I posted the following as a direct response to the post, but I also want to make a separate thread because I have a bad feeling about this.
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Sorry if I am misreading this, but a few things here make me wonder.
We’ve been having a number of “trick questions” here recently. These are questions that purport to be about a simple topic, but on a closer reading there is a “ringer”, a small fact slipped in on the side that changes the whole playing field.
When someone here answers the trick question carefully and with due concern for all the possibilities and the dangers of long-distance diagnosis, the topic disappears into a black hole and is never seen again.
This pattern is very different from the real questions, which tend to start a long back and forth discussion exploring the situation and the possibilities.
The present question somehow seems too neat, too pat, as if we’re being set up for something.
I’m wondering why these “trick questions” — is it a troll setting people up to make mistakes so he can browbeat them, is it a new style of troll trying to find an avenue to discredit people professionally or to start a lawsuit, or what?
I notice that nobody else here jumped in to answer this either; I let it sit overnight to see how others felt. Perhaps others feel something is missing here too.
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Anyhow if you are real, sorry for being suspicious.
*IF* this message is just the facts and all the facts, there is no question; in the situation as presented, you simply make a legal complaint through authorities. First to whoever employs the coach, then their superintendent, then the local police, and/or child protection agency, then if no action the state child protection agency. Such a complaint needs to be made in writing, dated, with you keeping a copy, and with the name of your lawyer if you have one.
One of the thing that raises eyebrows about this whole story is the “get the paddle” — I don’t know if there is anywhere in North America any more where public schools keep a paddle for use on students. And other students would not be familiar with paddling either.
If there are vital facts missing — oh, for example, this is a private religious school where the authorities believe in corporal punishment and you have signed a contract agreeing to that; or, for example, if this is a training program for kids who have been in trouble and they are trying a “scared straight” approach — well, that changes the picture and it would be a question of whether this is the right place for your son.
There is also the possibility that this is true and the coach is just a bit behind the learning curve and has a limited sense of humour; it is possible that he knows that paddling is no longer done but that he still thinks it is something to joke about, and he thought it was all a big practical joke. Of course even if somehow this is all true, he would *claim* it was a joke.