Heebie, this is Texas, right? I mean .... maybe things have changed tremendously, but when I was in school there, and everyone I knew who went to school in TX (late 70s), we all experienced what I would call "authoritarian" schooling. I'm not surprised at all that a Texas teacher would react badly to any sort of backtalk from a student, just as I wouldn't be surprised at fathers who expect their children as "sir".

My kid has some trouble with the concept of backtalk. So did I as a kid. It's not really a well-defined concept. My best effort at defining it is "speech directed at an authority figure, that the authority figure doesn't want to hear." As such, it isn't always a bad thing; whether it's bad really depends on the content, the situation, and how reasonable or unreasonable the authority figure is being.

AIMHMB, I got into an argument in 3d grade, in Ft. Worth, with my teacher over the dumbest thing, where she was just plain wrong. Was the Plymouth colony founded, as she said, before the Jamestown colony? She wasn't making some kind of sophisticated case about changes to Jamestown in the early years: no, she was saying the every book in print that said that 1607 was before 1620 was just wrong.

She had a really hard time letting go. and dammit, I wasn't going to give in either.

I bet there was talk of backtalk.

And a useful lesson in bankrupt authoritarianism.

Kids really suck at getting to the point quickly.

Anyway, there's a big space between "listen to my side" and "we'll talk until you agree with me because you obviously didn't hear right if you don't," but many people don't really see the difference.

CharleyCarp: Ha! Fort Worth! Lotta teachers in Weatherford with not a clue about actual facts, either. Some deluded by the bible, some by single-neuron disease. I learned pretty early that it didn't pay to contradict them; just get on with it and the period would be over soon enough, you could move on to your next class.

I mean, they were almost all unendurable dumbasses anyway.

My kid has issues with this and a definite tendency to keep talking until he gets the answer he wants (AKA, never accepting that he's wrong). Sometimes he's even explicit about it - "I'm going to keep asking you for an answer until I get one I like!". And I do worry that we're a bit too tolerant at home, leading to more conflict at school where the teacher running a whole classroom doesn't have the time for that much verbal jujitsu.

There really does need to be a way to cut kids off from exhaustively trying to "well actually" any situation into oblivion. OTOH, "backtalk" all too easily becomes shorthand for the shittiest authoritarian instincts of grownups. Some of my most vivid childhood memories were of being told not to "answer back" by assholes who were clearly on some bullshit and knew it. It's a conundrum.

"Backtalk" in school is like "team" in professional life: Even though the concepts are useful, you should be immediately suspicious of anyone who uses that language.

When a teacher complains about backtalk, they are complaining about being challenged. Your boss, when talking about being a team player, is really saying, "You need to do more for me."

When I was in 3d grade, we had the same teacher all day, except for PE and music. I certainly lost a lot of respect for her over this, because it would have been so easy for her to just say she'd misspoken or misremembered.

We drove through Weatherford a lot, on the way to Possum Kingdom (yes, you Yankees, that's what it's called) but my family never stopped there. I've mentioned before that we went to that Mary Martin park in 4th grade or so. Mostly, though, when I think of Weatherford, I think about how the little covers over the clocks on the courthouse look like ears.

CharleyCarp: My understand is the entire town shifted southward. They built I-20 to run south of town in the late 70s, and since then everything's been built down there; the north side of town was already fading. But yeah, the town center was kinda quaint, back when it was bustling.

See, also, "sass."

Maybe somewhere in the archives I have a post about deciding whether to raise sweet, obedient children, or slightly jerky children who would advocate for themselves. We tolerate a lot of arguing, and we have kids who are sweet and obedient at school, and maddening at home, which I guess is...the worst outcome?

But yeah, you can't raise a Jew in Texas, as both the Jews and Texans will tell you.

If you would just LISTEN to my side, you'd see why you can.

I'd be thrilled to get backtalk from the kid in the form of an actual argument or dispute over facts. What actually happens is usually that she just repeats herself more loudly. Or if I ask her something like "why are you wearing two pairs of pants?", at best I get "because I want to." Getting her in a snit is more likely.

Apart from stuff like that I feel like I should be more tolerant of backtalk in general, but in the specifics there's very often a good reason to put my/our foot down. Of course, this is somewhat self-serving.

I'd rarely use the word "backtalk" itself, though. Seems like a regionalism or generational thing.

Looking back, I would say that I was raised to believe that any amount of backtalk was justified if an important moral principle was at stake and that no amount of backtalk was justified for other reasons, and that "this seems modestly unfair", "I am really unhappy" or "I think it would not make things harder if we did it the way I prefer" were not moral principles.

I'm sure my parents would say that I talked back too much, but now that my friends have kids I can say that the level of backtalk or whatever that is typically permitted is about 100x what would have gotten me sent to my room followed by a dose of silent treatment from my mother.

My parents definitely did take our preferences into account when they made their decisions but we were told directly that the parents made the decisions and the kids accepted them. "Your parents are your parents; they're not your friends" was how my father put it.

I was a tractable, bookish kid and my parents weren't monsters, so there really wasn't much backchat in our house or at school. At college I had enough concern with important moral principles (even some that turned out to be, hey, actually important) that I made myself pretty unpopular.

"cultural Jewishness is more willing to tolerate the annoying brashness of children"

Flashbacks to lots of my parents explaining to me that Hearing Culture expects children to be seen and not heard and doesn't celebrate assertive children the way that Deaf Culture does, and what this meant about my behavior when visiting hearing churches.

I think of "backtalk" more as "reflexive whining about having to do things." (but I wanted to go to Tashi Station....) than "arguing a position." (we really need some power converters!)

We did have a discussion recently where the Calabat and I were disagreeing about something, and after a little back and forth, he looked at me, and said very reasonably, "how about this? we try it for a couple of weeks, and if it doesn't work, we can do it your way" and he got his way because I was ded from hearing my own voice come out of my son's mouth and shiv was laughing too hard to back me up.

Nobody listens, rarely any point to talking. Saying what you want gives the other guy an advantage, you give away your plans when you do that.

3: So this is a New England thing too. One of my friends is from DC and married a guy from the South Shore. Her father-in- law would get into disagreements about which was older. She asked me at dinner what my answer was. I looked puzzled and said: "Jamestown". She looked at me somewhat triumphant, and I said "but it didn't last." At which point, her husband smiled. My friend said that it must be a New England thing. Basically we are taught that Ply ought is the oldest, existing English settlement.

Jamestown, Born of Frustration.

My personal way of identifying "backtalk" is that the authority figure is entitled to decide when the discussion is over, and "backtalk" is an attempt to continue the conversation past when the authority figure has implicitly or explicitly called a halt to it. As an authority figure (of sorts) I was also pretty willing to listen to argument for a long time, and was willing to make the end of the conversation explicit rather than implicit (and explicitly discuss with my kids that some people communicated that sort of thing implicitly), so this didn't turn into a problem at home, and I don't think it was a problem at school. Newt made some enemies by being capable of communicating that his interlocutor remained entirely wrong without saying anything out of line, but that's not backtalk, it's eyebrows.

I think you get bad cultural clashes where the home environment allows for and rewards a child pushing past implicit reluctance to keep talking about something, and the outside world expects obedience to that kind of implicit reluctance.

16: Huh. So deaf people talk about hearing people as if there's one thing called "hearing culture" that we're all part of? That's surprising and interesting to think about.

it didn't last

Um . . .

I guess that's referring to "In mid-1610, the survivors abandoned Jamestown, though they returned after meeting a resupply convoy in the James River"? A pretty short lacuna.

Pretty sure they had reconstituted before Plymouth, given what happened in 1619.

I thought the place was abandoned in the 18th century and that's what the "didn't last" means.

Oh, I didn't scroll down enough in my Wikipedia skim.

I was just going off of memory of what I had been taught, because I didn't remember the details. My point is that this was widely taught in the 80's and 90's.

Let me add end 28: to "widely taught in New England."

26 Moving a little bit inland isn't 'didn't last.'

The Roanoke colony didn't last.

They moved it inland, changed the name to Colonial Williamsburg, and so forgot about the old place that it took archeological digs to find it a century later.

The New Englanders are just trying to distract attention from the failure of the Popham colony in Maine, which was founded a few months after Jamestown and abandoned the next year.

I must have mentioned before that family lore of the too good to check sort holds that the first Flippanter in the Malickesque New World arrived in Virginia in 1636 as an indentured servant--and forthwith ran out on that obligation to head north.

this very website is dedicated to fruitless arguing for sport

No it's not.

Two additional thoughts before I relinquish control of the thread to colonial America:

1. Both kids' teachers seem to have a pretty good handle on the backtalk, but report that things get difficult in the lunchroom, when the teachers aren't around and the lunch monitors and cafeteria staff are in charge. Likewise at the afterschool program.

2. I'm interested in the intersection of race with the topic. For one, the school and teachers are mostly Hispanic, which may mitigate the Texas cliche, which is mostly a cliche about white people, but maybe not.

For two, I had a conversation with one of my oldest friends about our schooling experience in north Florida, and I said something about black teachers being extra strict. My friend - who is black - reprimanded me and said more or less, "Heebie, they were leveling the playing field. You were allowed to be disruptive in general as a white child, but the black children were not, and so the black children were not getting the time and energy from the teachers because you sucked up more than your fair share. So a strict black teacher is allowing the black kids to get their fair share of time and attention."

She said it more tactfully and nicely than that, but I've been turning it over in my head since then.

Luckily, I don't think xelA has this problem. Obviously, he'll argue with his parents endlessly, and can be an obtuse, irritating little shit about it at times, too. Arguing about things he is being asked to do, I mean, like doing his homework or tidying his room. But he's fine with teachers and other authority figures, and this seems to be the norm with his peer group. He will express his opinion, but not to the extent that it's an issue.*

I guess one thing that I see as a big change since I was a kid is how kids interact with adults who aren't their parents in non-school settings. It's just a given, for example, that I would expect my friends' kids to backchat me, be cheeky and insulting towards me, or be (playfully) violent towards me. There's zero sense in which adults are people to be feared. They are fair game for any kind of teasing, or cheek, or mischief.

Every kid calls us by our first name, or by some nickname. I have a friend with a white beard who is near universally referred to as "Santa" by the kids--partly because it's also his nickname among the various Dads who drink with him in the pub--except for by one 5 year old, who calls him "Fat Santa" to his face.

I see this as a totally positive change. I like the fact that all of the kids call me "Matt" and are quite happy roasting me and giving me shit.

* I was the same, although I could be quite stubborn when the time came, especially when I was a teenager, because I knew when I was right. I did tell our deputy headmaster to "Fuck Off" when I was about 15. There were no consequences, though, as he knew I was in the right, and he knew that he'd been a dick, and totally deserved it. But mostly, I trod the right side of the line.

37: Our experience is similar w.r.t. adults and kid interaction. I'd put it down to the weirdness of being an academic in a smallish town in a relatively homogenous state where most non-university people have generations of family in the same area; close friends end up being a little closer to family because all of our families are out of state so they're the people who become emergency contacts, host holiday gatherings, playdates, etc. And of course none of us use titles with each other, and the titles we use regularly we don't use socially. When the kids are really little we wind up being called the reverse of patronymics (Pebblesmama, etc.) and then just to first names, sometimes with a title in front of the first name (Miss Cala) but it doesn't stick. But these friends are basically surrogate aunts and uncles at this point so I wasn't sure if it was a more common trend.

Just this morning, I had a five minute conversation with a woman I know only by her kid's name. She probably knows mine. I guess I could look it up in my email.

the reverse of patronymics

Teknonymy! More common cross-culturally than you might expect.

40: Cool! Not at all surprising to me that it's common (Mary mother of John, etc.) and it's nearly universal in preschool, where the kids know each others' names and which parent belongs to which child. It's very cute to be addressed that way directly ("Pebblesmama, did you see the drawing I made?)

Yeah. I like it too.

Abu in Arabic names means father of. I don't know if there's a maternal equivalent.

Huh, like Abba in yiddish.

or Hebrew? idk.

Aramaic, I think.

Don't talk back.

Ibn or Ben are just "son of".

Umm is the Arabic equivalent for mothers.

Uncle Son's rice.

Cousin's Rice?

The uncle walks into the office and says "I can't operate on my nephew, it's a grain of rice." HOW CAN THIS BE?

things get difficult in the lunchroom, when the teachers aren't around and the lunch monitors and cafeteria staff are in charge

It must have been 2nd grade or so when young Rory became livid about the lunch/recess monitors, who had made the entire class stand outside until everyone was quiet before the could go inside for lunch. But rather than talk back directly to the monitor, she wrote a rather thorough letter of protest to the principal regarding the grave injustice of collective punishment. The recess monitor got a talking to and Rory's class for an apology from the principal.

It will shock no one here that I had a high tolerance for backtalk from Rory. But she was an only child and generally pretty easy, and I was a relatively young mom. I can imagine that had I been older with more little monsters my energy for that would have written thin much more quickly.

Di!

45: Abba is Hebrew.

36.2: I don't have a firsthand sense of how this plays out with respect to race, but I would say that generally, when you've got an environment that's less authoritarian, or less mannerly, it does let the more aggressive kids suck up all the oxygen in the room. And if white (or male, or richer, or whatever) kids have learned that they can safely be more aggressive than the other kids, they'll get all the time and attention.

Of course, the problem is that when you have a more authoritarian environment, you're depending on the authority figure for fairness, and that doesn't work either.

this very website is dedicated to fruitless arguing for sport

Fruitless? If so, then why do we give new commenters a fruit basket?

when young Rory became livid about the lunch/recess monitors, who had made the entire class stand outside until everyone was quiet before the could go inside for lunch.

I just had a flashback to middle school. We all sat at assigned tables in the cafetorium. The rule was that everyone had to put their head down on the table until your table was called to go to the lunchline. The admin who did the calling was the kind of adult who swerved back and forth between being your super-fun pal and being too angry or going on power trips. So they would sometimes streeeeetch it out and make tables wait to go to the lunch line. There were like 20 tables, and so it might take most of the 30 minute lunch before some tables got to get up to get in line. Students who brought their lunch could surreptitiously eat with their heads still down on the table, if they were stealthy about it.

I remember the ridiculousness of wrenching your neck at crazy angles to see what was going on by the time most of the cafeteria was eating and going nuts and you were going on Minute 10 or whatever.

My impression of Black culture, which is mostly in church-y settings, is that there's a huge emphasis on being respectful to your elders and very very little tolerance for backtalk. With a lot of emphasis on titles of respect (sister, brother, elder, pastor, first lady, always with lastname). Presumably some of this is that older Black people have often been treated with disrespect and so value being respected, but another part of it is just that Black culture has a lot of overlap with southern culture (even for Black people in the north, due to the great migration still being relatively recent).

55: It's one of the very few words in the New Testament that was in the Jewish vernacular and not Greek.

58 is like a wedding reception.

With extra cricks for your guests' necks.

and was willing to make the end of the conversation explicit rather than implicit (and explicitly discuss with my kids that some people communicated that sort of thing implicitly)

I think this is the conversation I need to have with the kids.

Fruitless? If so, then why do we give new commenters a fruit basket?

Come for the fruit. Stay for the fruitlessness.

63: They're probably not old enough for the whole Ask/Guess thing (maybe Hawaii is but not the rest?), but it's related.

61, 62: Gathering ideas.

The only idea I ever liked was "open bar" but we didn't have to pay for it.

55 Swedish

67: My mom is paying for ours.

66: Yay! Congratulations to you both. Only note I have to offer is don't sweat the details and just enjoy the heck out of the party.

Oh, and what Moby said.

Thanks! Planning is going about as smoothly as could reasonably be expected under the circumstances. Hiring a wedding planner was definitely a good call.

67, 69: There's a winning "your mom" joke to be made here, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

I can put my finger on your mom.

a variation on lb here, the variation being a strong emphasis on learning how to have an interesting, engaging exchange of views on a scale sliding from serious discussion on matters concerning the family unit to making chit chat at a party bc same skills involved at different heat settings. lots of positive reinforcement for acknowledging the other person's point, volunteering compromises and/or solutiins, and the well delivered amusing observation/quip. definitely experienced the calabat move at young ages with all three kids & set about reinforcing it pronto pronto. youngest wrote a rip roaring letter to fr school admin re viciously misogynistic gym teacher, proudest moment ever. 💓💓💓 had no idea what he was up to until it was sent, was a well-argued& supported scorcher.

re: shit-talking from kids

This is a true story.

About 2 weeks ago I was in the park after school. Usually on a Friday there's (literally) a hundred or so kids from my son's school and their parents all hanging out. The kids run wild as there's always a lot of vaguely familiar adults to watch out for them.

I was standing talking to another dad, when the younger sister of one of my son's friends came up to me accompanied by another little friend. She's 5. She started head butting my stomach and grinning. Clearly looking for some attention. Then she disappears off, and my friend and I continue chatting. She returns. Repeat.

"You have a soft tummy."

My friend is now quite amused.

"Yeah."

Goes away. Comes back.

"Why do you have such a fat tummy?"

So I said, "Well, I probably eat too much."

This seemed to make sense to her and she walked off with her friend.

5 minutes later she came back. Prodded me hard in the stomach.

"Eat less!"

When I told her mother a few minutes later she was both mortified and highly amused.

My kids have a punch-in-my-stomach routine where they chant "It's the fat fat mommy with the fat fat tummy! Squish, squish, POP!" The punches land on the words "fat" and "Pop" and it's more of a jelly-roll-push on each "squish".

"'Rust' armorer's attorney suggests sabotage may have led to fatal on-set shooting". I guess flooding the zone with shit is one option available to an assiduous defender when they don't have anything else to go on.

(He also used the word "live round" - was there a discovery of an actual bullet being used, as opposed to the Hollywood meaning of "live round"?)

This was the link.

was there a discovery of an actual bullet being used, as opposed to the Hollywood meaning of "live round"?

Yes. There was an actual bullet that went through the cinematographer and lodged in the director. The LA Times had a good rundown of what's known about what happened that day; it's paywalled on their site but other papers picked it up.

LATimes paywall can be gotten through by just using the "reader view."

They were doing a closeup where you can see the bullet in the gun, so the gun was supposed to have a real bullet but with no powder in it, but it was actually a real bullet with powder in it.

same skills involved at different heat settings

My friend's daughter was socially awkward and they put her in a class for socially awkward girls (probably neuro-atypical, but no diagnosis required). They very explicitly taught the girls rules for conversation. "You can give a fact, then you must ask two questions before giving another fact." I've always loved that they were so practical and quantified about it.

75, 76:

HAH! I was recently at the river beach with my kid and his sweet friend E and E's parents, also very sweet. They were drawing the river and I was sitting next to E. E showed me his drawing and tried to apologize for making me so big. (I think he was actually trying to explain that it was a combo of me being fat and also in the foreground, so relatively bigger.)

E: Sorry to make you so big.

E's Mom: E! Be polite!

E (thinks for a second): Sorry to draw you like a person who eats too much and doesn't move around enough!

I cracked up because I could just hear those words coming out of E's mom's mouth as she tried to explain overweight to E. She was horrified and gave up, but I was amused throughout. Yep. That's how I am now. Besides, I just adore E.

77: Union sabotage is a good one, but I still prefer my proposed plot twist.

Speaking of neuro-atypical kids, my social worker friend uses that to describe Pokey and Rascal, specifically when I'm discussing the ways they get in trouble. This isn't actually about the backtalk per se, so much as their more ADHD things that prompt teachers to come to us and say, "What works at home? Because I have no idea what to do," as Rascal's teacher did earlier this year. That kind of thing prompts my friend to say, "Teachers in Texas schools aren't trained in developmental psychology for non-neurotypical kids like yours."

First off, it doesn't really matter whether someone includes them in that label or not, but I can't figure out whether or not I agree with it. Are we watering down the term by including kids like mine, or we widening the umbrella and visibility of who counts as non-neurotypical, or are we more definitely atypical than I realize because I'm used to the Geeblets? (and by extension, does that mean me?) At most I think we're in a gray area.

(Also Rascal's teacher has been really great and responsive - she's talked to the counselor to get ideas for him, and she's implementing suggestions that we've had. So he had a rocky first month, but she's squarely in the category of great teachers for being so open and welcoming to how to adapt to him, even though it wasn't intuitive off the bat for her.)

My preferred plot twist is that people were using real bullets for target practice, and the reason they hadn't gotten in trouble is because the ring leader was... Alec Baldwin.

I like "non-neurotypical" precisely because it's vague and inclusive and descriptive and not insulting. It's much better than "weird."

Guess what the kids just told me:

The girls bathroom at their school says "My pronouns are she/hers/they/them" in English and Spanish, and the boys says "My pronouns are he/his/they/them" in both. With rainbow backgrounds.

And no nipples on the rainbow?

87: I don't think it would be that hard for the other kids to make "non-neurotyptical" sound insulting.

I think adult activisty types standardly use non-neurotypical to cover autism and ADHD, so your kids with ADHD would be inside, but of course everything's a matter of degree.

Back on the OP, we heard a week or two ago that our fifth-grader and his friends all hate the computer program they're using in math class (ST Math), and so a couple of them had been circulating a "no more ST Math" petition around the class. All of us parents were kind of bemused and mildly impressed, and tried to encourage them to make a specific request instead of just a complaint, etc.

A couple days later the principal heard the kids talking about it on the playground and he was also very encouraging, asked to see what they had, and promised to talk to the teachers, the math specialist, and the district about it. It's really great to see him -- new to the school this year -- taking a positive attitude toward the kids early efforts at organizing and advocating for themselves, instead of viewing it as impertinence.

"You can give a fact, then you must ask two questions before giving another fact."

... Can you link to the coursework or class name? I'm only middle-aged, I can still learn.

It's three questions if your fact is "fish can't masturbate."

It seems insulting to me to be called neurotypical. Like saying someone is basic.

I generally see "neurodivergent" used as the complement to "neurotypical" (in the disability community) but it definitely includes ADHD.

I thought it was "neurodivergent" vs "normcore."

no Normcore is specifically when you LOOK like a neurotypical

The kid's lingo is confusing. I was thinking of "core" as your baseline traits.

88: If "they/them" is intended to be gender-neutral, how do they render it in Spanish?

I've seen references to the pronoun "elle" pronounced "ay-yay" (also apparently how ell@ and ellx are pronounced). The Real Academia had a web posting on it up for all of four days before a backlash or confusion or something made them take it down. I also would be curious to know how the Heebieville grade school handles it!