Washington Post: Tasha Henderson got tired of her 14-year-old daughter's poor grades, her chronic lateness to class and her talking back to her teachers, so she decided to teach the girl a lesson. She made Coretha stand at a busy Oklahoma City intersection Nov. 4 with a cardboard sign that read: "I don't do my homework and I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food."

Extreme? Certainly. Better than entropy? Absolutely! Props to the Mom for trying something. Oh, and there was another nugget in this article worth calling out...

Donald Wertlieb, a professor of child development at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, warned that such punishment could do extreme emotional damage. He said rewarding positive behavior is more effective. "The trick is to catch them being good," he said. "It sounds like this mother has not had a chance to catch her child being good or is so upset over seeing her be bad, that's where the focus is."

Extreme emotional damage, my left testicle!

This man needs to be taken outside and flogged with a huge stick of salami. If anything, he's the reason why some people should attend less of school. The quack gets a degree and people believe this type of crap! Jeez: if the kid was getting C's and D's in school and disrupting classes, what is she doing well? Extra curricular activities? Got a job? Best hip hop dancer in her homeroom? hah!

What about other important good things, like keeping off drugs? Staying away from alcohol? Not smoking? While these are good things for teenagers, how are they suppose to take away focus from bad things? Should the child be praised for being clean? Of course! But that does not hand her a pass to do whatever the hell she wants at school.

Especially at school.

And on that topic, if she's not doing well at school, isn't that one of the most important problem the child should have? Americans seem to think that going to high school is supposed to be a social party rather than a training session for the world to come. I'm not sure when that happened, but it was definitely in effect when I was in HS; probably started in the wasted 60's.

Hell, it was the social aspects of HS that made me not want to be there in the first place... I scored many a C and D's while going through the HS system. Why? First off I didn't think it important - this was true in my case but not for everyone... I got lucky and was saved in college. Second, I hated being in the building - at all - mostly due to social reasons. Why would I give a rat's ass about the work going on there? Think of it this way... as an adult, you land a job. You hate nearly everyone you work with. You're in so much pain that you get ill simply walking to the building, knowing that you have eight hours of what will feel like nails on a blackboard. What do you do? Odds are you've already started looking for another job. For the immediate future, you suck it up b/c you need to work, but you can deal with that because you know it's temporary. As a HS student, there is no option, given the four year sentence: this will make for bad job performance. Parents, students, high schools... they need to keep this in mind. Would make for a better - meaning more effective - schooling system.

Back to the tosser that works at Tufts, though... dude, you're freakin' clueless. If there's a problem in the home that's what needs the most amount of attention... how does it get fixed otherwise?

Meh.