Tales From The Travels

So, my son got into a fistfight at school the other day. Even the school administration said it wasn’t his fault. The other kid was taking my son’s lunch away from him and harassing him, trying to start a fight. Instead, my son tried to walk away, but the other kid hit him and it started. The other kid was hitting my son in the head, so my son hit him back, hitting him right in the nose. The other kid went down to the floor with blood all over his face. My son backed up away from him and tried to get away. By the time the other kid got back to his feet the police officer was there and broke it up.

I told him that I was actually proud of him. He tried to walk away from the fight, not pursue it. When he was attacked, he defended himself. And, when the other kid was down, he didn’t take advantage to clobber him. I told him he made some mistakes, like not going for help, but I confessed to him that I’m not sure I would have done any better. I could tell he was feeling very down about the whole thing and that made him feel better.

Even though the school admits he wasn’t at fault, the policy is that anyone in a fistfight gets a five day suspension from school. I support this policy. Having had to fight my way through junior high school, I know what its like to have to spend your time at school worrying about the next bully. School should be a place for learning, not bullying. So, my son is at home all this week.

But, he has the idea that this is a week off and he’s going to play around all week. I’ve made it clear to him that he is wrong on that count. This is still a school week and he has to go to bed and get up at the normal times. He also has to do all of his normal school work and I’m sitting down with him every night to review what he did. Failure to study results in consequences. I guess this is the problem with having a teacher for a father.

I’ve tried to explain to him how he can make this a positive thing. If he works at it, he will go back to school next week ahead of his classmates, not behind. By using this time to invest in his school work, he can become more proficient at it and actually raise his grades. This, I’ve been telling him, is how you take a bad situation and turn it to your advantage. He could go back and be the bad guy that gets into fights. Or, he could be Hester Prynne, an analogy that he didn’t get.

That, I think, is one of the biggest secrets to success. It is inevitable that something bad is going to happen to you. There is nothing you can do to prevent bad situations from coming your way. You can make all of the right decisions in life and you can minimize them, but they will still occur. And, how are you going to act when they do? Are you going to mope and sink low? Or, find a way to make the most of it?

I, of course, have had quite a lot of experience at it, so its pretty easy for me to talk about it. There’ve been times when, if I wasn’t getting in trouble, I would wonder what was wrong. Even when I work at making the right decisions, it seems like I’m a magnet for trouble. So, I really know what I’m talking about here.

I’m sure from my son’s perspective, this is double punishment. Not only is he suspended from school, but he has to listen to his dad talk about what an opportunity he has. It doesn’t get much worse than that for a teenager.