Australians are nothing if not straight speakers

[LONDONER]

Turn SOUND ON!

Wait for the phone to ring for the voice mail.

This one is priceless. This is the actual answering-machine message for the Maroochydore High School in Queensland, Australia

[Cridders88]

They all made me smile but number 6 really tickled me haha

[Insertnamehere]

That's parents neatly summarized.

Well, a certain prevalent kind of parents anyway.

[matty7]

the only people who will be offended by that are the parents who actually do make all the excuses in the world for their lazy kids - more honestly like this would make the world a better place , im getting sick of the politically correct police terrified of offending anyone and everyone

[Pix]

I can see the appeal of it (but not the connection to political correctness which I presume means some think specific races or such are the matter rather than families in general), and I can add that while I'm aware of many sports activities disrupted, sometimes to the point of the police having to involve themselves due to violence or brandishing weapons, it was always adults (parents and coaches) rather than the kids.

But school faculties come from the same species as the parents and have their own dysfunctions and attempts to escape responsibility. Phones with cams weren't banned as disrupting the learning process, but because too many schools were having their socks sued off when kids recorded unethical to downright vile behavior going on that the school faculties swore was not happening.

Schools do get sued for very good reasons at times, and the sheer idiocy of some school faculties make me wonder WTF. Things like a boy about age 4-5 getting a permanent mark on his record for "sexually harassing" a teacher (he hugged her, and even if it was malicious, there's no point in noting what someone did at that age anyway, but a lawsuit did get the permanent mark removed), a girl expelled for casting spells that made her teacher sick (based on that she was reading a book on Wicca and a teacher got sick, she didn't even claim it--not that her claiming it should've been taken seriously by educators), a principal who knowingly tried to cover the gang rape of a mentally disabled girl by the jocks (though a teacher exposed it), enforcing dress codes by making girls lift up their dresses to make sure they weren't wearing g-strings at a school dance (and where boys could see) in which many parents oddly supported the fired VP or Principal who did that, and handing out laptops in which the kids were then secretly spied on by school faculty (and were dumb enough to call parents and try to discipline kids for things like poor eating habits at home and then shocked when the FBI came in to investigate them as individuals and as a group for possible child porn, given what plenty of boys would do in front of a computer as they were being secretly recorded by faculty), among many other things.

Then there's the usual corruption and insanity going on. A school I know of are stuck with biology textbooks from the 1970s because the fundies on the school board didn't want the newer ones that explained the fallacies of Creationism/Intelligent Design given to the kids, and another board member arranged so that milk his dairy farm sold for a nickel each to other schools was sold for a full quarter at the school he was a board member of. And I could go on here, too.

And the pressure is killing kids. While plenty are lazy (and others just burned out or demoralized) there are plenty of others who push themselves driven by parental pressures and the belief that their lives will be terrible if they don't excel, even beat everyone else (including their friends) via athletics and/or academics.

And then there's Common Core:




And teachers are sick of this, too, though they're typically forced into silence and compliance (and thus becoming demoralized themselves, just as many kids are) or having a paper trail started to get them fired. Here's one who got sick of it and quit (and it was the school policies and testing, not the parents):




Hmph, I went on longer than I meant to, and there's more I can say besides (my partner is a teacher, by the way, and though she has exasperating to infuriating stories about parents and students, she has just as many about other school faculties members and the school board and admins, but she has sympathy for all of them as well as it's messed up for about everyone), I just had to comment on that the only people who would take offense at the joke are the no-good parents it depicts as if schools and authority are above question. (And I used to correspond with someone from Australia who says what's going on in American schools sound similar as Australian schools, and I have heard this joke before to apply to American rather than Australian schools.)