because that is not why you would go to church.

Is handing out birthday invitations why children go to school?

Didn't think so.

Kathryn I just came on to say good night.

I don't think that i would hand out wedding invitations in church... that is not why I would go to church. Have not been for years.

BUT we were talking of CHILDREN.
Sorry but your analogy makes no sense to me.

Goodnight everyone.
Deanna X

"So who do I take my complaint to."

You could try here:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/stau0156/architecture/garbage%20can.jpg

Seems appropriate in so many ways.

Just a comment on this "discrimination" business too.

I am amazed at how fixated people get on words rather than on the underlying intentions of rules.

In the baby's-bottom case, the policy was apparently called "pornography". That doesn't mean that the store considers babies' bottoms to be pornography -- it's just the name it gave its policy against copying pictures of naked people, which in many cases would be pornography or could be pornography, and the store doesn't want to have to make value judgments.

In this case, the policy is apparently called "discrimination". That doesn't mean that every child who snubs someone in distributing invitations is being discriminatory. It's just the name that the school gave the policy that prohibits children from intentionally excluding some classmates from things they do on school property in a way that could be bad for the children affected or for the school community as a whole.

It's called an analogy.

In order to understand how someone else might feel in a situation, imagine a similar situation you might find yourself in.

The facts of the situation I presented were identical to the facts in the school / party invitation scenario. They were just transposed to another situation -- the exact same thing happening, except among adults in a church congregation instead of among children in a school.

The idea is to see how you would feel if you were one of the players in the scenario in a situation that is more familiar to you and maybe easier to relate to.

I think it's pretty easy for an adult who is a member of a church congregation to see what kind of discord could be sewed, and what kind of harm could be done, not just to individuals, but to the entire congregation, if members behaved that way.

And I think it should then be fairly easy to see what kind of effect the same behaviour could have on a school and the students in it.

C'mon, let's face it -- the two children who were not invited to the birthday party were being deliberately snubbed. Invite every single kid except the one who didn't invite you, and the one you're not getting along with? Did that kid get invited to every single other kid's birthday party, and get along with every single other kid? Gimme a break!

Kathryn....................the other day you said if I didn't understand what you had written, then I was to ask you.

Please can you explain what your last post was about.................I read it twice and still got lost.

Sorry..............maybe my brains a bit slow today.

Deanna.

If you belong to a church, and the church has a policy that congregants may not hand out wedding invitations in the nave after Sunday services unless they are inviting all congregants to the wedding, what will you do?

Will you defy the rule and hand out wedding invitations to every member of the congregation -- except the one who didn't invite you to her daughter's wedding and the one you're engaged in an ongoing feud about your garden fence with?

Or will you accept that the rule has been made by whoever has the authority to make rules for conduct inside your church, and obey the rule with good grace?

Do you think relations among the members of your congregation will be better or worse if someone hands out wedding invitations to everybody in church on Sunday morning -- except the two people whom s/he wishes to snub?

Do you think your congregation is entitled to make rules about what gets done on church property during church activities, in the interest of harmonious relations among congregation members?

Do you think that someone who flatly breaks the rules that your congregation has decided are best for the purpose of harmonious relations should just be allowed to go ahead and do it?

Do you think that if somebody breaks the congregation's rule by handing out wedding invitations in church to everyone except the two people whom s/he wishes to snub, and the minister or the church's lay oversight board takes that person to task, that person would be justified in kicking up a huge giant public stink about being mistreated?


On the last point, I would certainly agree that there are good and bad ways of dealing with rule breakers, and the way the teacher handled the situation may have been one of the bad ways.

Other than that -- whaddaya think, Deanna?

It is hard on children who are not invited to the parties, but if they don't behave... then they have to learn that that is unacceptable.

And what the *&** is happening to this world?

If you lived next door to me... and we did not get on, the I would not invite you to MY BIRTHDAY PARTY..... and I'm an old woman.
Don't children have the same rights?

Another thing which really annoys me is.... if you are my friend, then our children should be friends too!! WHY??

AND... what does Parliament have to do with a child's party?

Poor children, they must be becoming so confused.

Deanna X

im with kathryn on this,some brill answers tho.good debate.

Kathryn is right. The main point is that the child did something that was apparently not allowed (i.e. gave the invitations out in class). (or gave invitations to selected people in class). So (and don't forget we are not talking about UK here so don't really know their procedures). Were those rules made clear to all parents at start of school year? If so then the parents were at fault for encouraging their child to break a rule. However, the teacher was equally at fault for the way it was handled, the child should not have been allowed to hand out any invites at all (and I would think it is the norm so has happened before) We can't know all the circumstances but it is certainly strange.

Who suffered most here? The children who were not invited (maybe they didn't care!) or the child who was humiliated and had his invitations confiscated? In later years I wonder who will have the bad memories of school and that teacher?

Ann
Glos

What does it teach children if they never learn to deal with being left out of things? It happens in adult life as well and if you never learn to deal with it as a child then you are going to be forever upset.
I haven't read the whole story on this but are this school saying that they never pick one child over another to do anything? And that everyone is always included in everything? Teams, plays, choirs, anything at all?

The point is, even though it wasn't permitted, they let the child give them out anyway...AND only intervened when they realised not all the kids had got an invite.

Maybe the boy & his parents felt the discrimination rule diddnt apply, as they felt they were not discriminating against the children concerned, but rather it being a personal choice of choosing friends only. ?
Remember we are talking 8 year olds here !

If it wasn't allowed then they should have been told to give them out after school, instead it was allowed to happen even then it should have been left there after the child being told to hand them out after school.instead of going to parliament, which I'm afraid will have more adverse affects on all the children concerned than not being picked for a school sports team or the like


DISCRIMINATION
treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the GROUP, CLASS, or CATEGORY to which that person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit: racial and religious intolerance and discrimination.

Dont say anything about
Not inviting peers because of a row or clash of personalities, nor does it say anything about not inviting another child because the birthday boy was snubbed himself by him regarding his party.

I wonder if the second boy in question was told he was discriminating his peer when he failed to invite him to his party...most likely not !

Mildred ... do you know what discrimination means?

It doesn't mean rewarding someone for his/her good behaviour while not rewarding someone for less good behaviour.

So ...

"However,would it be seen,if it was in that country, In that school, to be discriminating those children deliberately left out of the fun & games because of adverse behavior?"

-- I just really don't think so, do you?

I think schools have to be, and are, much more senstive to things that could adversely affect children's development than they used to be. I think they properly try to reward children for a range of good behaviours, not just in areas that certain children excel at and others don't.

Good behaviour is something that all children can excel at, even those who are crap at sports and crap at academics. Even a child with behavioural problems who actually makes an effort and shows improvement can be rewarded that way.

"How do they know those children never got an invite on the basis of their own bad behavior towards the birthday child?"

IT DOESN'T MATTER. Yeeeeesh. The child was doing something on school premises that is NOT PERMITTED on school premises. It doesn't matter WHY the child did it. It was NOT PERMITTED.

The child was absolutely perfectly entirely free as the free-est bird to go hand out those invitations to whomever s/he pleased OFF school premises.

The effect on excluded children could be just as bad -- but there's nothing a school can do about things that go on out of school. All it can do is try to teach children about the harms their behaviours can cause ... and hope their parents aren't meanwhile teaching them to be vile, bigoted, cliquish bullies, I guess.

"My friend and I often laughed as adults about being last."

I reconnected with a friend I hadn't seen in 35 years a while ago. She and I were both unpopular, unattractive, unathletic eggheads throughout school. Well, except that right at the end, I turned really cute and ran away to university and threw myself into feminism and political organizing and everything else the tail end of the 60s had to offer, and had all the boys I could eat for a long time. She never did. She has always been the socially awkward, unattractive, working class kid we both were all those years ago, excluded by the rich kids with straightened teeth and lithe bodies and backyard swimming pools we went to school with -- despite her Ph.D. and obvious acomplishment in her life, and obvious value as a person. And she still suffers the pain of her childhood. Not everybody gets over it. And the fact is that I never really got over it either.

And the fact that people get over it really doesn't mean that anyone should have to go through it.

And if schools making rules to prevent it being done on school premises has even a little persuasive effect on kids and thier parents, then I think that's fine.