Mike Maddock Discipline is alive and well in the public school system. The only problem is it has become more complex than the nation’s defunct color–coded terror alert system.

My kids have been coming home from school for weeks talking about how this kid was on yellow all day, and that kid pulled a blue card yesterday. For some time, I wasn’t quite sure if they were discussing the behavior habits of their classmates or a game of Twister. All I knew was that green was good. I wasn’t quite sure why, but apparently if they stayed on green all week it didn’t mean the terror alert was minimal, but that they would get something out of the treat box on Friday.

After eaves dropping on yet another afternoon conversation about the various colors of the day, I finally decided to get expert advice on this honor code rainbow. I went directly to an expert source…my kids. Fortunately for me, they are still too young to realize the more the old man knows about their lives away from home, the worse life can be for them.

My youngest daughter, who is in kindergarten, earnestly began my education. “Green is the best! It means you’ve been good all day! Red is the worst. It means you go to the principal’s office, and nobody ever sees you again.”

My second grade daughter then interjected. “Yellow is sort of a bad day, and if you get a blue card, they send a note home to your parents.”

“What does the note say?” I asked.

Both my daughters looked at me as if I had just asked if ice cream was a tasty treat then they said to me simultaneously, “It says you pulled a blue card, Silly!”

I could only imagine that note coming home to me as a novice of the color code system. I wouldn’t know whether to send my kid to her room without any supper or congratulate her for winning a game of Uno.

I continued my education, “How do you know when you’ve pulled these various cards?”

Again, my kindergartener went first. “There’s a chart on the wall with all our names on the different colored cards. If we’re being bad, my teacher tells us to go to the chart and pull out a yellow card.”

Apparently it works a little different in second grade.

“We have cards attached to the side of our desk. Our teacher just walks by and changes our colors.”

I then confirmed what I had learned, “So green leads to treats. Yellow just means you’re aggravating the teacher. Blue gets me involved, and red means you get kicked out of class, sent to the office then disappear from the face of the earth. And your color status is monitored through a system of charts and desk attachments. Is that correct?”

My kids looked at me like they’d just explained the Pythagorean theorem and said, “You got it!”

I don’t remember discipline being so complicated when I was in elementary school. If we were bad, the teacher yelled at us. And if we were really bad, we went to the principal’s office where we were threatened with various wooden objects. If we were good, then we didn’t get an earful from the teacher. We didn’t get treats, but we didn’t have to worry about any wooden objects either. It was that simple.

Wooden objects are a thing of the past, but so is the color–coded terror alert system. Maybe there is a reason for that.