Yeah, see also: West Memphis Three. Some folks will never be convinced that they didn't do this thing. Including at least one of the fathers of the victims. Cognitive dissonance is powerful.

But I'd also like them to stop cursing constantly (which for my lower socio-economic students is more likely to be a hindrance to getting a job than their online life) and to capitalize the first person nominative pronoun. The latter seems more like a battle I'm willing to fight rather than the former.

HA! Yeah, ITA.

I'm agreeing with you, Kat; but I'm not just thinking about what is written -- I'm thinking of camera phone shots and vids of parties that go viral around the school, and you KNOW some of that stuff gets send out beyond, to a cousin in NY or New Bumsticks or wherever. That's the stuff that makes me cringe for those kids.

Ok, I gotta get some sleep. Long, tiring but productive day.

Heh -- now I'm thinking of a teacher Kinsey: the Squash/Prickle continuum.

I was an academic Prickle, but an "I think I'm pregnant" Squashy. "You're still getting a D on that paper, but let me listen to you and give you some advice."

What the family believes could be wrong.

Of course they could be wrong. I'm just saying it's the obligation of the prosecution to defend the case against appeals, and the courts say they don't have enough evidence to overturn the conviction.

Attorneys uphold the law. I'm not sure justice is involved.

eta: I'm not trying to be argumentative here. I think the system stinks. I think it stinks so badly that I would happily abolish the death penalty, even though I'm not morally against it, because you can't undo dead.

Yeah, I'm squashy. We do a lot of work to not be the authority figures in their lives, even though we totally are and they respond to us that way. But Dave's pink mohawk goes a long way toward them going to us for stuff they wouldn't talk to their teachers or dorm parents or whatever about. And half the value of that is that I don't respond to the crazy stuff they pull. They know, and they know I know, but I may be the one adult in their lives that honestly isn't that worried about them smoking pot. Meth, we got another story. But I know more about what actually goes on in their day than most adults. So then we can get past that and have conversations about the bigger stuff, the important stuff.

I tried not to friend any students at first. Hell, I tried not to friend donors. But they found me, and I felt it would do more damage to refuse. So my own public internet profile is all hummingbirds and canning. I don't talk religious-speak, and I don't talk fannish, and I don't talk about much, really. I'm on there all the time; I'm present, but the actual content is fractional.

And both sides of my potential audience out there are seriously sensitive. I got worried when someone joked on my grape jelly post about fermentation. So I pay attention to my social networking image in general, but treat walled gardens and places like this as if they were private. I got jumpy at the bronzer/buffista conversation over on facebook. I really do try not to cross the streams, but I suspect at this point we're pretty much in the ocean.

My binge drinking and sleeping around occurred in college for me, too. It was not, however, advertised on social media.

In my case, it was only that it didn't exist. I regularly give thanks that cell phone cameras and facebook weren't around, there would be a lot more pictures of me doing stupid shit in the world. Frankly, even with cameras, there are a lot of pictures of me doing stupid shit.

It's the obligation of the prosecution to seek justice, not defend, I think. So if evidence comes to light that says, "this is not the correct person," then they need to drop it. But in order to bring a capital case to trial, you would have to, as a human, really be convinced that the evidence clearly points to this individual. And in that convincing, it's difficult, and probably takes a herculean effort to be swayed by new evidence. That's the dissonance. Too often those charged with prosecuting crimes (and cops, too) get tunnel vision. Sometimes, a fresh pair of eyes looks at the evidence and says, "wait, there was this other dude, and here's his DNA, and look, he owned that gun..and what the fuck were you thinking?"

It's not that they're being intentionally stupid or anything. It's just really human to double-down in the face of being wrong, especially when circumstances are so dire.

Squashy/Prickly were things we were talking about to explain social personality types to Noah. We decided we are entire family of pricklies, except for Grace who is all squashy.

At work, my friend C to my mind is a squashy because she'll actually listen to kids' non academic issues but I sat in her room and heard her tell a student, "No. I'm not going to fix the printer. No one taught me what to do. Figure it out." (favorite advice ever!) and my other fave, "No. You can't go to the school psychologist right now. Face it. All people have problems they'd like to talk about. The people who are successful learn to compartmentalize to finish what they need to do Right Now and then deal with the problem when they can. You need to learn that too."

So perhaps not so squashy after all.

Squashy outside with a hard rubber outside--like those teddy bears that are actually filled with hard foam, so cuddly to look at and hold, but such a disappointment when you go to give them a good, hard hug.

Possibly, we watch a lot of True Crime in this apartment.