detention.

Firstborn got his first detention this week.

And he has to be at school at 6:30 A.M. to serve his sentence!!!!!

The offense? Several boys were on the internet at a time during computer class when they should not have been. I don't disagree with the punishment, but DAMN, we live an HOUR away from the school. Needless to say, he got seriously grounded HERE.

That said, my kids are so lucky. My parents pay to have them in private school, so in a lot of ways they are very sheltered. My husband went to private Christian school growing up, and it shocks me the things he talked about getting in trouble for!

In MY school, you basically had to shoot somebody to get suspended. And even then, it was less of "oh go get the grief counsellors and call the national news" and more of "whew, one more of THEM out of the gene pool...." Of course in the 70s and early 80s, school culture was very different. Columbine hadn't occurred yet and truly gross acts of violence were more random and singularly focused (rather than on "populations" of students.)

Honestly though, I went to a very rough high school. And you know, it wasn't so bad while I was there, because everyone kinda knew their place - in a strange way. You knew where you could go and when, who to avoid, etc. The freaks and geeks stayed in their group, the jocks in theirs, the "heads", the gangs, etc. You just didn't really cross lines.

However, we knew better than to go back to a football game at our 20 year reunion because we knew, that they didn't know us. We'd be fair game for a mugging for sure.

To give you an example. We were sitting in biology class one day, and all of a sudden we started seeing "stuff" falling past the windows outside. Well, apparantly, the typing teacher in the class above got sick and left the class alone for a bit, and so the kids started dumping EVERYTHING out of the windows!!! (of course we all knew it wasn't a real typing class, they basically made it up to round up all the heads and gangsters and put them someplace...) But needless to say, not much was done to the kids, or the teacher (bless his heart.) Nowadays, this would probably make national headlines!

Or another time, a teacher was shoved down the stairwell. Again, not newsworthy then, but probably would have been a candidate for national news on a slow day.

We had plenty of drugs. And we knew who took them and who didn't. I mean for crying out loud, field trips were banned in my middle school because the kids kept bringing liquer on the bus!

Pregnancy was rampant, and violent fights were a regular occurrence. The dropout rate was pretty high too.

We did have the er, coolest, scariest, (or most memorable) Vice Principal. I'll call him "Mr. Cook" for reference sake.... but he was the... BIGGEST, BLACKEST, BALDEST, most STERN looking human I have, or proabably ever will, see in PERSON. He was about 6'4" tall, and wore a three piece suit (even in 90 degree weather) and he wore a fedora on the way in and out - the mere sight of him made even the thuggest of thugs shake in their shoes. We all swore the whites of his eyes glowed from a deal with the devil. You never, EVER, looked him in the eyes. Kids who went to his office were purported to occaisionally never return, ever to be seen again. It was rumored he mysteriously appeared after the riot of '78, but no one would ever corroborate or refute the story.

We even had a special room known as the B.I.R. room. Or respectively, the "Behavior Improvement Room". That's where Teddy the Dropout and Bart the Fart lived, and you did NOT want to have to spend the day with THEM. I'm quite certain that they were there so much, they got posthumous credit for it. Just so the administration could find a way to get them OUT... LOL.

So, it could be so much worse.

Detention, it is.