Alister’s got a couple asshole kids in his kindergarten class. I know this not because I’ve had to deal with them personally, but because I’ve cataloged all the stories Alister comes home with about these kids and made the determination myself that they are definitely Future Assholes of America.
I mean, they’re already assholes now.
From what I can tell, the kindergartners in Alister’s class get stickers for good behavior and participation in their music and gym and art and library classes, and once they’ve accumulated a certain number of them, the class gets to have a party. It would seem this collection of stickers is on a class-by-class basis as opposed to an individual student-by-student basis. This means everyone in the class has to behave in order for the class to receive its stickers.
These two kids in Alister’s class — we’ll call them Dusty and Ryot, not because those are their actual names but because they sound like names asshole kids might have — always seem to prevent the class from getting their stickers. Sometimes it’s because they were running around and refused to sit. Other times it’s because they started punching other kids. Most recently it’s because they “got in a fight with their lockers”, thus losing privileges to said lockers and, presumably, stickers.
What does that even mean, got in a fight with their lockers? I asked Alister to explain, but it still didn’t make any sense. And this is the point at which I definitively concluded that these kids are assholes. When you can’t even identify with words what these kids are doing wrong, there’s nothing left for them to be but assholes.
It might sound wrong to call a 6 year old an asshole, but if calling these kids assholes is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Alister claims they “don’t know how to do kindergarten” because they never went to daycare where, according to him, everyone needs to go to learn how to play right, how to listen, and how to learn stuff. I asked him who he heard that from, but he said he just figured it out on his own. SMART KID. (Not that every kid needs to go to daycare; just that every kid should have some exposure to structure and socialization before heading off to school.)
Mr. Sammich and I started talking about how, as high school teachers, we’ve got Dusty’s and Ryot’s numbers. We know these kids. We deal with them everyday. What’s more, it’s pretty sad that we can already predict who they will be when they’re 15. It’s like they fit this perfect, stereotypical mold. Only it’s less of a stereotype and more of a reality. And while it’s always possible and a down right damn shame for conscientious, try-their-best parents to have asshole kids, it’s usually assholes who produce asshole kids who will grow up to be assholes with asshole kids themselves.
I’ve seen Dusty’s and Ryot’s parents at open house and class parties. They’re TOTALLY assholes. Totally.
Which begs the question: Why? Why are they assholes? Why are they perfectly fine with their kids being assholes? I mean, it’s February already. God knows how many phone calls and notes home Alister’s teacher has sent to Dusty’s and Ryot’s parents by this point, and the little shits keep acting up. Enough so that it’s practically all Alister talks about when he gets home.
We could blame the teacher. It’s the fashionable thing to do. But I don’t want to blame the teacher. She didn’t raise these kids to be assholes by acting like an asshole in the kids’ most crucial formative years. The parents did. The parents did by being obnoxious, assholey assholes. And the teacher is just stuck trying to teach these zoo animals how to act like actual people in public.
This pisses me off. It pisses me off because my kid has to deal with it on a daily basis. It pisses me off because I’ll have to deal with it on a daily basis when they enter my classroom. And it pisses me off because nobody’s demanding that these parents do something about it. The schools are somehow expected to fix them; the police are somehow expected to control them; but the parents get off scot-free?
Uh uh. No way. That ain’t right.
First, you should have to have a license to have a kid (Constitutionally impossible, but normal-people sanctioned). And secondly, you should have to make your kid not be an asshole. You have to make sure your kid goes to school where he makes everybody else miserable or you go to jail, right? Well, you should have to make sure your kid isn’t an asshole while there or you go to jail, too.
I’m going to start a new group: Parents Against Asshole Kids. It’ll be like the #Occupy movement, only instead of dodging police in riot gear, we’ll dodge men in spaghetti-stained wife beaters throwing empty Pabst cans.
Who’s in?
