ENTIRE FB Team Suspended for Bullying - EARN Right To Play

[Tugela]

Doesn't look like his plan worked.

Sure it did. By acting unfairly and unjustly he made them contemptuous and disrespectful of authority. That was the example he set. If authority is abused it becomes diminished. The outcome was not what he thought it would be, but was predictable none the less.

 

[angela]

Sure it did. By acting unfairly and unjustly he made them contemptuous and disrespectful of authority. That was the example he set. If authority is abused it becomes diminished. The outcome was not what he thought it would be, but was predictable none the less.

The coach is in no way responsible for this behavior. I suspect these behaviors developed long before this coach came into their lives.

 

[Tugela]

Not directly, but in a way he is. When you set an example for a child, that example should be that if you play by the rules and act responsibly, life will reward you. What this coach did was send the message that even if you do everything right, it doesn't matter, you will still be punished for what some unknown person did. Injustice is never a positive tool. I think most of the kids would think that he was an *advertiser censored*, but still jump though the hoops he put in front of them because they wanted to play football. It would be a negative experience that would impress contempt for authority on the child however. And in some cases, some of those kids are going to say "what the hell, we are going to be punished no matter what, so lets go and have fun anyway".

I have seen this so many times, and experienced it myself, when a responsible authority feels they have to blame someone, but don't know who. So they blame everyone, and although they wont man up and admit it, their motive is to create a climate where the kids will do some vigilante justice in the alley behind the school. Sometimes that happens, other times it has the effect of just removing the boundaries on kids behaviour. But whatever the case, the outcome is pretty much always negative and damaging.

 

[Satch]

I am outraged by this.

Actually, the person doing the bullying here is the coach. There are 41 boys on this team, and of those a couple "maybe" had engaged in making anonymous comments online about another kid. And contrary to popular opinion, the average athlete is no more a bully than any other average kid.

So, the response of this "coach" is to punish everyone for something that most and possible all of them had nothing to do with. Way to go coach.

Now, to carry on playing these kids have to humiliate themselves and be publicly branded as sociopaths, all in the name of building "character". That is the exact same language that people defending bullying use, so how is this any different? Does he not see the irony in what he is doing or does he simply not get it?

If someone does something wrong, punish them, and if you can't prove it, do NOT go rounding up all their neighbors and punishing them instead. That is just immoral.

As to what message these kids are getting, I can't speak for them, but personally, when I was a kid, we occasionally had teachers and what not "build character" by punishing everyone when they couldn't figure out who the guilty were. The usual result was to create significant bitterness and general contempt for authority among the student body. Naturally this was not expressed openly for fear of provoking official retribution, but it was always the consequence.

No doubt most of these kids will jump through whatever hoops he wants them to jump through since they just want to play football, but if he thinks he is somehow "building character" he is sadly delusional, it will have quite the opposite effect. He is creating anger and resentment in kids where those emotions might not have existed before. Personally, if I had been on that team, I would have refused to continue playing and let him coach an empty field.

If he really wanted to build character in his team the way to do would be to have a component of social involvement as a requirement for participation in the team, and not to link it to specific anti-social activities as a form of indiscriminate punishment.

A good opposing point is raised here,

I had a teacher in grade school that would assign compositions as punishment if students could not exchange papers quietly. It would always be the same three or four people who did the loud talking and the teacher would punish everyone, like twenty five of us, by making us write a "how to exchange papers quietly theme."

He was a good teacher, but this particular policy of his was not fair. You punish the perpetrates and instigators of the problem, not the whole class. This was many years ago, and I remember coming home and crying because I "had to write a paper as a punishment for something I never did" in addition to our regular homework.

Fortunately, it only happened maybe three times during the year, but this was one thing that always stuck with me.

Satch

 

[MyBelle]

I am outraged by this.

Actually, the person doing the bullying here is the coach. There are 41 boys on this team, and of those a couple "maybe" had engaged in making anonymous comments online about another kid. And contrary to popular opinion, the average athlete is no more a bully than any other average kid.

So, the response of this "coach" is to punish everyone for something that most and possible all of them had nothing to do with. Way to go coach.

Now, to carry on playing these kids have to humiliate themselves and be publicly branded as sociopaths, all in the name of building "character". That is the exact same language that people defending bullying use, so how is this any different? Does he not see the irony in what he is doing or does he simply not get it?

If someone does something wrong, punish them, and if you can't prove it, do NOT go rounding up all their neighbors and punishing them instead. That is just immoral.

As to what message these kids are getting, I can't speak for them, but personally, when I was a kid, we occasionally had teachers and what not "build character" by punishing everyone when they couldn't figure out who the guilty were. The usual result was to create significant bitterness and general contempt for authority among the student body. Naturally this was not expressed openly for fear of provoking official retribution, but it was always the consequence.

No doubt most of these kids will jump through whatever hoops he wants them to jump through since they just want to play football, but if he thinks he is somehow "building character" he is sadly delusional, it will have quite the opposite effect. He is creating anger and resentment in kids where those emotions might not have existed before. Personally, if I had been on that team, I would have refused to continue playing and let him coach an empty field.

If he really wanted to build character in his team the way to do would be to have a component of social involvement as a requirement for participation in the team, and not to link it to specific anti-social activities as a form of indiscriminate punishment.

I say Bravo! to the coach. He knows only parents of the bullies will whine about it and try to dig the hole bigger for their own kid. At that point, he'll kick them off the team.

 

[paperdog]

I don't consider any of the things these kids had to do "punishment". These kids are about to become men. Oh those poor babies had to do a little hard work. Man it must be awful to visit seniors and maybe learn something about life. They had to help out, wash some windows, do some work to earn something they wanted? Welcome to being an adult, they are only a couple years away. They experienced how to treat people and how to be good and helpful. They learned that their actions can affect a lot of people. How is that a punishment? That is what makes a man. Regardless of who is guilty of what, only good came of it.

The fact that a few of them went out and did this afterwards has nothing to do with the coach's decision. They had the opportunity to be great. Just because they fell off the track doesn't mean they've rebelled over their "punishment". Maybe they are just kids who made a silly decision, perhaps to be impressive as there was a group of them. I bet they are embarrassed now.