We’ve been on the road for over 8 hours over the last two days. Tomorrow I have a sub-job at the middle school. Special ed again (this time the lower-functioning class). Last week I actually got a two-day high school gig that was not special ed. Both high school and not special ed are unusual, though I had the assignment due to the teacher being gone at the Special Olympics.

Not only was it not special ed, but I had a couple honors sections. They were not at all what I expected. Indeed, my most troublesome class of the day was an honors session. The fact that it was at the end of the day probably made them more antsy. Also, they were not given enough to do. Even so, a lot of these kids were not what I would have expected. There was a delightfully ditzy cheerleader type. There were two girls with piercings out the everywhere.

I actually knew some of the honors kids from teaching middle school last year (it was a freshman class). One girl thought it was creepy that I recognized her. I actually only recognized her for two reasons: First, because she used to live back in the Deseretian town where I worked (Mocum). Second, she was annoying as hell. I had another that I had noted looked really young for her age last year who this year looks… not young for her age anymore (though she doesn’t appear to have made the mental transition yet).

The non-honors sections I had were generally well-behaved, but not very productive. It’s their last semester. Most are probably not going on to college. They could barely care less. I had a class of ten and five showed up the first day and six the second.

Back to the honors sections. Someone in last period asked if they were the worst class of the day. I said they were, which had them really surprised because usually third period is worst. Third period was fine. They remembered that Codey wasn’t there. Surprised, I asked if Codey was somehow a problem student. They all said yes. I was surprised because Codey is the regular teacher’s son.

If you are so inclined, participate in this.

I was looking at a university’s price structure for their distance learning program. They explain:

Tuition $173/credit
Distance Education Fee $75/credit
TOTAL $248/credit

Developmental Math (site-based MTH 065 & 095): $173 per credit, no distance ed fee

Okay, $248 a credit. Got it. They go on to explain…

Examples:

3 credit undergraduate course: 3 x $248 = $744
3 credit graduate course: 3 x $478 = $1,434

Okay. If you need this spelled out for you, perhaps you should be reconsidering going to college.

-{Note: This is a land-grant university with an endowment of approaching half-a-billion dollars. Half Sigma might say otherwise, but not what I would consider a glorified community college.}-

Back when I was minding the hellspawn, one of the diamonds in the rough was a girl named Magdy. Unlike Dariette (a Daria-like girl, but with Aspergers), I didn’t take an immediate liking to Magdy. But as the days progressed, she became increasingly helpful. She was tough enough not to be intimidated by the other kids, but unlike most of the other tough kids chose – for whatever reason – to be rather helpful to me. Dariette was nice and friendly, but Magdy helped me get control of the classroom to the extent that I did. And when she wasn’t helping me, she was quiet doing her work or her own thing.

Despite my taking a liking to her, I also got the sense that… things are not likely to turn out well for her. Not the least of which because she was in resource/remedial classes. But also because… well, it was just a sense I got from her. She’s not going to college. She probably won’t graduate from high school. She may be a mother before then. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up on drugs or in skirmishes with the law. I can’t even explain why I thought these things about a girl who was nothing but helpful to me and by appearances was almost standard (not dressed provocatively, typical hair-care, and wore little or no make-up).

So last week, I was back at the middle school teaching another resource/remedial set of classes. The 8th graders I had this year were the same as the 7th graders I had last year (and a couple 8th graders I had this year were 8th graders from last year, as well). Magdy was among them. And once again, she was just a marvelous student (with bonus points for actually remembering me). Which was odd, because her name was on the list of students to be wary of and for whom there was a specific protocol for misbehavior (never a good sign). I also got a look at her file, which was… not ideal. Some problems in the 7th grade, more in the 8th. But her previously standard appearance had started changing and she has already started the physical (at least) progression to where I think she will end up. Nose ring. Another piercing below her lip. The first day she looked kind of… messy (though less so the second day).

Also, this time around, I got a better idea of where these classes are, scholastically (it’s easier with English and Math than Science and Social Studies), and it was disheartening (a subject for a separate post). None of these kids are going to college – not even community college. The Direct Instruction I ran through was more reminiscent of elementary school than regular middle school. Groans of frustration doing relatively simple mathematical tasks such as counting change (True or False, seven dimes and seven pennies equals seventy cents?), percentages (a pie chart split in six with one of them colored in), and comparatively simple multiplication (24×6). Magdy could do the first but didn’t like it, did well on the second, but struggled on the third.

The kids end up in these classes generally for one of two reasons: they have legitimate developmental problems or they have attitude problems, or both. Magdy seems to fall into the second category, which makes her perhaps the only student who does that I actually took a liking to and wish the best for in more than an abstract wish-the-best-for-everybody sort of way. I’m just hoping it’s not both.

On a sidenote, one of the things that gave me a little hope last year was that she talked about her father during some downtime and said something that suggested that he was a fixture in the household. My expectations for the Magdy-like kids are such that I thought “Well hey, at least she has a father who stuck around!” Well, I came to find out that it was her step-father and she doesn’t know her real dad. There’s still a bright side, I suppose, if there is a stepfather she gets along with well enough to think of him as a father.

I’ve commented before that in high school, I typically often lunch alone. It was a combination of back luck (always seeming to have a different lunch period from all of my friends) and an inability to “put myself out there” and find people to eat with. There were some respites from this isolation, however.

I can’t remember how Clint and I ended up eating with Sonja and Grace. I think it was the semester that we had previously been eating with Myron – a lunch companion we felt a strong need to get away from. Yet even that doesn’t make sense. I have multiple memories of the same thing. But somehow, we ended up just eating by ourselves within proximity to Sonja and Grace, who were also eating by themselves. And eventually our pairs merged and the four of us ate and chatted together for a time.

This was a-okay by us because both Clint and I had independently noticed – and discussed – Grace. She was rather cute, if you noticed her, but she had the sort of face that almost seemed designed to be inconspicuous. She wasn’t overweight, but didn’t have much of a chest. A little tall, pale-skinned, but not a thing objectionable about her. She dressed in a peculiar manner partially designed to get attention, but we never got the impression that she really succeeded. You had to be looking for girls like her to notice her. Clint and I did look for such girls. In lieu of girls like Sonja, who I will get to in a second, Grace was the sort of girl we felt we had a shot with and would have been really happy to couple up with. She was shy, however, and so were we, and so it was one of those things that each of us would notice, ask the other if they had noticed her, and then talk about how she was the sort of girl we would notice, be glad to couple up with, and might even have a shot with.

So it seemed fortuitous when we ended up lunching with her. The only problem was, we were also lunching with Sonja. I’d had a couple of classes with Sonja, but hadn’t thought all that much of her. Except that her matter-of-fact, earth-shattering beauty was not coupled with any sort of self-elevation, snobbery, or, for that matter, popularity. She was, after all, eating alone with the invisible Grace. But she was Hollywood star beautiful. If you’d asked me to name the 20 most beautiful girls at our huge high school, she would have probably made the list before we started lunching with her. To put a fine point on it: she wore nail polish. I didn’t care.

And this created a problem. Because as awesome as Grace was – with her unassuming looks combined with outstanding style of dress – she was standing next to a girl that was virtually a model. A gregarious, personally pleasant, intelligent, single model. We both agreed that Grace was much more up our alley (and that, in addition to being quite cute, was also pleasant once you got her talking). Whenever Clint and I had a group of two-and-two, we had the tendency to want to partner up. Not that we had delusions of romantic stuff, but just a pairing. This itself created problems because we’d always hone in on the same person. The Grace, typically. But the Grace was usually next to a girl that was fat, or unpleasant, or pretty but with a bad personality. Here, she was sitting next to Grace.

And so the Invisible Girl that Clint and I had noticed was, in a near-perfect situation, invisible to us again. She made it easy, because she so rarely talked. But it’s one of the things I look back on with a certain perplexity. It’s also one of the things I look back on as evidence that no, I am not too terribly different from most guys. I fall under the spell of the conventionally beautiful – under at least some circumstances – just like the rest.

It’s also one of those things that outlines the positional nature of the relationship market. Partially because Grace’s presence was amplified or muted by who she was sitting next to. Partially, though, because even though Clint and I never denied that Grace was as cool as she was by our own typical standards, we both wanted to be associated with the more desirable person. Even if we had no chance of romance with her, we’d forgo what might have been a legitimate chance with Grace just for the chance to be more publicly associated* with the likes of Sonja.

Just as I don’t remember how the situation came to be, I don’t remember how it broke up, either. It was, for its time, a wonderful pocket of existence. I’d lament that I never got more opportunities like that, except for the fact that we sort of blew it.

So apparently, school lockers are becoming extinct:

All of the students we spoke with at Parkway West and Ladue, estimate about 95% of upperclassmen don’t use lockers.

“I see a lot of students carrying around very heavy backpacks, with their locker with them, a portable locker,” said Eileen Kiser, spanish teacher at Parkway West.

Several reasons are given when you ask “why” students today don’t use lockers; don’t have as many books because of newer technology, rather carry all items with them, and lockers are no longer used as a gathering spot to talk to classmates.

“Our lockers aren’t meeting places anymore because we are talking a lot through texts, so we don’t have to meet and share gossip at the lockers or anything,” Shanker said.

While we found no schools locally that have done away with lockers, a recent USA Today article says it’s a growing trend. KAI Design and Build, an architecture firm based in St. Louis, has designed two schools without lockers in Texas. KAI President, Darren James feels its only a matter of time before you see new schools in St. Louis being built lockerless. James says their statistics also show about 95 percent of students don’t use lockers. Some local teachers also feel, lockerless schools could be in the future.

Maybe I was ahead of my time! At least, until I regressed.

When I was in high school, I used to carry around all of my books in a huge duffel bag. Sometimes I would sell the use of my locker to others. My high school was rather large and the lockers are always along the periphery, which meant that they were never centrally located or easily accessible. The result was that the bag was severely overloaded and had to be replaced every year or so. Same make, same model, start all over again.

What changed things was the campus news program. I actually saw myself in the hallway and was horrified by what I saw. I was so… slouched. I’d learned by that point that posture matters, and so the next week I asked my parents to get me a traditional Jansport backpack and started switching at lunch time. Within a week, two girls commented that there was “something different” about me. Both meant it entirely complimentary.

Even the elementary schools in Redstone have lockers. They didn’t in my school system. This may actually be somewhat indicative of what the article is talking about, though. The schools in Redstone trend to the very old. The ones in my district were new. Newer schools, less likely to have lockers.

Getting rid of lockers presents a logistical challenge. Having “classroom books” makes it more difficult to assign homework (though more likely that the kids have books in class). I suppose it works to have a classroom set of books and a book for each student. A little more expensive, but school districts are (or often can be) less than rigorous about replacing textbooks. The Redstone textbooks still include Yugoslavia, which is not insignificant when you consider the heavy Slavic population of teachers (I’ve noticed a trend among teachers with Slavic names that they actually have maps of eastern Europe on the wall even if they’re not teaching social studies).

Having assurances that kids do have their books in class is rather important. The alternative is that they stare at you blank-eyed or that they “read off a neighbor” which makes classroom enforcement more difficult. I do fear that, however, without the accommodations of a locker and/or a classroom sets that more kids will simply keep their books at home rather than lug them around school all day like I did.

Except when referring to padded cells, when people talk about “rubber rooms” they are as likely as not talking about the New York education system’s reassignment centers, where teachers accused of misconduct bide their time until the district determines what to do with them.

I thought about that when I was confronted with a different sort of educational holding cell: alternative schools.

The school district I grew up in had an alternative school. It was a godsend. It took all (well, most) of the people that were disrupting everything in the regular classrooms and getting them the heck out of the way. I never labored under the illusion that they were getting much an education over there. I didn’t really care, though, because they weren’t getting an education where they were and at least this way they weren’t preventing anybody else from doing so. My perspective changed a little bit when I discovered that a friend of mine (a couple grades back) was sent to one. I never knew what for. I never asked. But he was a bright kid. I sort of gave him my sympathies as politely as I could (“That must have been tough” or something like that), but he actually shrugged it off. I hadn’t realized what a hellish place I thought it to be.

I have a couple of times been given an assignment to Redstone’s alternative school. It isn’t a hellish place. It helps, I suppose, that the school is comparatively underpopulated. When filling in for a social studies teacher for a half-day, I had all of six students over three periods assigned to the class. Only two showed up at all. My second assignment (another half-day) there was for PE. I thought that would be awful, but it wasn’t, really. Thirty kids over two periods. They self-organized and did their own thing.

The reason my only two assignments there have been half-days is that it seems largely staffed by coaches. So they miss half-days when they have some competition halfway across the state. While there are always exceptions, it was my experience that coaches tend to be the least… engaged… of classroom teachers.

The Missing Portion of the Post:

There is an “alternative” school in Callie. A military school, actually, in close to the literal sense. It’s run in conjunction with the local national guard. It’s for the real hard cases from all around the state. I’ve never actually seen the campus, but I do see the kids marching around town in a “TEN-HUT!” sort of way. The Callie Academy is for the really hard cases. From bits and pieces I here, that’s where kids go before they get kicked out of the system entirely. My wife sees a lot of them as patients. She says that they are actually uniformly polite with the “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” and among the most respectful patients she has. Instead of being accompanied by a parent, they’re accompanied by instructors (looking over their shoulders, I imagine, and causing the exceptional behavior).

This couldn’t be any more different than Redstone’s Alternative school. That’s where it really is approached more as a holding tank. I’ve frankly never seen anything like it. A fifteen year old pregnant girl in the hallway drops a pack of cigarettes and a teacher says “Hey, Molly, you dropped your cigarettes!” She picked them up and was on her way (yes, this actually happened). My own cigarettes never leave the car and aren’t even supposed to be there. There is no time I pull into the school and there aren’t a handful of kids smoking cigarettes at the grocery store across the street. I go to another corner of said grocery store, just so that I am not actually smoking with the students.

My first assignment had a kid take a cell phone call during class. The principal walked in. I’d told him to get off, but he waved me off saying he’d be done in a minute. The principal actually walked in at that point. I thought I was going to be in trouble, but he didn’t care. During PE, some kids who were ditching class came in and joined in the fun. I told the principal, who sent one kid back but let the rest stick around.

The odd thing about it is that the kids actually aren’t all that bad. They are mostly completely indifferent. They can’t really be bothered to challenge authority. Or maybe they just already won. When I had them for PE, I was left a note that they needed to play volleyball or basketball. Instead, they chose to play dodgeball. I told them that I would let the regular coach know that they said it was okay and they shrugged it off. They were pretty brutal with one another with volleyballs being thrown at heads from a few feet away. Never a complaint, though. Compare this to dodgeball in the grade school where all of my time is consumed comforting some kid that’s crying. (I’ve come to the conclusion that the bans on dodgeball have little to do with kids actually getting hurt – they’re really quite resilient – but rather a lot more to do with how annoying and time-consuming it is for teachers.)

They’re also oddly – and refreshingly, in some ways – self-directed. Fewer actual fights and feuds than in regular school. Everyone seems to know the hierarchy and acts accordingly. The weaker kids seem to be perceived as a waste of the stronger kids’ time.

I don’t know what the difference is between these kids and the ones who get sent to the military school. I suspect that the latter are considerably further down the misbehavior path. I also think it depends on what the parents consent to (a lot won’t consent to their kid being sent across the state). It’s kind of funny that the system has given up on one set of bad kids, but is going the extra mile with what I suspect are a worse set of kids.

I consider a lot of public education to be a mere holding tank, but this was the first school I had ever been to that seemed to simply accept its role as such. I don’t really know how I feel about that. It seems honest, but also depressing. And I do wonder what is going to happen to these kids when they are allowed to leave the system. And if the results are actually any worse than in a regular classroom. One of the worst assignments I ever had was a remedial class at the middle school. I don’t know what separated those kids from the ones shipped off to the alternative school. But lordy, lordy, were they worse-behaved. It just seemed to bring out the worst in them. A constant tug-of-war with struggle and rebellion.

So maybe, in the end, maybe this is the lesser of evils. Or maybe it’s just easier. It’s hard to say.

One of the natural inclinations that, when I substitute teach, is not to put myself in the class. What I mean is, if I have a middle school class (for instance), I can usually guess half way through any period where I would fit in within the class’s dynamic. These are the students who would torture me. Those are the students who would be my friends. Those are the students who would unfortunately be my friends. Those are the students who would be kind but distant. That right there is the fat girl who would make fun of my weight to ingratiate herself with the popular-mean-nonfat girls. At the end of the day I do my write-up, and I should not mention – or fail to mention – a student on the basis of how I would expect they would have treated me at my middle school.

It’s a little different with the grade school kids because the social patterns aren’t all set yet. The notion of “I can’t be friendly with you because then other kids won’t like me” hasn’t fully set in yet outside of less than a handful of toxic individuals. I was actually a little surprised by this despite the fact that it matches up with my grade school experience. I remember a couple of kids at West Oak Elementary getting a really hard time, but it was rather an exception. I had previously thought that I had glossed this over because I wasn’t on the receiving end of much of it myself. But I am coming around to the idea of social patterns not having formed.

To jump back to middle school and high school and the inclination I have to resist, I guess it goes back to that saying that you graduate from the public school system but you never really leave it. The social patterns that establish themselves there long outlive their original context. I remember Eva saying that she and a previous boyfriend were having a hard time relating to one another because he was super-popular in school and she wasn’t. It sounds trivial, doesn’t it? Yet I am not sure it is. When your perception on that place that you spent seven hours a day for thirteen years of your life is so different, you can approach everything social with different assumptions. The justice of schoolground popularity, for instance. More basically, whether or not you can assume that people will like you.

Now, the older you get, the less all of this matters. But it does matter straight up through marriage. I don’t consider it a coincidence that all of the major romantic interests in my life have ranged from not-particularly-popular to unpopular. The friends through which you meet the person you marry are often (though not always) going to be people that you meet and become friends with while you labor under whatever impressions you have of your interactions with other people that you got from school. This isn’t set in stone (my brother Mitch was not-particularly-popular in high school but became Mr. Social in college), but it’s a general tendency I have seen.

All of this being really horrifying, when you think about it. Our social expectations being derived at a time when social alliances have no consequences beyond social standing. When being useful isn’t socially useful, for the most part. When being smart doesn’t help. When following the rules doesn’t help (and can hurt). These are the seeds from which our self-perceptions are often planted.

I had a kindergarten class today. It was a relatively light day, as far as academics go. The afternoon was spent with a Christmas “play” (more like a recital, but they called it a play). The rest of the day was spent with Christmas books and a couple short movies. Almost none of them involved Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

This was a problem.

Because over and over again, in any picture book or movie that showed the reindeer without Rudolph, the same response occurred: “WHERE’S RUDOLPH?!?!?!?!?!” My options of explaining this were three:

(1) Rudolph is a registered property of some media rights company and so any story where Rudolph appears must therefore pay this company money. In an effort to make their product less expensive and therefore enjoyed by a larger number of people, writers and producers of Christmas material where Rudolph does not play an integral part will leave Rudolph out of it. This, of course, diminished the enjoyment of the story for kindergarteners everywhere. So tell your parents to write your congressman in opposition to future copyright extensions so that eventually Rudolph can be more widely enjoyed by children such as yourself.

Pros: Accurate and potentially motivating young people for political involvement.

Cons: None of them will understand what the heck I am talking about.

(2) Think of it as though there are multiple parallel dimensions. What takes place in one universe does not necessarily take place in others. For instance, in this story, there are talking bears and wolves. As we know, in our dimension, bears and wolves don’t talk (and are more likely to attack one another than be best buddies). So, while Rudolph may exist in the world of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, he does not necessarily exist in this world of talking bears or wolves or this other world where dogs talk to one another in various accents.

Pros: Concedes the possible existence of Rudolph and places the context of the story within the storybook worlds where they are being told.

Cons: None of them will understand what the heck I am talking about. Except the words “Rudolph doesn’t exist.” They will understand that part.

(3) Rudolph is dead.

Pros: Short and to the point.

Cons: Will make kindergarteners cry.

(4) This story takes place before Rudolph was the lead reindeer. Remember how, at the beginning of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer how Rudolph wasn’t a part of the sled team? This story is like that.

Pros: Does not foreclose existence of Rudolph (and therefore Santa), comparatively short and to the point with an example they may be able to understand.

Cons: Kids have an incomplete understanding of “before” and “after.” Plus, if for instance there are only two reindeer, they will wonder why only two were necessary at the time of the story but Rudolph was one of several. Coming up with an explanation of how union regulations requires the hiring of more reindeer, or how animal rights advocates insisted on it, would require a greater understanding of the real world than kindergarteners are likely to have.

I went with #4, though left out the part about union regulations and instead opted for an explanation that the story took place when there were less people (errr, bear-people) and therefore less presents required carrying and therefore fewer reindeer were required.

To get to a more serious point, this actually is indicative to me of the problem of indefinite copyrights. Rudolph has extended beyond something that some guy made up for Montgomery Ward and into a cultural icon. Not even a pop culture icon, but a through-and-through cultural one. I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate that Santa Claus himself wasn’t invented under the current copyright regime.

(To any kindergarteners reading this blog, that last part is a joke. Because, of course, nobody invented Santa Claus!)

Up until about the eighth grade, the first semester ended about two weeks after we returned from Christmas vacation. Then, some law was passed that allowed school to begin earlier in the year. A few days off and inservice days were shifted to the Spring, and the semesters were separated by winter break. Shortly after I graduated high school, there were grumblings that the school year was starting too soon. The local theme parks and other summer-fun places were complaining that they were left with only a little more than a couple months of business. So they tried to pass another law forcing districts to wait until September to start school. Education experts, in turn, argued that starting the semester earlier in the year was problematic because it would require splitting up the first semester again, which was problematic because of the brain drain that occurs over those two or so weeks.

As I read about this debate, I scratched my head. First, if they forget it over two weeks, then they never really learned it. Second, though, if we’re worried about what happens over two weeks, what about the two to three months of summer?! One of the frustrations for K-12 for me was that how it seemed that half of each year was spent reminding us of what we had learned over the previous year and forgotten over the summer (except that I didn’t forget, which made it even more frustrating). I was reminded of this when I read the following snipit from Reihan Salam’s piece on education:

Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist President Obama tapped to serve as his chief economic adviser, co-authored an important paper with Molly Fifer in 2006 on summer learning loss. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are at a big skills disadvantage in early grades, but that gap grows with each passing year. One reason is that while middle-class kids take part in enriching activities during the summer, ranging from camp to stimulating conversations with educated parents, poor kids are far less likely to do so. With that in mind, Krueger and Fifer called for a program of summer opportunity scholarships paying for enrichment programs during long vacations. It’s an excellent idea that should be pursued.

But what we really need is a cultural shift in which all of us take more responsibility for our education. We are not empty vessels into which credentialed professionals ladle knowledge. Rather, we are a special kind of animal uniquely good at learning through imitation and practice. Somehow we need to find better ways to capitalize on this fact — inside school walls and outside as well.

Or, of course, we could eliminate and/or divide out the “long vacations.”

There are a few arguments against this one. The theme park lobby being one of them. They like having things condensed in a way that allows them to concentrate all of their business over a short period of time (though, apparently, there is such a thing as “too short”). And a lot of leisure activities are season-specific (beaches, for instance). The fall and spring, where at least a few weeks of vacation would be harbored, can be too cold for outdoor swimming (where applicable) but too warm for playing in the snow (where applicable).

The second argument is that a lot of schools up north are not cut out for summers. They have non-existent or insufficient air conditioning. Which strikes me as insane no matter where you live. I hear this in particular about the northeast and that just strikes me as bizarre. They brag about how much money they spend on schools, but don’t shell out for adequate air conditioning systems?

The last argument is that summer school is necessary for some kids to get caught up.

In any event, I am unmoved by these arguments when you consider the degree of brain-drain that does occur over the summer. The third is the only really problematic one, to me. For the students that fall behind, I think the solution to that is with a quarter system where some classes over some quarters are repeated. While useful for shorthand, I think that overall the tendency to delineate too much by “grade level” is problematic. I would prefer more of an assessment/promotion approach on a class-by-class basis. So if we did go to a year-around system, I would support other changes occurring at the same time. Up to and including allowing families to pull their kids out of school for family trips, in the event that the months-off are staggered between the school. Staggering months-off could also go a ways towards alleviating the Disneyland problem.

As for the air conditioner problem, buck up and pay for it.

Long Island University Professor says that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was bullied, others agree and disagree:

Millions of viewers have reviewed the evidence. So, was Rudolph bullied?

“What they do to him is bullying especially what they’re teaching the kids now as big as it is in the schools, but yes, he was definitely bullied,” Audra Bamford said.

“We just watched it the other night and I was telling my kids that’s not how we treat our friends,” Ronette Hillenbrand added.

“No I don’t think he’s being bullied,” Dr. Friday said. “I think the problem lies with Santa. He’s just not hugging this poor defenseless thing.”

Santa’s involvement (or lack thereof) hadn’t really occurred to me. Perhaps it’s a telling indictment of how the expectation isn’t even there that authority figures will help.

I think it all depends on how far you stretch the definition of “bullied.” You can limit it to physical violence. You can broaden it a little to include threats of physical violence. You can broaden it even further to taunts and ostracization. I think all of these things apply as bullying of some sort, though some of these forms are more serious than others. I remember back in college I had a discussion with a female classmate wherein she argued that girls are worse bullies than men because guys rely on violence while girls are more creative and hit other girls where it really hurts: self-esteem. I countered that (a) violence hurts and (b) violence in boys is not unrelated to self-esteem. On the second point, she said that the same was true of girls and it was nothing like the self-esteem hit of being accused of being fat. We never came to an agreement. I think there was a fundamental misunderstanding of how boys and girls respond to accusations of weight (which hits girls far harder than boys) and physical weakness (the other way around).

As for Rudolph, I am inclined to agree with Dr. Giuliani that yes Rudolph was bullied, but disagree with his assertion that the movie promotes violence. The attitude towards the taunting of the other reindeer is treated with uniform negativity. If it does anything wrong, it’s to perpetuate the notion that the bullied are bullied because they are “special.” Which sounds nice, of course, but… doesn’t exactly ring true.

On the subject of bullying, Dr. Phi wonders to what extent “helicopter parenting” has actually helped alleviate the bullying problem from years past.