“So how are your kids liking their new school?” my daughter’s fourth-grade teacher asked me last week.
“Things are going pretty well overall,” I replied, “except for some bullying. My son had a problem yesterday in gym class. There’s a kid who has been bothering and hurting a number of other students, actually, and it seems to happen a lot in gym for whatever reason.”
“Ah, that’s too bad,” he sympathized. My daughter loves the fact that her teacher is a man. I have noticed that the school has a higher ratio of male to female teachers than other public elementary schools with which I’m familiar. “Often I don’t even realize kids are having problems until they build up the confidence to come talk to me about it.” One student, he told me, was getting shoved in line but the teacher didn’t see it happen. As it turned out, the child had been moved from a different school because of bullying problems he experienced there. He had been uncertain what to do, enduring it again at a place that was ostensibly an improvement.
“Yeah,” I continued. “The kids aren’t sure how and when to approach the teacher, and they don’t want to embarrass themselves. My son’s okay now, but there’s a concern about this one kid.”
I didn’t share much detail, but there was a girl who got punched in the face multiple times just after my son’s hair was pulled and he was punched repeatedly in the leg. I don’t really get it, because the gym teacher seemed not to notice until well after a small group had formed around my son and was trying to egg him on, saying, “Fight back!”
Talking about it later, after school, my son said he knows that fighting in response is not a workable solution. One classmate had told him it’s the only way to scare a bully and keep him off your back, and prevent yourself from getting hurt. My son’s rationale is that fighting back both gets you hurt and gets you suspended. I couldn’t overemphasize with him how pleased I was with his reasoning and his choice. The fact that he could stand there in gym class getting punched in the leg by a known, repeat-offending classmate, and make the logical choice not to fight back, gave me great confidence in his capacity to determine right from wrong in a situation like that.
But it didn’t give me any confidence about the way situations are handled in the gymnasium.
A staffer at the school encouraged me to talk to the school administration, to stand up for my kid and attempt to ensure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. Being new to the school, and this being the very beginning of the school year, I’m more than a little uncertain about how to proceed. But the advice was sound and so I approached the school office. I repeated a line I had tried out in my head a few times: “I want to talk to someone about what happened to my son in gym class yesterday.”
The woman at the office desk expressed sympathy and said, “Is he okay?” with a mild sorrowful look. I interpreted this as kindness and smiled and said, “Yes,” and she dialed up a school administrator, who I got to see right away. That was satisfying. I didn’t have to explain myself beyond my initial sentence.
The administrator was also kind and sympathetic to me. As we spoke, the school’s guidance counselor arrived for a meeting, so I was introduced to him as well, and I was told that the troubled student in question is a “high profile” student in terms of having difficulty, but was not necessarily on the social-worker radar until recently.
That’s interesting, but mostly I was concerned with the degree of supervision in gym class, I explained. I did very little explaining. The assumption was that the administrator knew why I was there, and my visit was taken quite seriously. I said that it was odd to me that things escalated in class to the point where a small group gathered to egg on a fight. This should not be happening in an organized classroom, even if it is physical education, which might seem to allow for more chaos.
My children’s stories about gym class at their Springfield public elementary school sometimes went like this: So-and-so was behaving badly, so we had to sit on the floor for class and we weren’t allowed outside. This year in Hartford, the tales about gym class are somewhat more disheartening: no one was listening and everyone was talking, so the teacher yelled. A day earlier, my daughter reported to me that one teacher went and got a hockey stick and slammed it against the wall, making a loud crack, in order to gain the attention of two classes’ worth of kids in the gym at the time. She said that when he went to get the stick, other students were murmuring excitedly, “Is he going to spank us?”
My son told me that after his hair-pulling and leg-punching experience, which took place when students were supposed to be doing exercises on their “floor spots,” the child busy doing the injuring was still in class. It was at the end of class, when a girl was collecting the floor spots, that she got punched—repeatedly—in the face, requiring security guards to show up and an ice pack and whatnot.
I understand the occasional injury during recess. Kids falling and scraping their knees can be rather common. Sometimes a stray elbow flies into someone’s face and necessitates a visit to the nurse. Heads bang together and even blood can flow, and it’s all accidental. It’s part of life, and part of being a kid.
But when there’s supposed to be an organized activity, and an adult in charge, and kids are in a position to receive bodily injury from a fellow student who has anger issues and can’t seem to direct himself during times of physical confusion, or whatever his problem is, then something has to change. This isn’t the first complaint I’ve heard about this one student, but I’ve been perplexed as to the root cause: is this student out of the ordinary for this school? When he constantly curses at my son and gives him the middle finger, is this normal?
The administrator assured me that the incident last week is not normal for the school. I’ve been wondering if I’m just out of touch with how third-graders behave these days, and that I was too sheltered in my Springfield environment.
Meanwhile, a neighbor informed me last week that my formerly-stray cat has apparently been hunting in the woods near the Hartford Seminary, retrieving her freshly-killed, small rodents and depositing them on various neighbors’ doorsteps. I had not previously had a chance to meet this neighbor, so this was an awkward introduction; actually, it was no introduction at all, as we did not exchange names. I apologized and was glad that the seminary did not yet follow through on contacting animal control officials as the neighbor said was bound to happen before long. Her words to me were, “We didn’t have this problem before your cats came.” So much for trying to take in a stray and rehabilitate its wild ways. I wanted to joke with the neighbor, “Hey, at least it’s not the four squirrels a week she was killing at our old place!” I restrained myself from attempting to make light of the situation, bottling up my usual good humor for a stern expression instead.
I sat my children down and explained that we had a few options, none of them terribly appealing; it may be that our cat just can’t deal with city life (not here, anyway), and she should be somewhere in the country with a family that has a large, rodent-infested barn and she can kill to her heart’s delight. We’re not the type of family that wants to keep a cat like this indoors, but that’s the required course of action for the time being, lest I bring the wrath of my new neighbors down upon us, which I’d like to avoid. It is a health hazard, as my neighbor pointed out, especially because of the young children she said were living in at least one of the homes, and it’s a pesky annoyance for sure that only a pet-owner ought to be expected to handle. Plan A: get a bell for her to wear on her neck. Plan B: find a new home for the friendly, spayed calico who loves children.
Bells on necks aren’t appropriate for third-graders hunting for quarry, however; they require a different and yet-to-be-determined remedy to keep everyone safe and in one piece.
I plan to follow up to see how things are progressing. It seems that something may need to shift in gym class, and the administrator plans to discuss the situation with the relevant teachers. I am uncertain how assertively to pursue a conference of any combination of people, but I appreciate and am open to the advice and suggestions of others.
Part of my challenge in this situation is to balance various aspects of my parenting philosophy, which includes both a desire to expose my children to hardship so they learn lessons, adapt and acquire wisdom at their own pace; and also to ensure the constant supervision and care I believe children require, ideally speaking. Advocating for my child is one of the best ways I can set an example for him so he will also advocate for himself, but it’s also true that I am not aware of the best course of action for the administrators and teachers.
What is the role of a parent under the circumstances? To make sure things are getting addressed? To remind administration that someone cares and is making note of progress? To assist in problem-solving in some way?
While the schools in Springfield have their problems, and are obviously dealing with concentrated poverty making for a range of challenges, my own children were well-tended and generally happy in their school, tested well, and were encouraged to be creative in addition to an adherence to quite strict standards and expectations about behavior. Never in my experience at our former school would hair-pulling, punching, kicking and the like be tolerated in even the slightest way.
My sense about our new school is not that such behavior is tolerated, so much (I was told that our violent incident is very abnormal), but that there is not necessarily a groundwork laid that helps students understand why it’s not tolerated and what such behavior means, both when kids succeed and when they fail. The staff, to my inexperienced eyes, appears in some ways to be without the resources or the language to communicate the expectations, which is why there is sometimes a resort to yelling. Raising voices was undesirable at our Springfield school; teachers instead created a culture where they raised a hand, palm flat, to indicate the need for silence, and the expectation was that every other student would shut his or her mouth and raise the hand as well, until all were quiet. This was so effective that I began doing this at home sometimes, because my children were trained to respond so immediately: shut the mouth, raise the hand. This stands in stark contrast to the yelling, which I have always taken as a sign that an adult does not feel in control (for example in a domestic setting, where I am all too familiar with yelling).
The Springfield school we attended employs an excellent Responsive Classroom model that helps to lay the groundwork for expectations. The basic ideas are: take care of yourself, take care of the things around you, and take care of the people around you. Teachers spend time at the beginning of each school year helping the classroom draft the rules they’ll follow for the entire year, essentially coaching the students to come up with these same three rules themselves.
When students later show signs of misbehavior, the teachers can then point them back to the rules and remind them what they agreed to at the beginning of the year.
Far from horrific, I found such standards inspiring and reassuring, and it positively impacted how I parented at home.
“So how are your kids liking their new school?” my daughter’s fourth-grade teacher asked me last week.
“Things are going pretty well overall,” I replied, “except for some bullying. My son had a problem yesterday in gym class. There’s a kid who has been bothering and hurting a number of other students, actually, and it seems to happen a lot in gym for whatever reason.”
“Ah, that’s too bad,” he sympathized. My daughter loves the fact that her teacher is a man. I have noticed that the school has a higher ratio of male to female teachers than other public elementary schools with which I’m familiar. “Often I don’t even realize kids are having problems until they build up the confidence to come talk to me about it.” One student, he told me, was getting shoved in line but the teacher didn’t see it happen. As it turned out, the child had been moved from a different school because of bullying problems he experienced there. He had been uncertain what to do, enduring it again at a place that was ostensibly an improvement.
“Yeah,” I continued. “The kids aren’t sure how and when to approach the teacher, and they don’t want to embarrass themselves. My son’s okay now, but there’s a concern about this one kid.”
I didn’t share much detail, but there was a girl who got punched in the face multiple times just after my son’s hair was pulled and he was punched repeatedly in the leg. I don’t really get it, because the gym teacher seemed not to notice until well after a small group had formed around my son and was trying to egg him on, saying, “Fight back!”
Talking about it later, after school, my son said he knows that fighting in response is not a workable solution. One classmate had told him it’s the only way to scare a bully and keep him off your back, and prevent yourself from getting hurt. My son’s rationale is that fighting back both gets you hurt and gets you suspended. I couldn’t overemphasize with him how pleased I was with his reasoning and his choice. The fact that he could stand there in gym class getting punched in the leg by a known, repeat-offending classmate, and make the logical choice not to fight back, gave me great confidence in his capacity to determine right from wrong in a situation like that.
But it didn’t give me any confidence about the way situations are handled in the gymnasium.
A staffer at the school encouraged me to talk to the school administration, to stand up for my kid and attempt to ensure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. Being new to the school, and this being the very beginning of the school year, I’m more than a little uncertain about how to proceed. But the advice was sound and so I approached the school office. I repeated a line I had tried out in my head a few times: “I want to talk to someone about what happened to my son in gym class yesterday.”
The woman at the office desk expressed sympathy and said, “Is he okay?” with a mild sorrowful look. I interpreted this as kindness and smiled and said, “Yes,” and she dialed up a school administrator, who I got to see right away. That was satisfying. I didn’t have to explain myself beyond my initial sentence.
The administrator was also kind and sympathetic to me. As we spoke, the school’s guidance counselor arrived for a meeting, so I was introduced to him as well, and I was told that the troubled student in question is a “high profile” student in terms of having difficulty, but was not necessarily on the social-worker radar until recently.
That’s interesting, but mostly I was concerned with the degree of supervision in gym class, I explained. I did very little explaining. The assumption was that the administrator knew why I was there, and my visit was taken quite seriously. I said that it was odd to me that things escalated in class to the point where a small group gathered to egg on a fight. This should not be happening in an organized classroom, even if it is physical education, which might seem to allow for more chaos.
My children’s stories about gym class at their Springfield public elementary school sometimes went like this: So-and-so was behaving badly, so we had to sit on the floor for class and we weren’t allowed outside. This year in Hartford, the tales about gym class are somewhat more disheartening: no one was listening and everyone was talking, so the teacher yelled. A day earlier, my daughter reported to me that one teacher went and got a hockey stick and slammed it against the wall, making a loud crack, in order to gain the attention of two classes’ worth of kids in the gym at the time. She said that when he went to get the stick, other students were murmuring excitedly, “Is he going to spank us?”
My son told me that after his hair-pulling and leg-punching experience, which took place when students were supposed to be doing exercises on their “floor spots,” the child busy doing the injuring was still in class. It was at the end of class, when a girl was collecting the floor spots, that she got punched—repeatedly—in the face, requiring security guards to show up and an ice pack and whatnot.
I understand the occasional injury during recess. Kids falling and scraping their knees can be rather common. Sometimes a stray elbow flies into someone’s face and necessitates a visit to the nurse. Heads bang together and even blood can flow, and it’s all accidental. It’s part of life, and part of being a kid.
But when there’s supposed to be an organized activity, and an adult in charge, and kids are in a position to receive bodily injury from a fellow student who has anger issues and can’t seem to direct himself during times of physical confusion, or whatever his problem is, then something has to change. This isn’t the first complaint I’ve heard about this one student, but I’ve been perplexed as to the root cause: is this student out of the ordinary for this school? When he constantly curses at my son and gives him the middle finger, is this normal?
The administrator assured me that the incident last week is not normal for the school. I’ve been wondering if I’m just out of touch with how third-graders behave these days, and that I was too sheltered in my Springfield environment.
Meanwhile, a neighbor informed me last week that my formerly-stray cat has apparently been hunting in the woods near the Hartford Seminary, retrieving her freshly-killed, small rodents and depositing them on various neighbors’ doorsteps. I had not previously had a chance to meet this neighbor, so this was an awkward introduction; actually, it was no introduction at all, as we did not exchange names. I apologized and was glad that the seminary did not yet follow through on contacting animal control officials as the neighbor said was bound to happen before long. Her words to me were, “We didn’t have this problem before your cats came.” So much for trying to take in a stray and rehabilitate its wild ways. I wanted to joke with the neighbor, “Hey, at least it’s not the four squirrels a week she was killing at our old place!” I restrained myself from attempting to make light of the situation, bottling up my usual good humor for a stern expression instead.
I sat my children down and explained that we had a few options, none of them terribly appealing; it may be that our cat just can’t deal with city life (not here, anyway), and she should be somewhere in the country with a family that has a large, rodent-infested barn and she can kill to her heart’s delight. We’re not the type of family that wants to keep a cat like this indoors, but that’s the required course of action for the time being, lest I bring the wrath of my new neighbors down upon us, which I’d like to avoid. It is a health hazard, as my neighbor pointed out, especially because of the young children she said were living in at least one of the homes, and it’s a pesky annoyance for sure that only a pet-owner ought to be expected to handle. Plan A: get a bell for her to wear on her neck. Plan B: find a new home for the friendly, spayed calico who loves children.
Bells on necks aren’t appropriate for third-graders hunting for quarry, however; they require a different and yet-to-be-determined remedy to keep everyone safe and in one piece.
I plan to follow up to see how things are progressing. It seems that something may need to shift in gym class, and the administrator plans to discuss the situation with the relevant teachers. I am uncertain how assertively to pursue a conference of any combination of people, but I appreciate and am open to the advice and suggestions of others.
Part of my challenge in this situation is to balance various aspects of my parenting philosophy, which includes both a desire to expose my children to hardship so they learn lessons, adapt and acquire wisdom at their own pace; and also to ensure the constant supervision and care I believe children require, ideally speaking. Advocating for my child is one of the best ways I can set an example for him so he will also advocate for himself, but it’s also true that I am not aware of the best course of action for the administrators and teachers.
What is the role of a parent under the circumstances? To make sure things are getting addressed? To remind administration that someone cares and is making note of progress? To assist in problem-solving in some way?
While the schools in Springfield have their problems, and are obviously dealing with concentrated poverty making for a range of challenges, my own children were well-tended and generally happy in their school, tested well, and were encouraged to be creative in addition to an adherence to quite strict standards and expectations about behavior. Never in my experience at our former school would hair-pulling, punching, kicking and the like be tolerated in even the slightest way.
My sense about our new school is not that such behavior is tolerated, so much (I was told that our violent incident is very abnormal), but that there is not necessarily a groundwork laid that helps students understand why it’s not tolerated and what such behavior means, both when kids succeed and when they fail. The staff, to my inexperienced eyes, appears in some ways to be without the resources or the language to communicate the expectations, which is why there is sometimes a resort to yelling. Raising voices was undesirable at our Springfield school; teachers instead created a culture where they raised a hand, palm flat, to indicate the need for silence, and the expectation was that every other student would shut his or her mouth and raise the hand as well, until all were quiet. This was so effective that I began doing this at home sometimes, because my children were trained to respond so immediately: shut the mouth, raise the hand. This stands in stark contrast to the yelling, which I have always taken as a sign that an adult does not feel in control (for example in a domestic setting, where I am all too familiar with yelling).
The Springfield school we attended employs an excellent Responsive Classroom model that helps to lay the groundwork for expectations. The basic ideas are: take care of yourself, take care of the things around you, and take care of the people around you. Teachers spend time at the beginning of each school year helping the classroom draft the rules they’ll follow for the entire year, essentially coaching the students to come up with these same three rules themselves.
When students later show signs of misbehavior, the teachers can then point them back to the rules and remind them what they agreed to at the beginning of the year.
Far from horrific, I found such standards inspiring and reassuring, and it positively impacted how I parented at home.