Thank you for your response. I hope you read my reply with the respect with which it is intended.

Take the kid to the principal’s office, state your case and let the principal deal with it.

That had been done. In the 30 days the child had been in school (he had transferred in) he had been sent to the principal’s office over 30 times. It is clear to see that sending him to the principal’s office was not working or having any kind of effect.

At that age a kid’s understanding of peer pressure is pretty limited, ,,,,

Yet the “peer pressure” is what finally got through to the kid.

….. but removing him from the class with one or more trips to the principal’s office is something even a two-year old understands.

Not this child. Once again, the child was averaging over a trip to the principal’s office a day. In fact, when teacher brought the kids together in a last ditch attempt to control her classroom, the child had just returned from being sent to the principal’s office. Within 20 minutes of returning from the office, the kid was disrupting the class again to the point where kids could not complete their assignments and the teacher could not teach.

The plan of “send the child to the principal’s office” had not worked in the past, did not work that day, and there is no indication that it would have worked in the future.

Plus if the errant behavior continues it becomes the principal’s responsibility to resolve it to a solution.

You would think so, but that didn’t happen here. Apparently the school district had a policy of not having a child stay in the principal’s office more than half a day. So once the kid got to the half a day mark, he was sent back to the classroom. The teacher had met with the mother of the child. The mother, the teacher and the principal had met to discuss the child’s behavior. Nothing was working and yet the teacher still had 15 other kids to worry about.

The teacher tried to fix a “kid” problem with an “adult” solution, it had FAIL written all over it from the beginning.

I understand that is your feeling, but the fact of the matter is that after going through everything, the teacher was still left with the misbehaving child.

The only thing that did work was what the teacher tried as a last resort. It may seem like a “FAIL,” but in fact was a “SUCCEED.”

That being said, and now knowing that the teacher had tried your suggestion more times than either you or I would have had the patience for, plus knowing that your solution had not worked in the least, I ask again, “what would you have the teacher do?”

Here’s an answer from someone who was raised by a teacher, married to a teacher and helped raise a teacher.

Take the kid to the principal’s office, state your case and let the principal deal with it. That’s why they get the big bucks. At that age a kid’s understanding of peer pressure is pretty limited, but removing him from the class with one or more trips to the principal’s office is something even a two-year old understands. Plus if the errant behavior continues it becomes the principal’s responsibility to resolve it to a solution. The teacher tried to fix a “kid” problem with an “adult” solution, it had FAIL written all over it from the beginning.

That would be one thing if that had happened. It didn’t. The class was asked to tell the kid how his actions affected them if they wanted to. No one was forced to say anything.

Tough shit!

Right! Because we all know it is about this one kid. It is not about the other kids. They have no rights in this. Heck, let’s just ask that they come to school and create chaos like this one kid was doing. That work for you?

What is amazing to me is that we always criticize teachers for not caring about their students and classrooms and when a teacher gets thrust into a set of circumstances where no one is helping here and nothing is working with the kid, we castigate her for finding a working solution.

If the kids his own age want to say something, then that’s their decision.

Which is exactly what happened.

You obviously disagree with what the teacher did. So I ask you the same thing that I have asked others: What do you think the teacher should have done?

The only thing that worked was what she did and she got the shaft for it.

What specifically should she have done?

I understand that a lot of people are worried about lawsuits. I am worried about waste of money. The people in charge are supposed to make decisions. If we take away their ability to make decisions, then we might as well follow them. Replace them with a bunch of magic eight-balls.

Bob

“Nothing the teacher said got through to him. Nothing his mother said got through to him. Nothing the principal said got through to him. ”

Tough shit! If the kids his own age want to say something, then that’s their decision.

Maybe if we hadn’t spent thirty years telling teachers to squash “fighting”, then the other kids wouldn’t have been scared to say something.

He wasn’t “voted off the island.” This was a child that had disrupted the class for over a month. Nothing the teacher said got through to him. Nothing his mother said got through to him. Nothing the principal said got through to him. The teacher thought that maybe the kid would listen to kids of his own age.

The “vote” was whether the kid should be sent back to the principal for that day. That’s all. That single half a day.

That is not “voting off the island.”

The funny thing is that when the kids told him how his disruption hurt and bothered him, he reacted in a different way. He listened. He hadn’t listened to anyone before but he heard what the other kids told him.

He came home and was distraught thinking the other kids didn’t like him when in fact they did like him, but they wanted him to stop making the classroom a living hell for them.

The mother focused on how her son reacted rather than seeing that what the teacher had done was effective. The kid could have come back to school and all would have gone merrily forward. Instead, the parent made the teacher the focus of a witch hunt rather than focusing on her son’s actions and her lack of accountability.

The other parents in the school stood by the teacher. She was bright, energetic and loved by every kid and family that came through her class.

She is gone now. She left teaching.

So because one teacher didn’t have the support of a parent and a system, hundreds if not thousands of kids lost a person who was great teacher.

Oh, and just so you know, the kid couldn’t be put in a special needs class because he hadn’t been diagnosed with anything at the time of the incident.

As far as charging the kid with the nerf gun and the spitwad shooter, it is an object lesson to the kids that the school system is out to harm children. All the teachers, cops, and administrators involved should forever be banned from working with children, or approaching within 1000 yards of a child.

I hope my kids never do something like that.

Should be: Poor baby. Scared for life. How dare a teacher show him how his actions affect others and have consequences. What a terrible lesson to teach a child.