::A Geek in Korea::

My school has revised it’s detention policy to make it more annoying for both students and teachers. The problem with giving half a class detention was that if half the class WANTED detention to work together, you are only playing into the worst student’s hands. In a few classes, students were intentionally getting detention everyday so that they could get their Korean homework finished together.

While some students still avoided detention like a punishment, bad kids tried to get all their friends to join them. Detention had been warped into a strange social club where you have to fail to succeed. My director decided that you had to pick the worst student, and only ONE student per class to send to detention. The idea is that if a bad student is stuck there alone, they’ll have to actually work instead of playing with friends.

Sending only one student is much harder than sending students to detention indiscriminately. If five students don’t do their homework, it’s easy to send all five. Students can’t be sent on absolute terms, and I have to pick the biggest idiot, I’ve got classes where it’s nearly impossible to choose who to send. There is a class where I dislike so many of the students that choosing one student that is the most awful is impossible. They all are so awful, it would take a tremendously terrible thing for them to stand out in any one class to get sent to detention. Sure, if they start stabbing each other I’ll have an easier time, but do I have to wait for it to get that bad?

Some classes get strict enforcement, because one bad kid will stick out, but if there are five bad kids in one class, and I can only pick one, it’ll seem arbitrary when I pick someone. I actually let five students that would have detention in ANY of my other classes go today because I didn’t feel like arguing why one or the other was worst.

Eventually, I’ll stop being fair and go back to being cruel and vindictive. Is it too late to add a solitary confinement wing to the school?