Posts by Nicholas King

Paul Kern12 said:I would appreciate your perspective or perhaps some advice regarding this situation:
My child is currently in third grade at a small rural school. There are four students in his specific class, making a total of twelve in the grade. The teacher commutes every day from a town roughly 16 miles miles away.
The issue stems from his relationship with the students. His aggressive and condescending attitude—referring to them as "stupid hillbillies"—manifests almost daily; he screams at the children so loudly that the noise reaches our house, which is about 150 yards away.
Last year, my son came home in tears because the teacher had slapped him. I called him immediately, of course, but he denied everything. It was simply his word against my child's, which I pointed out to him. After a few minutes, he actually called me and demanded that I come to the school right then with my son so we could "settle things." When we arrived, he loomed over my child and asked, "Do you even know what a slap is? Let me show you: a slap is when I hit your cheek with my palm. But I didn't hit you with my palm; I used a textbook. That isn't a slap."
At that point, I lost my patience and asked him if he preferred to "slap him with a textbook or a chair?"
He then began making excuses, claiming it isn't easy working with so many kids, or asking if I realized he was alone with nine students (last year there were nine).
I requested that this never happen again. I didn't want to report him initially, as I felt bad thinking he might lose his job—he has a family to support.
It seemed as though that gave him a sense of impunity, as the daily screaming continued unabated.
Because of this, I complained to the principal of the main school (though I kept the slapping incident to myself at that time), and she said she would have a conversation with the teacher.

This school year hasn't brought any changes whatsoever. The constant yelling has reached a point where my son has started crying every single day. He would even break down at school, leading the teacher to send him home or call my wife to come calm him down. We repeatedly pleaded with him to stop screaming at the children, explaining that we don't raise our son to yell like that. Eventually, it escalated to the point where the boy would leave for school crying every morning.
At the teacher's suggestion, the school sent him to a child psychologist. Psychology told us that everything was fine with the boy, but that he just needed to "toughen up."
I should mention that my son is incredibly outgoing with everyone—he'll chat with a cashier, a waitress, or anyone he meets for the first time—but he completely freezes up around this teacher (he even asked me, "Do you realize he won't talk to me?").
At the start of the second semester, the teacher lost his temper again and slapped a second grader, throwing him to the floor and kicking him. That little boy kept it to himself at home, but he told our son. We informed the parents, but their reaction was quite lukewarm.
I reported everything to the principal and the school counselor. The teacher denied everything. He pressured the students to say nothing happened. He even asked the entire class who had told their parents about it. My son, since we teach him to always tell the truth, spoke up, only to be called a liar and a "lowlife" by the teacher in front of the whole class!!!
The principal, the counselor, and a school specialist all arrived. They interviewed the students individually, and every single student confirmed the incident (it turned out there were other things, like being punched in the stomach and similar things).
However, the response was utterly useless... the principal essentially said, "Well, I've slapped a student once too—we're all human..."

I wasn't going to let this slide, so I threatened to report everything to the Department of Education and Child Protective Services. I demanded that they either remove the teacher or I would transfer my child to the main school (even though he’d have to commute, whereas this local school is only 150 yards from our house). The principal argued that changing environments wouldn't be good for the child, asked me to be patient until spring break, and promised she would handle it.
Just before the break, we were called into the school, presumably to see if we would stand our ground. I stated clearly that I do not want this teacher as my child's educator, though I agreed to wait until the end of the school year (as the principal pleaded with me).

Now, as the school year winds down, the teacher announced at a parent meeting that my son would receive mostly Bs across the board. He claimed, "Everything is between a B and an A, but this will motivate the student to work harder next year."
It isn't that I care about my son having straight As, but I feel this is fundamentally unfair to a child who worked hard all year. For instance, his art project is being selected for an exhibition, and he has straight As except for one C (because he didn't have a soft brush during a timed task).

I reached out to the principal again today—mostly because I'm trying to get some clarity regarding next school year—just so I can finally figure out where my child will be attending. She mentioned that she "has a few ideas in mind," though she noted she won't have any concrete information regarding the scheduling until July 10th.

I suppose I am looking for some perspective here—how should I approach this? Should I be taking any specific steps now, or would it perhaps be better to just wait?

How are you reading the other parents' attitudes?

I suppose I'd say that your chances of actually resolving this depend heavily on whether the other parents are still clinging to those outdated, old-school views about corporal punishment—you know, that "back in my day" mentality. If they are—and if they truly believe that kind of discipline is acceptable—then I suspect your prospects are quite slim... because, in all likelihood, the teacher and the rest of the school administration will end up siding with them and turning the whole situation against you.

Alex Barnes8 said:So, did anyone else get an email from Reddit today?

That’s just an automated notification sent to everyone.

wanderinggardener12 said:I can see it now. The sour expression, the disbelief, the aimless flipping through pages just hoping to find some loose change tucked inside... But regardless of how that kid reacts, I wouldn't participate in dulling their intellect, whether they appreciated it or not. If encyclopedias were sold with premium branding on the cover, they’d certainly be a coveted gift. An encyclopedia from a flea market—$33, from Name—maybe 200, from Benetton—300, and the prices would just keep climbing... And if it were a special edition tailored for blue-eyed kids standing between 5'3" and 5'5", you could probably tack on another 20% to the price tag...

Besides, do you really believe everything worth knowing is available online? A general encyclopedia was merely a small irony—a testament to the idea that a physical book is something truly worth owning for anyone with half a brain. And if they haven't reached that level yet, well, I can at least wish it for them.

And just imagine having a fifteen-year-old whose highest ambition in life is to get some mindless gadget (some "i-something") that will be obsolete before they even fully understand how it works, leaving them to cycle through three more identical devices before they even finish high school.
I know a girl who spent 62 hours on her phone in just one month (with a bill totaling $400)! Buying a smartphone or any similar device for someone like that is essentially telling them
that this behavior is perfectly acceptable...

Please, amateur 😬.

(with a bill totaling $400)!

If parents would just take a moment to actually look into their data plans—I mean, really study them—this wouldn't happen. Unless, of course, the kid is spending twenty-four hours a day chatting away with some Sjorgen from Sweden, I don't see how—provided they pick a decent plan—anyone could rack up a charge like that.

BTW, more often than not, the real issue turns out to be how many hours those parents were actually glued to their own devices alongside "that kind of girl."

Charles Murphy6 said:And then, at the end of the ballad, they head off to high school where they enroll in ethics instead of religious studies, only to be taught a completely different version of faith altogether.☕
No, look, as long as they’ve got a smartphone in hand and a laptop in their room, that's what actually matters...😁

If you look at the statistics—and I mean really dig into the numbers—it seems pretty clear that Confirmation is essentially just a ritualized way to celebrate a young person’s official departure from the Church.

Kate Morgan14 said:My niece's godmother is asking for cash because she’s trying to save up for a new computer... I want to help, but I don't want to overdo it or make it awkward. How much is considered a reasonable amount here?

I was thinking about giving her $333 and maybe picking up a small gift too—though I'm stuck on what that should be.

$14 and 43 cents.

Now, naturally, you’re going to scream, "Jesus!!!11! Are you insane!!11!! Do you have any idea what my salary is, how high my cost of living is, how many kids I have to feed, or how much mortgage debt I'm carrying??????"

And then I’ll just say, "Of course I don't know—why on earth would you expect me to provide a meaningful answer to that?"

feralmoose32 said:I was at a service once where the priest actually scolded a child—just because the little one added their last name when they were only supposed to say their first name...
Absolutely dreadful...

It’s honestly chilling if an anonymous forum post about some unidentified priest is the only reaction we get from everyone who actually witnessed such an act.

rustydrifter10 said:So, just a heads-up for everyone—the play center actually decided to change its name! Since we’ve been doing so much work lately tailoring everything specifically for the little ones, they felt like "Infants & Preschoolers" was a much better fit for what we actually do now.

I'm not entirely sure if the American language even recognizes bolded text as a grammatical distinction.

Pre-schoolers.

rustydrifter10 said:Even if I were to toggle the setting to block all incoming direct messages. 😁

The way it works is—well, they still end up getting an email notification letting them know exactly who was trying to slide into their inbox in the first place.

So, what you're saying is if someone hits a hundred messages, we just automatically wipe out all their saved private messages—including the ones with photos of the forum ladies' chests? 😁

A hundred messages is more than enough, honestly. If someone actually cares about their inbox, they have plenty of opportunities to keep it organized and usable. On the flip side, let's be real—we all know people who intentionally stuff their inbox to full just so they have an excuse to block anyone trying to send them new messages.

Hannah Roberts66 said:If we are talking about a space meant for innocence, then insults and bad behavior certainly don't have a place here..

Maybe take it easy on those heavy—and frankly, completely baseless—accusations. Saying "I think this topic was made up" isn't an insult, nor is it some kind of foul behavior.

Megan Hill13 said:Look, it’s not like we all go around tracking everyone's history of where they were and when. And think about it this way: even if it turns out to be a troll, someone who was actually assaulted could still potentially gain some kind of benefit from the thread being open.

Hardly.

I suppose I should thank all the relevant high priests for the fact that Lisa Hernandez3 competently confirmed what I—as a mere layman—constantly point out as one of my primary motivations for chasing trolls: if a thread regarding sexual assault is initiated and steered by someone who treats the whole thing as nothing more than cheap entertainment, then such a topic stands absolutely zero chance of hosting a quality discussion. The author of such a thread is solely and exclusively interested in padding their initial post with new, often contradictory and confusing details, just to see if they can drag the conversation out longer.

A person who has truly been violated can really only respond to a discussion like that with outrage, additional trauma, grief, or simply by walking away entirely.

you, as just an average user, can spend all day arguing with the admins and those responsible for moderating threads. I trust you're respected for your wit, but perhaps you should be officially appointed to give you actual legitimacy when it comes to participating in decisions regarding bans.

Messages, appeals, comments. I fail to see why it would be an issue in a structured Adobe document for an average user to provide their commentary on specific situations. Besides, since I am commenting on events spanning several different Adobe files, any moderation applied to just one of them wouldn't fundamentally change anything.

Megan Hill13 said:Michelle Alvarez8, look at how Soraya is acting again—these girls are losing their minds for good reason, yet they’re the ones getting slapped with a ban.

🤦

If you were using a candle and a magnifying glass to hunt for a more glaring example of how poorly this forum is being managed, I doubt you'd find anything more obvious than this.

The individual has essentially just written, "I suspect the original post was fabricated." Even if he were right (which, frankly, I am convinced he is)—even if there weren't specific forum rules prohibiting outbursts, whether justified or otherwise—it remains entirely unclear where, in Michelle Alvarez8's sentence, she provides any actual reasoning for why these girls are "losing it for good reason"?

To the OP: of course reporting a post very, very frequently results in sanctions—it is completely unclear what other method an admin is supposed to use to prove anything.

Aaron Harris2 said:Look, I follow hundreds of threads across two major subreddits and three other forums. What exactly is so confusing about that? 🤷

What isn't clear is why you're stepping up to take on responsibilities that—if we're being honest and looking at your own words—you clearly aren't equipped to handle properly.

The world isn't going to stop spinning if you scale back those massive numbers to a level you actually have the capacity and the desire to manage decently.

BTW, regarding the part where you asked us moderators—it’s not that the post wasn't penalized for four days, it's that it wasn't penalized at all. Tyndall was the one who handled it.

Aaron Harris2 said:some moderators aren't even active on the Forum every single day

It would actually be quite helpful if one of you three could just list out how many posts each of you managed to write during those days when you weren't hanging around the Forum.

The subject here—which, let’s be honest, has been obvious since the very first post—is high-stakes. It is incredibly unusual for a moderator to explicitly state they haven't been monitoring a thread.

Take, for instance, the case where a warning wasn't issued for one post, yet was handed out for another one I mentioned—not to mention that whole mess regarding the thread about Hyperactive kids. To me, the arguments used to claim that you are supporting those who promote violence (and I am quoting here: "supporting this kind of thread state")—well, it isn't exactly difficult to distinguish between that specific phrasing and the accusation that the moderators themselves are "supporting violence."

Aaron Harris2 said:—there’s really no need to speak on our behalf.

I am speaking solely and exclusively for myself. As for the rest of you—well, two out of three of you are already making plenty of noise, so I don't think I need to step in and offer any assistance.

I haven't seen some of the posts, since I don't check this thread every single day—I usually just pop in when I get a notification (or occasionally browse a page or two just to stay ahead of things).

So, what you're suggesting is that the sentence I copy-pasted sat there completely unpunished for four days—right up until today's decree from Tyndall—simply because none of the three moderators spent those four days monitoring a thread that was obviously going to be explosive from the very start? Honestly, it's been a long time since I've witnessed such blatant moderator self-criticism—or rather, a confession of sheer negligence.

Now, it actually puts things in a bit of an awkward position, because one has to choose between two lesser evils: either this heated thread sat ignored by every single mod for four days, or someone *was* watching, yet they didn't find the announcement about cleaning up the streets to be problematic in the slightest.

rustydrifter10 said:I stumbled upon this thread last night—someone mentioned it while they were filing a complaint over that Hyperactive kids topic—so I decided to pop in and see what all the fuss was about. This isn't going to stay the way it is for long.

The bottom line here is that the moderators are absolutely enabling the current state of this thread, which becomes painfully obvious if you look at how they handle that other topic.

Meanwhile, their go-to defense—which, I have to admit, is crafted with quite a bit of cunning and "wisdom"—is to play the victim. They basically claim that "enemies of all colors want to sterilize MK, we’re just having a little fun here, and if you can't take a joke or have any sense of humor in life, then maybe you should just delete MK, the Forum, and the entire Internet..."

judolino said:We’re just having a massive blast over there...

In a huge percentage of cases, yes. Most seriously: MK is, for the most part, a place for high-level trolling and jokes.

That is precisely why I find it so confusing when people—especially the moderators, but others too—start showing solidarity with that tiny (we're talking low single digits) fraction of users who hide behind this "just joking" excuse while dropping completely serious rhetoric.

Let me give you an example: I’d bet anything that if you encountered a sentence announcing a definitive street cleaning where someone wrote, "To protect ourselves from this vile disease, we won't just take to the streets, we will establish order so they become a safe extension of our childhood backyards where our kids can grow up without having to look at this [slur] filth"—and you personally swapped out "[slur]" for something like "leftist scum"—you would have reacted with a level of apathy usually reserved for a rainy Monday in Seattle 🙂—yet that sentence sat there untouched for four days, only getting banned today after a massive uproar on the main Forum via an administrator intervention, rather than a moderator's action.

Can we all just agree that this (unpunished until today's admin move, and still unedited) sentence doesn't qualify as "just a joke"?

On the flip side, Chuck is currently (if you want to call it secondary 🙂) banning this post for "violating sub-forum rules."

If that isn't blatant moderator favoritism, then I don't know what is.

rustydrifter10 said:Since I’ve gone back and edited quite a few of my posts, most of what I’m saying here is coming straight from memory—which is exactly what I mentioned before. Honestly, there's just no way for me to know exactly what was written in those original versions, so I have to rely on what I remember!

I’ve been scrolling through the comments, and honestly, it’s a bit jarring. So many people are over there practically begging for the good old days when kids were disciplined with a heavy hand—talking about how we need to bring corporal punishment back into the classroom or reminiscing about those "golden eras" when kneeling on corn was standard practice. It’s pretty unsettling to see that kind of rhetoric; to me, it feels like nothing more than glorifying and promoting violence under the guise of discipline.

There are two main differences here: first, he’s a moderator. Second, he’s been consistently posting about this, both there and here.

Megan Ruiz13 said:If you'll let me say it, I feel for you. If we were chatting on a different forum or grabbing a drink in person, believe me, I wouldn't be making any crude jokes or being an asshole about it.

But look, the guys' lounge isn't the place to talk about kids with ADHD. Even mentioning hiperaktivan in the original post didn't really trigger a debate about that; it wasn't the point.

To me, the whole thing—and in your case, specifically—is about how people handle rude, ill-mannered kids. Laypeople see a kid acting out and call them hiperaktivan, when really they're just being bratty.

And then you get those comments from the guys in the lounge. That's all there is to it.

In your situation, you can't expect a "rational" discussion there. The whole point of this specific subforum is something everyone needs to grasp or just accept.
Don't take those posts to heart. If this group had moved the conversation to a more appropriate forum, it would have gone a completely different way.

If someone had brought that kind of nonsense to a thread where actual discussion was expected, I wouldn't have said a word.

It's honestly pathetic that admin even considered handing out warnings... it shouldn't have even reached that point. But hey, there's always someone lurking, just waiting to target poor MK members. 😁

Like that mention of the atomic bomb—I mean, who'd actually pull a nuclear option at a parade? 🤣, I think we all agreed that wasn't the smartest move. 😬

I assume that your previous post—the one where you demanded the thread be locked because MK isn't meant for discussions regarding ADHD kids—was deleted?

In my view, the whole situation—and in this specific instance, especially—is just ridiculous...

I mean, go ahead and tell the mother of an ADHD child that the entire "Hyperactive Kids" thread—where they basically claim you just need to wrap these supposedly hyperactive kids up tightly to fix them—is nothing but a massive joke 🤦.

Has the happy hour trolling squad officially clocked in? I mean, if the house is buying, I might as well join the party... 🙂

I truly admire the sheer brilliance behind this strategy—shifting the focus by (and I know, totally off-topic here) ironically mocking children's rights and liberties just to pull the spotlight away from Charles Fox10’s completely inappropriate and incompetent "moderation," not to mention those even more egregious outbursts we've seen in this thread. It’s a touching display of male solidarity, really.

By the way, it’s just lovely how the moderator has decided to label any attempt to bring a thread back in line with the forum rules as "sterilizing the topic" 😁.

bluemason3 said:No, that’s not the issue. Your problem is like someone who gets as sensitive about jokes about historical tragedies as a nationalist would be. Overreacting to your own situation distorts your perception of what was clearly meant as a joke—something everyone else understood was just a joke.

Women should be banned from visiting this site. For goodness' sake. 🙄

What kind of jokes and nonsense are you even talking about?

The writers here who are actually advocating for physical punishment—they aren't just joking around. They keep doubling down on their positions with this deadly serious tone, too. It’s almost unsettling; they aren't even attempting to turn these arguments into some kind of satire or a joke to lighten the mood. They mean every word.