demerits: do they work?

demerits: what's the point? are they just peices of paper that tell us when we've been naughty? are they 'just a tool that the school uses to help us recognize wrong behavior paterns'? i doubt it. demerits are nothing. they do nothing. their purpose is close to nothing, except give a reason to expell people. never once has a demerit done anything to help me. when i was in junior high, i was afraid of them. i feared them because my parents got mad at me when i got them. this didn't help because it didn't address any problem. all it does is make parents overly concerned for their kids behavior. or, parents just don't care. and almost all of the kids don't care. yeah, there was a time when i wanted to get the zero demerit award, but that was along time ago. getting demerits doesn't do anything anymore because the students realize that they are pointless. granted, after a certian number of demerits, a student can no longer participate in sports or stuff like that, but so what? the kids don't care about the demerits enough to change their behavior; they just want to get back to playing sports. demerits have become something to laugh at in our school. one kid in particiular tries to collect all of the demerit slips he can get his hands on to put up in his locker. other kids use the yellow copy to make paper airplanes. is my point getting across? demertis don't work. they don't help. the majority of the time, kids just get mad when they get demerits, which creates other problems. many times, the things that demerits are given for are really dumb. people don't care about getting demerits any more because so many are given out. after first semester, mr grass held up a small box that was overflowing with demerit slips that had been given to students. he encouraged us t get less demerits. well, here is somehting to think about: how about not giving so many demerits and start working on helping students develope personal convictions and standards for themselves. if that happened, the demerit thing wouldn't be such a problem anymore.