So, there’s this student whom I swear is in the hallways, when he should be class, almost every hour. I’ll make some comment and usually the response is playful banter. He also has a girlfriend and she is in my resource period class (sort of a homeroom idea) and so I feel even more welcome in sharing my views on dating with the both of them. And at the end of the day I’m watching the rush toward buses and dash to after-school activities and there’s the couple doing the “departure” kiss and I yell down the hall: “Hey! Stop your kissing and read books.”

I think I’m funny, but the boy doesn’t. She leaves for the bus and he walks toward me and I feel the compulsion to say it again: “Don’t Kiss; Read Books.” He mutters something slightly negative and I turn toward my editor and tell him how funny I think my new found phrase is and he perhaps humors me and I’m feeling pretty good about myself.

My day started out hostile and I think I passed that hostility on to the kissing boy.

Like Target, eating a meal at Hacienda will yield at least three encounters with people from school (it’s usually 3 students to every 1 teacher). And as Lori and I are enjoying a night out without the kids, I see four students swing by our booth to say “Hey” or to bring us our food (I’m a fan of the wet burrito myself). Occasionally the conversation goes a bit beyond the “Hey” stage and Paige and I are chatting a bit while my wife was…well, now I think of it, I don’t remember what she was doing during this time. Anyway, Paige (maybe her real name) and I are talking and she wanted to make sure that I told my senior students something that needed to be told. So, I’ll repeat it here:

“It’s not that great.”

Or, at least that was the theme. After high school, according to her, it really isn’t that wonderful. You work on finishing college and then you get a job and you suddenly find yourself– well–at the bottom. And sometimes, at the real bottom with little money and little respect and little power. So, she tells me, “Tell your little seniors that” and I say “Okay” and she leaves.

Tonight I coerced my son into playing in a chess tournament this weekend. He’s two weeks out from playing in the state team chess tournament in Terre Haute at the end of the month and we have talked about playing in the county tournament this weekend. He was wavering a bit because my son’s calendar revolves not around events, but opportunities to be with his friends or PlayStation or–and the best scenario–both. He wanted one of his friends to come over Friday night which means lots of PS2 time (and not the usual 30 min. timer limit). So, before dinner, I tell him (whiles he sits on my lap and he’s being all silly) that I think it would be good for him to play in the tournament and he objects a little but then concedes with “Well, maybe he could come over Saturday night.”

During dinner I ask Evan if he feels like I coerced him into playing in the chess tournament this weekend and he says “Maybe.” I ask him if he knows what “coerce” means and he says that he thinks it means “To force” and I say “Yes, do you think I forced you into playing in the tournament” and he says “Sort of.”

And I don’t feel really bad about it. Father knows best, right?

Maybe Paige has a point: Life’s not all that great after high school. Maybe there’s an upside to the coercion that parents and schools inflict on students. Sure, we parents and teachers “talk” our kids and students into doing a wide variety of things and most of the time they’ll smile and nod their way through compliance. And at what cost?

The kissing boy said I should just go ahead and write him up because “I already got a referral today anyway.” I told him that’s not what I wanted to do. He wasn’t too pleased with what I had to say and started off down the hall. I told him that all I wanted him to do is “Stop Kissing and Read Books.”

He didn’t laugh. I did.

Simple: PlayStation.

Accuse us of being controlling or applaud us for limiting computer use, but we allow both Evan and Colin 30 minutes a piece per day to play on the PlayStation (and folks, it’s play; incredibly difficult to market PS2 playing to an education or any marketable skills). See, we’re in our first year of even having a PlayStation in the house…it’s the first video gaming system we’ve ever have had. Sure, they’ve played MarbleBlast and TubeTwist and BridgeConstructionSet on the eMac (all from GarageGames.com).

Then–and I’m not sure where this came from–we got the boys LegoStarWars for the PC and the boys would play the game on Lois’ laptop. After hitting the keys so dang hard _and_ having a fairly successful garage sale one weekend last June, we told the boys that we’d consider getting a PlayStation. So, I priced them against the new systems and found that the PS2 would be sufficient for our purposes:mainly, to have the boys play StarWarsLego on the PS2 and not on Lois’ laptop.

But the day of Jubilee precedes the PS2 and applied to the computer games. The idea is that one day every 49 days we’d allow the boys to play computer games or PS2 for the whole day (alternating turns, obviously). We figured that would be a healthy thing to do in all of our limiting and time keeping.

So, today is the Day of Jubilee and the boys are pleased and we are fine with them playing, for one day out of 49, a couple more hours of video games.

Now, back to the PS2 story (and again, I think you know what happened). When we just had the GarageGames on the computer, none of Evan’s friends heard of those games and so those friends would tell their parents about the GarageGame games, parents would download a few and pay the nominal fee and the power of kid networking ran its course. The same thing happened to us with the PS2. First we heard about the newer StarWarsLego game, then ApeEscape3, then….and you can see where the story goes. Kids are great advertisers for games.

I don’t play many games aside from online chess (chess.com or itsyourturn.com) and the rare “Let me take a turn at that” at StarWarsLego or Cars. I am fearful, though, of GuitarHero as much as I was fearful of Asteroids when it came to the local Longs Drug store in Santa Rosa, CA in the early 80s. So, I’ll try and stick with chess and twittering and the occasional blog post. I enjoy those things and it think the boys enjoy the PS2.

Off to celebrate today with a good cup of coffee, eat some Girl Scout cookies and read a Linux magazine.

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