Way to wreck your college career - and maybe even beyond - Greyhounds!

Didn't a college prank used to be a panty raid or stealing a traffic cone? One Christmas, at my all women's Catholic college in the late 1960's - early 1970's, someone in my dorm took the statue of the Christ Child out of the manger scene and left a packet of birth control pills. A friend and I once kidnapped a 3 foot statue of the Blessed Virgin and installed it in her dorm room, surrounded by peacock feathers and with glow-in-the-dark rosary beads wrapped around her piously folded hands. (When a security guard stopped us and asked what we were carrying - which just looked like a mid-sized object wrapped in a madras rainjacket - we answered "art project." So he let us go.)

The ante has apparently been upped and some of today's TikTok and group-think inspired pranks are borderline criminal. And sometimes they even go way over the border.

As happened last October at Worcester's Assumption Univeristy, a Catholic college just down Salisbury Street from my high school. So I'm pretty familiar with Assumption. In fact Assumption's then-president spoke at my graduation. (Assumption's mascot is Pierre the Greyhound, pictured here. When I was a girl, Assumption was for the most part the "French college," where Worcester's French Canadians went; Holy Cross was where the Irish boys went.)

Well, having read about the recent antics at Assumption - which ended up with five students charged with kidnaping and conspiracy, and a couple of them facing additional charges (for one, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon; for another, lying to investigators) - all I can say is that Father Georges Bissonette is spinning in his grave. 

The incident that resulted in the charges (which were filed in early December) occurred on October 1st. From their ages, it looks as if all/most of the students charged were freshmen. So, on campus at that point for a month and change.

On that fateful day, a female student (age 18), on Tinder, had set up a meet and greet, on the Assumption campus, with a young male (age 18) who was in Worcester for his grandmother's funeral. 

The man said he and [his Tinder date] were sitting together for just a couple minutes when a group of people “came out of nowhere” and began calling him a pedophile and accusing him of wanting sex with 17-year-old girls, according to the report filed by Assumption police Sergeant Christopher J. Shea. (Source: Boston Globe)

For starters, the young woman's Tinder profile said that she was 18. For the starter before the starters, the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16. (Note that the Boston Globe article I used as the source for all the quoted info didn't state the man's age; MassLive says he's 18. But whether he's 18 or 48, having consensual sex with an 18 or even a 17 year old is NOT a crime in this state, and the man is NOT a predator.)

The man told police the group surrounded him and held him back, preventing him from leaving. At one point, he said, he was chased by more than two dozen people to his car, where he was punched in the back of the head and had his car door slammed on him as he tried to escape, police said.

While the young man was being chased, the crowd of student faux vigilantes doing the chasing:

...all had their cell phones out in an apparent attempt to record the chase. Additional footage showed the group coming back into the building, laughing and high-fiving each other, the report said.

Fortunately, the man was able to make his escape from campus and call the police. 

So what were these kids up to? 

The students were mimicking a phenomenon that’s become popular on TikTok, police said.

“The goal of the Tinder invite was to simulate the TikTok fad of luring a sexual predator to a location and subsequently physically assaulting him or calling the police,” police said.

One of the stuents charged:

... told police the plot was also inspired by the former reality TV show “To Catch a Predator,” a program hosted by Chris Hansen that showed men arriving at stings expecting sex with minors and instead getting arrested. [He said the mob scene] "was like the Chris Hansen videos where you ‘catch a predator and either call police or kick their ass,’” police said. “[He] reported that catch a predator is a big thing on TikTok currently but that this got out of hand and went bad.”

By "went bad," means that texts went out encouraging fellow students to come on down because there was a predator preying on an underage woman on campus. 

It's as yet not clear that any of the students charged, let alone their fellow mob-sters, has been expelled or suspended, but Assumption (of course) issued a press release stating that the students' behavior was "abhorrent and antithetical to Assumption University's mission and values." The statement also called out the role of social media in stirring up dangerous and irresponsible behavior.

What a bunch of prime knuckleheads. 

Stupid, thoughtless, reckless, silly, dumb, dumb, dumb. And susceptible to stupidly, thoughtlessly, recklessly, etc.-ly jumping into an out-of-control mob.

Whether they do any jail time or just end up with probation and a healthy does of community service, the names of The Assumption Five are all out there. I don't imagine that they'll be allowed to complete their freshman year at Assumption, and may well be expelled. Other colleges, job recruiters, hiring managers will be reading about this "prank" and most/all will be taking a pass. There may well be a civil lawsuit - the parents must be thrilled. And these idiots have pretty much wrecked what they must have imagined when they showed up on the Assumption campus would be a happy college career, only to find themselves in the Internet's educational, social, and professional forever hellscape for miscreants. 

Sure, over time, the news articles end up being a few pages in - especially if The Assumption Five hire reputation managers. But in the Age of AI, it's going to get harder and harder to bury bad deeds. ("Find me everything on Pierre the Greyhoud.")

When I was growing up, Assumption was pretty big basketball school, and their teams got a lot of coverage in the local paper. The cartoon mascot, if I recall correctly, was frequently quoted as saying "sacre bleu" when the ball didn't bounce their way. 

I'm betting that Father Bissonnette isn't just spinning in his grave. I'm betting he's letting out a few "sacre bleus," too.

Way to go, you stupid young Greyhounds!

Sacre bleu, alright. 

No, Madam

It's probably a pretty good rule of corporate thumb to approach HR surveys with more than a bit of wariness and skepticism. Just how anonymous is anonymous? And will employees ever see the results of the survey. (In my experience, probably not.)

Still, I was not prepared for the ardent stupidity of Yes Madam, an Indian startup that provides beauty salon services in the home. 

The company recently surveyed its employees to gauge the level of stress they were experiencing. Then followed up with a social media post that showed a supposedly authentic email supposedly firing the 100 or so workers who said they were stressed. Here's the email (email of sorts, anyway).

"Recently we conducted a survey to understand your feelings about stress at work. Many of you shared your concerns, which we deeply value and respect."

"As a company committed to fostering a healthy and supportive work environment, we have carefully considered the feedback. To ensure no one remains stressed at work, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with employees who indicated significant stress."

"This decision is effective immediately and affected employees will receive further details separately. Thank you for your contributions." (Source: Comic Sands)

As things do happen when haphazardly applied social media posts appear, the wonderful worldwide web was soon abuzz with rumors that the company had fired stressed out employees. 

Not so fast! No one was fired! It was all just a marketing thang promoting a policy that lets employees take "De-Stress Leaves," i.e., what we used to call a Mental Health Day. And the company's employees - one of whom, by the way, posted the supposed email on LinkedIn for all the worldwide webbers to see - were, Yes Madam, all in on it. 

"The social media posts were a planned effort to highlight the serious issue of workplace stress. And to those who shared angry comments or voice strong opinions, we say Thank you. When people speak up, it shows they care - and care is at the heart of our business."

The company claimed the employees in question "weren't fired; they were given a break to rest," "weren't let go; they were encouraged to release their stress," "they weren't laid off; they were offered a chance to relax," and that they "weren't sacked; they were urged to rest and recharge."

Oh.

No mention on whether the stressed out time-off-ers were paid or not for their "chance to relax...rest and recharge." And no word on whether the marketing folks who thought it was a good idea to post the 'hey, you, stressed out survey respondent: you're fired" fake email still have their jobs. Seriously, how dumb is dumb?

In any case, it does sound like the company did identify its stressed out workers. (So much for anonymity.) But at least Yes Madam published something of the results, for all the worldwide web to see. 

Anyway, although I find this colossally stupid marketing, it there's no such thing as bad publicity, then Yes Madam's marketing team succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Certainly, I would never have heard to this company if Yes Madam had been a bit less wacky with their social media. 

Maybe they'll even expand into the US market. Maybe I'd even sign up for a housecall haircut and blow dry.

Hooked on phonics

a-ay-aw

a as in apple

a (ay) as in lake

a (aw) as in claw

gu-je

g (gu) as in gum

g (je) as in gym

It's been nearly seventy years (gulp) since I was sitting in Sister Marie Leo's first grade classroom, reciting the sounds that letters make, with or without the aid of flashcards.

Sometimes phonics was easy. b was just b, the same sound, whatever letter came after it. Other times it was tricky. Soft g (je) when a long i came after the g, as in giant. Hard g (gu) when a short i came after the g, as in gift. Sometimes, any way. (C.f., the word "imagine.")

We may not have been hooked on phonics, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that most kids - but likely not all - came out of Sister Marie Leo's first grade classroom - a grim and uninviting little house of horrors - knowing how to read. And, yes, I was one of the four kids in the top of the line Our Lady's reading group, paired up - as if, at age 5-6 I was capable of teaching anything to anybody - with a kiddo who was in the Angel group, trying to help them learn phonics and reading. How could they not get gu-je???

(The middle reading group was named Saint Joseph. As a child, I was always trying to come up with some rationale to characterize everything and everybody. Thus, I concluded, based on our first grade reading groups, that Mary was smarter than Joseph (who was sort of a plodder), and that both Mary and Joseph were smarter than angels, who were just sort of pathetic, wispy know-nothings.)

I hadn't really given a thought to phonics until I saw a recent Boston Globe article about:

...two Massachusetts families are suing famed literacy specialists Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell, their companies, and their publishers, alleging the former teachers used “deceptive and fraudulent” marketing practices to sell curriculums that ignored the scientific consensus about the importance of phonics to early reading.

The families claim that their children were developmentally and emotionally injured, and that the parents incurred costs for tutoring and private schools "to compensate for the flawed reading curriculums used by their children’s public schools."

Apparently, over one-third of school districts in our state use the curriculums designed by the defendants. Interestingly, these districts include Amherst and Brookline, which are widely regarded as having highly rated schools. Amherst has all those professor kids; Brookline is an affluent Boston suburb chocked full of doctors-lawyers-management consultants. And there don't seem to be that many problems associated with Brookline and Amherst kids learning to read. But maybe the Brookline and Amherst parents are supplementing the non-phonics approach by sitting the kids around the kitchen table and drilling them with phonics flashcards. (In much the way parents of children in schools that don't require kids to memorize rudimentary arithmetic formulae sit their kids down and drill them on the times table.)

Anyway, other than knowing that I learned to read using phonics, and, thus, know it's effective - or at least was for me and my Our Lady's reading group colleagues - I don't have a pony in this race. But it sure looks like the alternative to phonics - something called "picture power:" "cueing directions, which instruct children to, for example, look at a picture for context in helping determine an unknown word" - is pretty flawed. (Just off the top of my head: what happens when the books no longer contain pictures?)

The Massachusetts lawsuit represents a new step in the early literacy advocacy movement and could spur new complaints like it nationwide. It follows several years of heightened debate surrounding the “science of reading,” a broad body of research demonstrating how the brain learns to read and which shows a firm grasp on phonics to be key to early reading success.

The suit alleges that the defendants "knew or should have known" that their approach didn't work all that well. In fact, when the evidence started emerging that "picture power" and the like wasn't very effective, the defendants created updated curriculums that incorporate some phonics. Trouble is, school districts have to pay a lot for the updates. Which a lot of them can't afford to. Recognizing that the defendants' curriculums were substandard, the Mass Department of Education has been providing grant money to school districts to update or replace them with "new materials grounded in reading science." And one can imagine  - soft g je sound - that the fact that the government is shelling out money to rid the schools of the defendants' materials can only help the litigants.

It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out. 

As with so much else in life, there may be no one perfect answer for how to get kids to read. Maybe a few kids learn better with "picture power," while most don't. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have been a "picture power" learner. As I have often said, for me, one word is generally worth a thousand pictures. I learn by reading about something, not by watching a 'how to' video. And the science sure looks like it leans towards phonics.

The question will be whethe the defendants "knowingly and deceptively" foisted their methods on an unsuspecting world. And made a boodle doing it. Nosy Parker that I am, I found the address of one of the defendants and found their $4.6M home on Zillow. So, deepish pockets.

We'll see. 

a-ay-aw
gu-je

A January 6th story

Growing up, we learned about the Feast of the Epiphany/Feast of the Magi, when the three kings arrived at the stable to greet Jesus, the newborn king, welcoming the swaddled babe with what must go down in history as the three most useless baby gifts of all time. Well, maybe gold would come in useful for an impoverished couple. But frankincense and myrhh??? Whatty-what-what?

The Feast of the Epiphany placed a far second, of course, to Christmas. Unless, of course, you lived in Latin America, where it was the big holiday kahuna.

One year, however, our teacher - Sister Saint Wilhelmina - decided we were going to actually celebrate it. Sister Saint W - as mean a nun as the god of parochial schools ever gifted to a parish school - was highly competitive. Her class had to sell the most magazines during the fall wholesome magazine sale campaign. 

Her class had to win whatever contests the St. Dominic Savio Club ran every month - even if if meant cheating to win. Case in point: one year, the contest - which we read about in our monthly St. Dominic Savio Club newsletter - offered some little prize to a classroom that had someone with the initials MC sitting in the second seat of the fifth row. This was in the December newsletter, so the MC was the clever for Merry Christmas, and the second seat-fifth row thang was the clever for 25. Well, lo and behold, the day before Sister Saint W handed out the newsletters, didn't she juggle the seating arrangements around so that Michael Curran was fortuitously seated in the right spot. 

I don't remember what the prize was. Maybe we didn't actually get our claim in on time. I suspect that every Catholic school with a cheater or two in its convent had, miraculously, some kid with the initials MC in the right place at the right time.

St. Dominic Savio contest aside, what Sister Saint W most wanted to win was the honor of teachingg the grade that collected the most mission money, money used to support the Propagation of the Faith, an organization that aimed to spread Catholicism throughout the world.

So for the Feast of the Epiphany, Sister Saint W decided it would be a fun thing to dress up like one of the kings and bring an offering of mission money to lay before Baby Jesus in the creche in the convent chapel. The big lure here was getting into the convent, which was never allowed. 

We all craved any glimpse into what their life outside the classroom was like, but entering into the convent just never happened. Talk about the holy of holies!

So our glimpses were things like seeing the back of Sister Marie Therese's shaved head when the wind blew her veil up one day when we were out in the schoolyard for recess. Or a half-burned letter sent to one of the nuns from her her brother, which had blown out of the convent trash barrel. Or standing next to the side of the school and looking down the hill into the convent's back yard, which was entirely taken up by a clothesline. On the outside lines of rope, the nuns would pin up their sheets and towels. On the inside lines were their bloomers and corsets. Apparently, they never realized that, from our perch on the hill, we could see their undies. What a thrill!

But actually getting inside of the convent? Never in a million years.

Yet here we were, all decked out like the magi (i.e., in bathrobes and hats), coins in hand, entering inside the secret, sacred walls of the convent.

I remember as clear as day what my get-up was.

I had some sort of goofy, royal blue plush winter hat that kinda-sorta resembled a crown. (This pic is a close approximation. Thanks, eBay!) But the piece de resistance of my costume was "my" pale grey quilted bathrobe, banded with red edging with vaguely Asian designs in gold, on collar, cuffs, and overall trim. Those vaguely Asian designs? I was rocking the we-three-kings-of-orient-are theme. Unlike every other kid with their pedestrian plaid bathrobes that made them look more like shepherds than kings.

I say it was "my" bathrobe because, like so much of my clothing, it was a handme down from my sister Kathleen, for whom it was a handme down from our cousin Barbara. Sometimes the handme downs from Barbara, while always beautiful and elegant, were a bit off. Barbara is 9 years older than I am, so something that was dead-on fashionable in 1950, say, looked a bit out of date by 1959. Like the red spring coat with the nipped in waist. Ugh!

But I loved that bathrobe, and was so proud to be sporting it on that brief march from the school, down the hill to the convent.

Of course, the trip inside was disappointing. All the doors were closed, so we couldn't see much of anything of the nuns' actual living quarters. We were just funneled into the chapel, left our mission money gifts in the basket that Sister Saint W had in front of the manger, and rushed back out the door. Fifty kids run through in about two minutes. 

I can't remmeber what the take from the Gift of the Magis parade was. My contribution was probably a dime. Some spoiler suckup - looking at you, Gerald N! - probably got a buck or two from his mother to toss in the basket.

Happy Feast of the Epiphany! 

(Let's not go anywhere near the more modern meaning of January 6th...)