Punished for Not Liking Jayhawks

Oh seriously.  A kindergartener refuses to colour a stupid Jayhawk picture, and she gets into trouble.  WHO CARES if she doesn't colour the picture?  Give the kid a blank piece of paper and have her doodle a sunflower if you're doing Kansas Pride exercises. 

Kindergarten.  We're going to dig our heels in with kids in kindergarten, pitch a fit and punish kids who don't want to do pointless assignments, and then get all surprised when they lose all respect for their teachers by third grade.

Hey.  I get that we need to listen to our teachers and we're not going to like every assignment.  But sure seems this little girl had some strong feelings about it.  They couldn't let her flip the paper over and draw something else?  Every kid has to love the Jayhawks?  I bend a little on things when I see my child flipping out about stuff, if I think he is not doing so to be manipulative.  And I expect my children to defer a bit when they see that something is very important to me.

But I think what bothered me most about the story was the social commentary I got from some "friends" from my old church who think that it would be a good idea to give that little girl the belt for her sassiness.  Also?  Soap in the mouth.  Yeah, that'll teach her.

I am so, so glad I left church in general that I can't tell you how much I regret not doing it sooner.  I'm sure there is a church out there that is not filled with such utter stupidity but frankly I'm not in the mood to even look for it right now... maybe later... there are some things I miss about going but dealing with stupid people is not one of them.

I swear I'm just going to hide everyone's statuses so I don't have to read anything from anyone any more.  I will have 643 friends and only read updates from like, two of them. 

Anyway.  I really think your average five-year-old simply hasn't learnt to say "no" politely yet. The comments in the original blog post about the incident are pretty interesting as well.