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Middle school bans all-black clothing, citing mental health concerns (www.kkco11news.com)

submitted 3 months ago by Emperor@feddit.uk to c/andfinally@feddit.uk

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A Texas middle school is banning students from wearing all-black clothing because school officials say it’s associated with mental health issues.

Students at Charles Middle School in El Paso, Texas, headed back to school Monday, days after a letter from Principal Nick DeSantis outlined the school’s new dress code policy. The letter says the school is eliminating all-black clothing because it is “associated with depression and mental health issues and/or criminality.”

Norma De La Rosa, the president of El Paso Teachers Association, explained in more detail why the policy is in place and what clothing is allowed. She says teachers see a sudden change in students going from dressing with color to all black when they are depressed or stressed.

...

Many parents and community members disagree with the policy, commenting online that clothing color doesn’t define a person’s mental state.

“The color of clothing has nothing to do with your ability to do anything or feel any emotion,” Alex Lucero said.

“Making students wear a different color isn’t going to magically make them a completely different person,” Alexis Contreras said.

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[–] xilliah@beehaw.org 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Think about this for a second:

Take all the stupid shit you've done and said in your life. For argument's sake let's say you are absolutely average in terms of stupidity. That means 50% of people are more stupid than you.

And now imagine that again, but with your capacity for noticing your own stupidity. Obviously there's stuff you've missed. 50% of people will have a lower capacity to notice their own stupidity.

I think it's safe to say that the distribution is a bell curve. That means 50% of people are sort of average. But 25% will be significantly below that and 10% of the total will be severely stupid.

Safe to say stupidity is a powerful force in this world.

Then we are not talking even yet about mental disorders. Iirc schizophrenia has an occurrence of roughly 2%, and so does psychopathy. Of course not all people with shizo are unable to manage it, and not all psychos are evil. But it's still a lot of people!

[–] dactylotheca@suppo.fi 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And before anyone barges in saying "that's not how averages work", first of all you mean the, uh, mean – both the mean and the median are averages.

Second, intelligence probably follows a distribution that's reasonably close to Gaussian (at least on a smaller scale) just like more or less literally all biological variables do. And I don't mean IQ, but the general idea that cognitive performance – however the hell you define it – is going to vary from person to person and it's going to approximately follow a Gaussian curve. The upshot of this is that the median is probably very close to the mean.

[–] xilliah@beehaw.org 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for expanding on that. Can you say something about the difference between a bell curve and a gaussian curve?

[–] dactylotheca@suppo.fi 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh there's no difference, "bell curve" is just a more colloquial term for a normal distribution. "Normal distribution", "Gaussian distribution / curve" and "bell curve" all mean the same thing.

Wouldn't be math if there wasn't 736 different names for the same thing 😆

[–] xilliah@beehaw.org 2 points 3 months ago

Oh sorry, I quick read over the first sentence and missed it. Long day yesterday!