"Humiliation is Not a Classroom Management Technique!"

 

 

 My youngest son is no angel, not in any way, shape, or form. He had been getting in  "trouble" since preschool. I would go to pick him up and he would wave and grin from the timeout area. He didn't know any better, he was just one of those kids that was always up and about. Back then, if you were that kid, you ended up in timeout.

 When he was in the second grade, I had a conference with his teacher. She couldn't wait for me to sit down as she proclaimed, "He needs to be on medication! You need to put him on medication!" (We won't go into the fact that legally a teacher cannot tell a parent to put their child on medication.) She then proceeded to show me what she did because he could not " behave."

She took his chair, put it facing the blackboard in the front of the room, and then if that wasn't enough, she rolled the hanging chart behind him "so he wouldn't distract the other kids." I saw red! What a humiliating experience for my child! She seemed quite pleased with herself. Needless to say, I contacted the principal immediately and had my child removed from her class.He was placed in a classroom where the teachers practiced strategies that allowed them to deal with kids like my son.

 Last Sunday, I was talking to a parent who has a son in one of the new charter schools in my state. She informed me that her son had to wear the "yellow shirt." The yellow shirt states, "Do not talk to me, I am in isolation." My jaw dropped, and I told her, "Get your child out of that school immediately. She responded, "Oh, it's ok, the shirt is normal."

 Normal? What's normal about having anyone's child walk around with a shirt saying "Don't talk to me"? Using Color coded student ID's according to your test scores?  Showing the class a student's work and mocking them  in front of the class? What's normal about a teacher humiliating a child in the hope that they will behave better? How could this possibly work?  The natural reaction to humiliation is to either shut down, or to become aggressive. The child no longer trusts the teacher and it creates an intolerable situation in the classroom. It can also lead to bullying. If the teacher is allowed to bully a student, why shouldn't the other students?

 I know they "take us there" sometimes. I was one of those teachers who had to stop using sarcasm as a classroom management technique, especially when I had a difficult group of kids. But now, I always think of how I would feel in that situation.  I think about how my sons would feel.

You know the adage, "Treat others the way you want to be treated!"  Now that's a good classroom management technique!