Madness

Allow me to vent a bit. One of my neighbors is an 8th grader named Mahi. He knows that the seven of us in my house are happy to hang out with the kids from the neighborhood (as all the kids know), so he comes over and we play ping-pong or monopoly from time to time. Yesterday, as I was leaving around 8 AM, I saw him walking down the street. I thought he was supposed to be at school by 7:30 but wasn't sure, so I just waved and left because I was running late.

When I got home for lunch at about 12:30, Mahi was sitting in our living room watching a movie with my housemate Laura. It turns out he got into a fight on Friday and is suspended from school all week. His aunt, who he lives with, was so mad she locked him out of the house when she went to work. Basically, if he he didn't come to our place Mahi would be wandering the streets all week. Does this seem like an intelligent move by his school administrators?

To be fair, I should mention Mahi has a history of bad behavior. Most recently (last year) he got sent to an alternative school for troubled kids. I don't get it, though, because he is the most polite and respectful kid in the neighborhood, easily. When I talked to him about it, he said kids were picking on him, and he "just doesn't like to be touched." So, it's a classic case of a kid with a reputation and a short fuse getting targeted by instigators in his classes. They mess with him because they know they'll get a reaction, and more often than not Mahi will take the blame for it.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not letting Mahi off the hook. He deserves to be punished, but this punishment is idiocy! Let's take him out of school for a week, so he gets further behind in his classes, gets more frustrated at school, and expresses that frustration by acting up more. Great plan! Laura made him do his homework, but when he finished in an hour (he's bright too), she had nothing else to do. They ended up watching a movie because the he was bored out of his mind. He actually wanted to go back to school! I'm not a parent or a teacher, but this doesn't seem like the way our school system should handle discipline.