So the boy arrived home with a paper that we both had to sign. He didn’t give me any details on it, so I assumed it was a permission slip or some such. It actually turned out to be, essentially, a contract with the school whereby he promised to engage in good sportsmanship, not to be too rough and so forth and so on for games played on the field. If he violated any of these terms, he would be “banned” from participating in any of the field games for 1 week.
Frankly, I’m not really sure what to think about this. It seems harmless enough and the boy wasn’t being singled out- all students that want to participate in the games like football or soccer had to sign the same piece of paper as well as get a parent to sign it. And who wants to argue with good sportsmanship?
On the other hand, conflict is a part of life and kids have to learn how to resolve it somewhere along the way. If the school is constantly engineering things to avoid conflict, then aren’t they doing the kids a disservice? Life seems to managed now-a-days.