Letter: Responsibility best taught by discipline

Tuesday, April 24, 2007 | 7:11 a.m.

When I was about to graduate from high school, a friend and I decided we wanted to spend a school day doing just want we wanted - eat lunch wherever and go to a matinee. What a wonderful day we had.

The day passed and we each went home, where we now needed to ask our parents to provide us with an "excused absence note" in order to participate in the next school day. My mother refused to give me an excuse and said, "I will not lie for you; you made your bed and you have to lie in it."

I spent the next four days in detention after the school day and was given extra homework to complete. As for transportation, I had quite a distance to walk. My parents were working people and they certainly could not take time off from work to transport me home.

So the escapade began to escalate - detention, extra homework, embarrassment, and the burden of how to get home. The shame of detention was almost unbearable - there was nothing "cool" about the snickers and pointing fingers that I experienced. I learned the lesson of responsibility for my own actions.

Travis Bowker, in his April 20 letter, suggests the issue of responsibility falls on the parents and that somehow parents being hit in the pocketbook for the truancy of their children would make the children more responsible. But I'm not certain "responsibility" is what that child would be taught by the angry parent.

Louise Gaines, Las Vegas