Hi everyone,
I have had a really hard time recently. I was hit and kicked at my teaching job, by a very angry year one student. It seems insignificant, doesn’t it? But I have now been off work for over eight weeks. It turns out that your subconscious as a lot of control over how you heal. Logically, that makes sense but my logical brain wants to control the situation and say “it was no big deal” and move on. But I can’t. That makes me feel guilty about taking time off and about not being at work doing my job and about the fact that I am sure it is not all from this one incident -it can’t be can it? But I guess what makes me think in all this is, whether it is a result of this one incident (well, set of incidents) or whether it is the result of over 23 years in the teaching profession. What is happening to teachers? To the education system? To parenting? To children that they are so angry?
I know we have been through a global pandemic and socialisation has been limited and for children who were in their formative years during this time there are likely to be consequences to their development. But it isn’t only in the last few years. When I started teaching back in the last century, I had a child, hiding at the back of the class, making a cutting weapon, by taking the blade out of his sharpener and then sticky taping it to a toy hockey stick. Then I had a rock thrown at my head by a student in my first year out. I have had chairs thrown at me and parents come into my classroom in front of students and swear at me and threaten me for letting a child have a shower at school and a clean change of clothes because he hadn’t showered in days and the other kids were teasing him and refusing to sit with him because he smelled.
There is so much commentary about these kinds of issues and any teacher who has taught in a variety of schools will have similar stories. When I taught in the UK, I taught in a classroom with an alarm button near the door so security could be called if a violent parent or student fight erupted.
I can not fix all of these things, but I really am concerned by the response by adults to these incidents. Students lashing out shows fear, anger, frustration and no strategic and acceptable way to deal with that. They are children and so we need support them with sorting through the emotions and build ways to deal with that. No question about that and in truth I am 100% in favour of deal with the incident and then starting fresh with a new plan. But what I am struggling with is there being no consequence. If my two year old hit or kicked me, they would get a time out, or some other age appropriate consequence because I need them to know that we do not deal with our emotions by hurting others, and that it hurts. What has made them emotional and lash out is valid and important but how we deal with our emotions is a key to how we function in the world. Ignoring the behaviour or placating the child but not having a consequence is dangerous. At what age do we say “now there is a consequence?” It feels to me like those stories I hear on social media about parents who do not teach their children to cook or clean and then send them out in the world to be adults without ever having done their job of raising an adult.
How do we move forward in the current education environment? How do we create a safe and secure place for learning when people, young and old struggle to have the important and meaningful conversations??