Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Penn. School-Issued Laptops Used to Spy?

The family of a 15-year-old high school student in a suburb of Philadelphia is suing his school district, accusing officials of using school-issued laptops, equipped with web cameras, to spy on students in their homes, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

An excerpt from the the news story about the lawsuit said:

“In a lawsuit filed [last week] in federal court, the family said the school’s assistant principal had confronted their son, told him he had ‘engaged in improper behavior in [his] home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in [his] personal laptop issued by the school district.’

The suit contends the Lower Merion School District, one of the most prosperous and highest-achieving in the state, had the ability to turn on students’ webcams and illegally invade their privacy.

. . . Families in the 6,900-student district reacted with shock. Parent Candace Chacona said she was ‘flabbergasted’ by the allegations. ‘My first thought was that my daughter has her computer open almost around the clock in her bedroom. Had she been spied on?’”

While school officials claimed that the remotely activated webcam feature was used as a security measure if the laptops were reported stolen — an application they say was used 42 times this school year – they aren’t saying much more about the controversy, particularly because a federal judge has told them that they need to get legal permission to do so first, citing the pending civil case.  The Inquirer reported that federal prosecutors have also issued a subpoena for all school records related to this program and a criminal probe is ongoing. It’s not publicly known how many images were taken by the remote cameras.

When I read about this case my jaw dropped. How in the world, if what the plaintiffs say is true, would anyone, could anyone, think it’s okay for a governmental institution to surveil someone in his or her home without his or her permission and without a court order? It boggles my mind. Beware of school districts offering “free” laptops.

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While The Youngest Boy was eating breakfast this morning and I was enjoying my second cup of java, we heard a news report that the disgruntled silver medaling Russian men’s figure skater has decided that since he didn’t win a gold medal in Vancouver (U.S. men’s skater, Evan Lysacek, did), he’s awarded himself a platinum medal for his Olympic work in Canada over the past week.

Platinum.

On his web site, Evgeni Plushenko lists the three Olympic medals he’s won to date. The first is a silver medal from the Salt Lake City Olympics. The second is a gold from Torino. The third is a “platinum” from Vancouver. However, to be quite honest, he won silver medal in Vancouver. They don’t *cough* give out platinum medals, Mr. Plushenko.

It was crystal clear, even to my 8-year-old that Plushenko — who’s been loudly and bitterly complaining that he was robbed of the gold and that because he can do a quad jump he should be named king (his prime minister backs him up on all but the king part) — is behaving badly and like a poor sport in the extreme.

Here’s what The Youngest Boy said after we saw the news report:

“What’s he gonna do, go in his front yard and have a podium thing there and say, ‘And the platinum medal goes to. . .’ then he throws it up in the air and catches it and says, ‘me!’?”

Precisely.

Image credit: HuffingtonPost.

Item #1: Obama’s Sweet Parental Leave Policy

While most parents I know who try to simultaneously work and raise kids — or juggle the needs of multiple kids at the same time — struggle to make an appearance at every kid-centric event their children have, I found myself feeling envious of President Obama’s ability to put everything aside, including budget talks and national security, in order to attend one of his kids’ events.

In a recent New York Times piece entitled, “He Breaks for Band Recitals,” a senior advisor to the president told the paper: “There are certain things that are sacrosanct on his schedule — the kids’ recitals, soccer games, basketball games, school meetings. These are circled in red on his calendar, and regardless of what’s going on he’s going to make those. I think that’s part of how he sustains himself through all this.”

I think I need a presidential advisor handling my schedule.

Item#2: Seinfeld on the Poison ‘P’s’

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, the father of three kids (ages 4, 6 and 9) told Parade Magazine recently that he’s figured out what’s wrong with today’s kids, something he calls, “The Poison P’s.”

Praise: “We tell our kids, ‘Great job!’ too much.”

Problem-solving: “We refuse to let our children have problems. Problem-solving is the most important skill to develop for success in life, and we for some reason can’t stand it if our kids have a situation that they need to ‘fix.’ Let them struggle. It’s a gift.”

Pleasure: As in, “giving your child too much pleasure.” Seinfeld said that because parents believe that today’s children aren’t as innocent as we used to be when we were young, “We feel so guilty for destroying that innocence — which is what we did — so we’re now trying to repair that by creating perfect childhoods for our children.”

Betcha his kids would reply with a nice, “Yadda, yadda, yadda.”

Item #3: Bullies in the Bull’s-Eye

Remember that horrific story a few weeks ago about the bullies in the Massachusetts town of South Hadley, who, according to news reports, drove a 15-year-old girl to commit suicide? Well the school superintendent has announced that the students involved in harassing the girl have faced disciplinary action and may also face criminal charges, according to Fox and the Boston Herald.  

In the meantime, the issue of students harassing other students in school to the point where the victims are fearful and can’t focus on their lessons, has become a hot button issue. Even Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick who, while relating his own personal experience with being the victim of harassment from fellow students when he was a child, said that harassers should be held accountable.

“Whatever we can do to create a safe environment for kids, that’s what we should do,” Patrick said, according to the Boston Herald. “If we can give teachers and administrators some extra tools, we should do that, and do it swiftly . . . Parents have to take responsibility, especially ones who are themselves parents of bullies. There is nothing in the [pending anti-bullying legislation] that absolves adults from their responsibility to teach kids how to behave respectfully.”

He said he was contacted by a 9-year-old boy from a Massachusetts school who needed help in dealing with kids harassing him and when Patrick met with the boy, the child appeared frightened. The governor said he went on the school’s intercom and told the students that there was to be no bullying at the school and that if there was, he’d have to return and deal with it personally.

Item #4: Trending Toward More Chores? I’m Skeptical.

On Valentine’s Day, the Boston Globe ran a story which claimed that a “modern trend” has been evolving where today’s parents are making their kids do more chores, like we all used to do back in the day, otherwise known as the Stone Age. Citing research from a Wellesley College sociology professor, the article said that parents have been “reasserting” the importance of chores in the past 15 years.

I don’t buy it. Not that we here in the Picket Fence Post household don’t make our children do chores — we do — it’s just that I find it hard to believe that many other parents are doing the same thing. I’d be shocked if even half of today’s kids have to do regular chores.

What do you think? How prevalent do you think chores are today?

Image credit: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters via the NYT.

Scene: My kitchen where I’m making dinner. The 8-year-old boy suddenly appears, having just left the basement playroom where the kids were hanging out and listening to a top 40/pop radio station which I suspect has some sort of mind control over them as they’re obsessed with it and want to listen to it all the time.

Kid: Mom, what’s a disco stick?

Me: A what?

Kid: A disco stick. We were listening to a song on the radio . . .

Me: By Lady Gaga?

Kid: Yeah. And she says, “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”

Me: (*head imploding, trying to think up something misleading, quickly*)

Kid: Do you know what it is? A disco stick?

Me: (*thinking that lying is the way to go*) I have no idea. That Lady Gaga’s crazy, isn’t she?

****

We were all watching the Winter Olympics as a family last night and, after witnessing a few brutal wipe-outs during the women’s downhill racing event — in particular, the crash where an athlete’s body, while careening out of control down the mountain, went up a mogul and then, after flying through the air, slammed into the ground — my 11-year-old daughter ran out of the room in tears wondering why on earth anyone would willingly participate in such a sport, especially in light of the luger’s death last week. She had trouble falling asleep because she kept replaying the crash footage in her head over and over. I had to try to take her mind off of the crashes as she fell asleep . . . but not by providing the definition of “disco stick.”

However their experience watching the Olympics hasn’t been all bad. Yesterday afternoon, I’m lucky we didn’t have a wipe-out situation of our own. After-the-fact, the Picket Fence Post children informed me that they had attempted to reenact an Olympic snow boarding event. They’d donned their bike helmets, climbed atop a small snow-covered hill in our yard, then stood on the rickety wooden sled as they slid down. (I got conflicting reports on how fast their descent was.) When I responded loudly with, “You did WHAT?” they tried to distract and impress me with the news that, before they “snowboarded,” they’d taken some tall dry weeds from the woods and pretended they were the Olympic flame and ”lit” a pretend Olympic cauldron. I have no idea what was the stand-in for the cauldron. Thank God that’s as far as they went with the flame reenactment.

****

Other than attempting to impersonate Shaun White, the kids have also used their vacation time to – and I’m not kidding here — reorganize their playroom. No, I didn’t bribe them to do this. It was wholly their idea.

Normally, I’m fond of likening the room in the basement — with the half-peeled jungle/animal border, the crayon scrawled on the walls next to the holes caused by a wooden wagon and various balls being smashed into them — to a bad neighborhood, the kind of neighborhood you realize is kinda sketchy only after you’ve taken a wrong turn in an unfamiliar city.

However, the kids did an admirable job of neatening it up. They set up ”sofas” (pillows from the various sofas in the house, blankets they pilfered from bedrooms), a music listening area (so they can listen to that station that’s teaching them about “disco sticks”) and a makeshift library where they created a bookcase from cardboard boxes and duct tape and filled them with paperback books, a hardcover copy of the 2009 Guinness World Records and an assortment of sports trading cards. They created and posted on the wall a list of nine ”rules” for the room that visitors have to agree to abide by, along with an oath that visitors must sign. Among the rules were:

1) When coming downstairs, never touch the bottom step.

2) Do not ever stand on furniture.

5) Owner of drum set must be watching you if you play the drums.

No word on whether playroom visitors are required to sing along with Lady Gaga tunes, however you DO have to have a high tolerance for KISS 108.

Image credit: Getty via Gawker.

And I laughed. And laughed. And laughed. “My head would explode if I gave up shouting for 40 days,” I told them today as I was driving the Picket Fence Post kids to the grocery store with me.

“You couldn’t do it,” The Youngest Boy said as he too chortled at the notion.

“I think I’d melt by day 20,” I agreed.

Instead, we agreed that I’d try to refrain from using bad words during the duration of the Lenten season, the 40 days leading up to Easter. When I’m in front of the kids I try, really hard, not to swear. But I’m not perfect. The ”s” word slips out of my mouth from time to time when I drop stuff or make a mistake. When I substitute “damn” or “crap,” they raise their eyebrows as well because I’ve told them those are bad words not to be used by kids. (For the record, I apologize when I slip up.) 

I think I’ll do what I did last year to incentivize myself to curtail my invocation of naughty words by putting a quarter in a jar each time I mess up, even outside of my kids’ presence. However it doesn’t always work. On one particularly bad work day last spring when the kids were at school, I put a $5 in the jar.

I’ve asked the kids to think about what they’d give up or what positive things they’d do during Lent. They’ve got until dinner tonight to come up with some good ideas, but having Mom cease with the shouting, ain’t happenin’ my pretties. No. Way.

Okay, so I get dragged to see dreck like The Squeakquel and other such fare on occasion with the Picket Fence Post children. But when the movies aimed at my kids seem like they’ll be decent, well, I’m simply thrilled.

I recently came across the preview for the third installment of the Toy Story series, which has been forever in the works. My eldest two kids fell in love with Toy Story years ago. The Eldest Boy (now 11) and The Youngest Boy dressed as Buzz Lightyear for several Halloweens, while The Girl went as Jessie the Cowgirl one year. We owned a couple of Buzz Lightyears, two Woodys, two Jessies and one Bullseye the horse.

And while my 11 year olds may protest that they’re too old to see Toy Story 3, there’s a chance that my 8-year-old will want to see this with me. (And I’d actually like to see it too.) In the preview, we learn that Andy is *sniff* going to college and has to figure out what to do with all his toys. It looks like most of the crew is being donated to some sort of pre-school.

Then there’s the live action movie that’s based on the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. The preview for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the movie made my kids laugh and I have feeling that, after this movie comes out, we’re going to be hearing a lot more about “The Cheese Touch.”

I felt a bit like the faux-cool dad, Phil Dunphy from Modern Family yesterday when I attempted to invoke the slang term “beast” when talking with my 11-year-old son and describing something as being cool. (”Beast” is — or was – the kids’ hip way of saying, “cool.” That’s why my eldest two kids told me last year anyway.)

“Mooom!” The Eldest Boy said, “It’s not ‘beast’ anymore!”

“When did that happen?” I asked, chagrined. “What do you mean?”

“It’s ‘tank.’”

“‘Tank?’”

“Yeah, that’s the new word,” he said.

It’s so new, this using “tank” as a synonym for “cool,” that when I looked in the Urban Dictionary of slang words, I couldn’t find a definition of “tank” that matched my son’s.

Combine my verbal miscue with the fact that last week when The Girl and I started dancing in the kitchen after dinner and The Youngest Boy (8) told me I danced “like an old lady,” you can understand why I’m not feeling too hip these days.

Hence my earlier statement that I’m worried that my kids are going to start to think I’ve become a Phil Dunphy. Who the heck is Phil Dunphy? He’s a fictional character from an ABC comedy. Watch the video below and you’ll understand my concern:

Do your kids make you feel woefully out of touch?

Two weeks have elapsed since I last updated my Picket Fence Post audience on the number of papers my three kiddos (grades 3, 5 and 5) brought home from school.

During those weeks – when we had two kids home sick (each were home from school one day) and they all missed a day of school due to a family situation – a total of 115 pieces of paper were dumped onto the kitchen counter.

Among the items in the array of papers were: 18 pages (worksheets, info sheets, etc.) on rocks and minerals, several flyers about a school read-a-thon, two red flyers about a school fundraising event, the agenda for an upcoming school committee meeting, a short story written by The Eldest Boy entitled “A Man in Black” (about a teacher leading a double life) and a dozen pieces of paper which served as study guides about the colonial era.

The grand total of the pieces of paper sent home from school since the beginning of the school year: 1,260.

Okay, so I write about ABC’s Modern Family so much that people might wonder if I’m getting some kind of payment for mentioning it this often. And I do, with laughs.

The promo for next week’s Valentine’s Day themed episode features Claire and Phil, married parents of three,  doing a little risque role playing to spice things up . . . with unexpected consequences. Enjoy.

 Item #1:  Call it ‘Harassment’ Not ‘Bullying’

What if, just for kicks, we stopped referring to the on-going harassment and humiliation of children — which interferes with their ability to function in school — as “bullying,” and, instead, started calling it what it really is, which is “harassment?”

After I read several pieces in today’s Boston Herald about children being subjected to physical and emotional harassment in school which left them feeling unsafe and unable to concentrate – along with school officials, by and large, not doing much to stop the behavior – I kept  wondering why it’s not simply called “harassment.” The word “bullying” seems insufficient. As does the word “teasing,” which I’ve also heard invoked to refer to this subject.

One Herald article, entitled “Bullied kids ‘helpless’ against attacks” started thusly:

“Hundreds of angry parents, worried teachers and even terrorized kids are reporting ugly episodes of brutal bullying at schools across Massachusetts as the heartwrenching case of Phoebe Prince continues to expose a painful nerve.

The abuse — detailed in e-mails and phone calls to the Herald – is emotionally jarring, often physical and spreading like a merciless virus in cyberspace.

Kids tell of being forced to drink toilet water, getting pummeled on the bus and seeing themselves ridiculed for all to see on Facebook.

. . . A Boston Latin High School parent said the bullying was so bad her son had to leave the elite school. A teacher on the South Shore said she’s sick over special-needs girls being photographed in the bathroom — only to learn it was all posted on Facebook.”

An accompanying Herald column, “Parents’ pleas fall on deaf ears,” painted a picture of parents feeling likewise helpless when it comes to putting an end to the harassment of their kids at the hands of their classmates:

“‘We told the school and the school did nothing.’

That’s the common refrain I’ve heard over and over since news broke of the apparent suicide of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince of South Hadley, who was relentlessly hounded by high school bullies.

Incredibly, her tormentors remain in class, protected by the school. Yet in conversations with parents and in more than 100 voice mails and e-mails, I learned that protecting bullies, not the bullied, is hardly unique to South Hadley. It’s now the rule in our schools.”

If the student victims were instead adult employees at a company being harassed by a peer, their supervisor would have to step in and stop the harasser from creating a hostile work environment or face a possible lawsuit. If one adult wouldn’t leave another one alone, a criminal restraining order could filed against the harasser. So why can’t the schools do more, like workplaces have done?

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