Toward the end of each semester, I accept late work for credit with a small late fee. For teenagers, this is practice in adulting. I always get a flurry of resubmitted assignments because, as the semester’s horizon approaches, students realize they need to recoup as many points as possible before the dreaded final exam.
Once I had a student who — rather than turning in a photo of his handwritten work — uploaded a beautifully composed image of a cheeseburger (with all the fixins’) in a paper-lined red plastic basket. In the lower-right quadrant of the picture, a pile of glistening, thick-cut fries caught a cascade of cheddar cheese drooling out from under the hamburger bun lid.
This is what teachers call a “child, please” moment.
As I like to remind parents, I think of the gradebook in high school as a conversation. Part of how students learn about adulting is through close encounters with the natural and logical consequences of their choices, which often reveal incompletely formed judgments.
In the Google Classroom teacher module, I entered a zero for this assignment along with the private comment, “This is a photo of a cheeseburger. The assignment asked for a photo of your handwritten work.”
When the student arrived in class the next day, he asked to talk to me in the hallway. With some agitation, he told me how mortified he was that he had accidentally uploaded the wrong photo to Google Classroom. He went on and on about how he hadn’t intended to upload that photo, hadn’t caught his mistake, and he would upload the correct image of his handwritten work immediately.
I paused to let this apology sink in and settle. Then I furrowed my brow.
“But … you uploaded this same photo for 14 of your missing assignments. Are you telling me you made this same uploading error … 14 different times?”
His cheeks flushed red. He knew he’d been caught.
Giving excuses and indulging in magical thinking is one thing when you do it as a 15-year-old high school student.
It’s another thing entirely when you get caught as a 40-year-old multimillionaire candidate running a self-funded campaign for federal office.
Things get even nuttier when people are reminded that you served as the chief of staff in the United States Congress for the most famous and influential progressive House of Representatives member in the country.
This is what teachers call a “child, please” moment.
I was reminded of this level of teenage excuse-making and fibbing when I nearly snorted my coffee at 5:30 in the morning, reading The Standard’s story on Saikat Chakrabarti and his bumpy residency problem in his run for Nancy Pelosi’s House seat.
It’s a problem only insofar as The Standard seems to have found and confronted him with public records showing that his primary legal residence is actually located in Gaithersburg, Md. — 3,000 miles from San Francisco.
The problem was only made worse through the quotes he gave in his interview about that pesky property deed from January 2018, whose Exemption Affidavit he signed, “swear[ing] or affirm[ing] under the penalty of perjury that the property herein conveyed is intended to be used as my/our principal residence by actually occupying the residence for at least 7 of the next 12 months,” followed by his printed name and physical signature.
As Chakrabarti insisted to the reporter, he “never lived there.”
Oops.
Chakrabarti then proceeded to throw others under the bus, assuring the reporter that “he had trusted his attorneys and real-estate people and had simply signed the forms put in front of him.”
Seriously?
Child, please.
Welcome to the rough waters of San Francisco politics.
On my drive to school later, the playlist knowingly shuffled out the voices of Nanci Griffith and Guy Clark singing Woody Guthrie’s iconic Dust Bowl anthem to California, Do-Re-Mi, out of my car speakers:
California is a Garden of Eden,
It’s a paradise to live in or see.
But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot.
If you ain’t got that do-re-mi.
Chakrabarti shouldn’t blame himself — although to be accurate, he doesn’t appear to be that kind of politician. He’s just the latest progressive who’s fallen prey to a locally familiar election-related mania that I’ve decided to name “San Francisco Personal Residency Delirium,” or “SFPRD” (6th edition editors for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — call me):
… a disturbance in attention and awareness of personal residency status and environment that tends to fluctuate, and is accompanied by at least one other cognitive disturbance, including reduced orientation to the environment, with unclear evidence of an underlying organic cause, though character and epistemological disorders are suspected.
Other cognitive changes and diagnostic criteria include memory deficits, disorientation, frequent Waze scrubbing on the patient’s mobile phone, angry outbursts triggered by metal detectors, a tendency to hoard cash in freezers, and other disturbances not better explained by preexisting neurocognitive or character disorders.
There is some evidence that the disturbance is caused by the direct physiological consequences of desiring to obtain or hold elective office, or by other compound etiologies.
Chakrabarti hopes to ride his SFPRD all the way to Congress, where — conveniently enough — he owns a primary residence. He’s proudly running to become San Francisco’s first-ever U.S. Representative from Gaithersburg, Md.
But as The Standard also reports, Chakrabarti is now also claiming he intended that house to serve as the primary residence … for his parents … who, it turns out, live in New Jersey.
Do his parents need to be tested for PRD?