100 Sup Ji's

There is a lamp in Noah's class that can get hot. I touched it myself and I suppose Noah was holding a paper next to it. And then supposedly he told one of his friends that he was doing this because hot things make paper catch fire and fire can burn. Since we are in a school it would burn the school. He came to this in a 5 year old frame of mind not thinking of consequences but just thinking of the science of it. By the way, the paper di not catch fire, and the teacher was not really concerned about that or that Noah was trying to burn the school. But things had to be explained to him and protocol had to be followed.
Which means that I got a call from the Vice Principal describing the situation second hand, which sounded much more grave and serious.
When I tried to explain things to Noah I felt I wasn't getting through to him. So we watched the Arthur episode about fires at school. But that didn't seem to get through to him either. I suddenly realized that he was too young to understand such concepts, and that honestly most adults do not really understand things. I suddenly realized that the true reason for thousands of years of continuous civilization was the Legalist approach. He doesn't even get the correlation between what he was doing and a fire at the school. To him one thing is a serious problem and the other is a science experiment.
So the only answer was you did this and the result is severe punishment.

Suddenly he was crying and begging for mercy. I allowed him to work off his punishments with 100 sup ji's which I counted off on a rosary while doing Hail Mary's and Our Father's (I do a simplified version of the Rosary Fr. Cullen had explained once in class saying of the more complicated version with the Apostle's creed, "You don't really need that.")

I think Noah did more than 80 Sup Ji's because at some point it was getting late and he did try.

When I talked to the teacher I realized the issue was not necessarily as dire. I brought up our concern that we would be doing Qing Ming this weekend (we are late, but we would rather do an enjoyable Qing Ming than be cold. Plus some of the old people say it can be done anytime and often go do this celebration whenever they visit China no matter what season. For us, it's just a tradition. After all, I didn't grow up doing this for either side of my family.)

The teacher said that burning money and real fire should be fine as long as it was explained that we took safety precautions etc.