For the last week or so, I’ve had NFL Hall of Famer Cris Carter’s words ring in my head in his response to the current consternation about NFL running backs Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson. His quote “My mom did the best job she could do. My mom was wrong” juxtaposed with “You know what? Take em off the daggone field because, you know what, as a man, that’s the only thing we really respect. We don’t respect no women. We don’t respect no kids. The only thing Roger and them do, take them off the field cuz they respect that” made me think about schools and parenting.

In particular, it made me think of the unwritten rules about parent-teacher communication, and how often many of us would observe parents not just threaten to beat their kids, but also hear of students get a beating, prompted by that educators’ phone call. Some of us might have even hoped that the phone call would lead to such a beating.

Yet, as my friend Alexa (@alexachula) said this on Twitter:

“Listen, beating your kids doesn’t work. They’re still not doing HW, fighting, cussing, & talking back. I spend 6.5 hours w/your kid, I know.”

This is a critical aspect of the Adrian Peterson conversation for educators. In the past, I’ve been of the mindset that sparing the rod meant spoiling the child. When I think about the hundreds of students I’ve taught and met, my best students never got beaten. Love, structure, and discussions seemed to work best for them. It was my more rambunctious kids who were the most fragile and, often, the most beaten. They also felt the least loved. Corporal punishment is still legal in 23 states, despite the studies showing more progressive ways to instill discipline and positive school culture.

So, all that beating seems to accomplish is making kids less confident in their own person and more agitated at the sight of authority. That includes teachers.

Even our classroom management strategies might need an upgrade, for, if schools are supposed to function as safe havens, why do we continue to work against that so often? Why do we run mock prisons and threaten students ad nauseam about ending up in jail or flipping burgers for a living? How do we re-define the word discipline as restraint towards achieving a wholeness, not destroying as a means of stripping apart?

This cuts across so many lines and gets more complicated the deeper you look, but it’s unfair for us to not look, to not see the legacies we’ve inherited, and the impressions we leave on the children who will have to ask themselves the same questions, scars and all.

A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme …

photo c/o