Guantanamo

I had a dream a few nights ago in which I was applying to reenter my old high school as a student again. I was standing in a long line with a couple other alumns from the same institution who were there to enroll a young relative (niece?) in the school. I was not enthused about going back to high school, although I was trying to psych myself up for it. I wasn't quite sure why I had made the decision to do it at all. "Yeah, I plan to take mostly AP classes," I remember myself explaining, uncomfortably,

*****

The high school at which I currently work is a little under 400 kids. It's not the best place, but it's certainly not the worst either. I get to work at each morning at 7 am or just prior, only minutes before the front doors are unlocked and the first students arrive. The second they come in the door, they swarm my desk with a thousand questions, most of which involve whether and why they have detention. My desk is located in a catch-all downstairs office that is intended to coordinate all non-academic student concerns, from calling home when kids are throwing up to breaking them apart when they're trying to rip each others' hair out. But somehow this one duty -- masterminding daily school-wide detention for some hundred high schoolers each day -- has become the bulk of my daily routine.

In years past, detention was a teacher-by-teacher affair. You acted up in a teacher's class and you got an order to return to said teacher's room at lunch or the end of the day for an hour or half hour of resentful sitting and glaring. The advantage of this system was that it established a clear loop of action/consequence, in that the teacher who was slighted was the teacher who did the detaining. The disadvantage was that teachers already are expected to do a truly impossible number of duties each day anyway, and few have time to hold consistent detentions each day. Teachers get tired and detention becomes optional, and that's as effective as an optional parking ticket.

So instead, we now have a school-wide system with school-wide detentions. You act up in a teacher's class and you get points deducted;  if you lose too many points that day, you get a detention assigned for the following day based on the severity of your badness. Then, tomorrow afternoon, or at lunch, or in the morning, you come to a room where I am standing with a clipboard and a list, looking grouchy. This is all done via a helpful website that lets me see the points each student has, which teacher has deducted points and for what reason, and which students have detention at any given time. The advantage of this system is that it removes the burden of day-to-day discipline enforcement from teachers. The disadvantage is that it's essentially created a miniature bureaucracy that obfuscates the loop of action, blame, and responsibility. The consequence is coming not directly from the teacher but from the corrupt and malignant entity known as The School. (I mean, arguably this is also an advantage, as it's amply preparing them for a lifetime in contemporary American society.)

The other disadvantage, in my opinion, is that I myself happen to be the bureaucrat sitting at the nerve center of the Ministry of Love. The word "detention" slips into my ears and out of my mouth literally hundreds of times each day, whether I'm telling kids they have it or nagging kids to go to it or warning kids about the consequences of skipping it (suspension) or fielding complaints about the unfairness of the assignment of this or that instant of it or actually executing it. It consumes me from dawn til the moment I leave the building after dark. I had little hand in creating this system's rules, but I have been appointed its middle-manager, a semi-autonomous cog in the machine, a hooded inquisitor thug in some Wizard of Id cartoon. Don't get me wrong, I am no strongman. (Just today, I am pretty sure I was overcharged for a medium Domino's pizza but felt too shy to question the price on the phone.) I don't need to be. I just tally the points, make the list each day, and make them shut up and sit there and think about what they've done.