The Doodle

[This post will contain some very crude humor. Please feel free to pass it over if you don’t care for that. You’ve been warned, and I’m placing the content beneath the fold so you don’t accidentally see it. If you read this post, you are deliberately “opting in.”]

Last week my friend at work told me a funny story. His son had just received a detention. I knew he wouldn't tell me if it wasn't something good. "Go on." I said. He explained. His son had gotten a detention for drawing a penis on another kid's hand. This was at a pretty strict Catholic high school.

So I had all these questions. There was some sort of formal notification to the parents. Did it try to use technical language? That would give the dad a wonderful opportunity to tease the principal (or whoever the official disciplinarian is). Puts on best dad deadpan face: "I'm sorry, 'phallus'? Is that a race of bad guys from one of their kid shows?" (Mom elbows dad.) "What? Can someone explain this to me?" (Dad shakes head in mock confusion over each in a long list of euphemisms.)

Did my friend's son draw it free-hand, so to speak? Or did he, how to say this, use the method my four-year-old uses to draw a turkey? This inevitably led to jokes about the doodle snaking all the way up the kid's arm.

What kind of teacher actually calls this stuff out? Why confront a student about such a silly thing? Shouldn't the default be to look the other way? But thinking about that one a little longer, I realized that maybe it wasn't an isolated incident. Perhaps it was a repeat offense. Maybe this same teacher had simply shrugged off previous dicks with an "Alright, boys. Knock it off." and this was simply a dick too far. This last doodle was simply the tip of the iceberg (or perhaps the base of the iceberg). The dick that broke the camels back. The match in the powder barrel. (Pick your favorite expression.)

Was there any plausible deniability about what it was? "No, it's an elephant with two ears and a trunk." (Incredulous look from teacher.) "It's spraying water onto some flowers." I've written before about the false positives/false negatives problem. You can't just say every doodle that might be a penis is a penis. That's a recipe for filling the world with dicks, because everything has some non-zero probability of being one. But it can't just be "dicks, dicks, dicks, the world over." There has to be some threshold, beneath which the student has plausible deniability and a "safe space" to operate in. A threshold beyond which the student is at risk. Maybe the teacher was actually quite fair in overlooking borderline cases, but this was perhaps a stone-cold no-doubter. Did they have some identification criteria? A scoring mechanism? A twenty-item checklist with terms like "shrooming tip" and "significant veinage"? "I'm sorry," the teachers says, "as you can see from the checklist, which we all reviewed at the beginning of the school year (flashback to teacher pointing to a Powerpoint projection), these ball-hairs put you just over the line. I'm going to have to write this one up." Do the children have, in effect, a brown paper bag for dick drawings?

Did my friend have to pretend that this wasn't funny? The answer to that is apparently "No." I told him he had to confront his son all serious. "Son. I heard what you did, and I have just one question for you. Did you draw the sack?" He confirmed later that he razzed his son good. Something to the tune of, "Did you draw it free-hand, or did you lay out raw material and trace it? And how did the young lady react?"

This was fun. I'm glad to get that...off my chest. Probably good I put this one...beneath the fold. Writing this was a real gag. If you've stuck around this far and you're still willing to read my more serious posts, bless you.