I second this.
[QUOTE=Soft Touch]
I don’t have any idea how you think this ought to be handled (or why you think it’s your business), but let’s spare a thought for what that kid and his parents must be going through.
[/QUOTE]
And this.
Don’t start that shit in here, or someone will be getting ripped a new asshole. 
That sounded like me, years ago.
Except the bullying was done and encouraged by the teacher. Never got over it. From personal experience, it’s bad for him in the long run. The grade’s not the biggest issue here, actually. The lack of confidence and ever-lingering shame are.
As for whether he should be accomdated - I am frankly surprised that he was. I just chose not to speak unless I really had to.
I don’t think it’s a good idea in the long run, it kind of reinforce the “There’s something really wrong with me and I deserve the special attention, be it good or bad” thinking he might have.
No, this kid needs to be put inside a plastic bubble and not touched until he is ready.
Seriously, if he is being bullied and his defense mechanism is to STOP SPEAKING why is everyone around him supporting that?
If everyone else gives an oral presentation, then he needs to.
If the reason he doesnt speak if because one or two kids in the class tease him, well then all 3 of them need a talking.
How does letting this kid do this help ANYONE?
Failing him or forcing him to talk won’t solve anything but the accomodating of his behavior should be seen as a temporary thing and not a solution. If the school and parents are using these solutions for him as a permanent answer they are doing him a great disservice. 3 years would simply not be acceptable.
You need to address the problem not avoid it.
I dont have any idea on your thoughts on the OP’s actions, and personally i think your comments are mundane and pointless, so why bother sharing…oh wait.
In the movie version, one day he will spontaneously break into booming, mellifluent song, melting the hearts and activating the tear ducts of fellow students and teachers alike. Don’t let his frumpy, matronly appearance fool you.
For sure. In a case I recall from some years back the kid was getting counseling and psychiatric help, as well as a sort of adjunctive speech therapy. The student didn’t need speech intervention per se (she could speak perfectly well under certain conidtions), but the therapist tried to help her feel more comfortable speaking in groups of peers. This was most effective, especially when the behavior was reinforced concretely in some way.
These are anxious kids, to be sure, but there is also a certain counterproductive effect some of them get from all the attention and efforts made by others to get them to speak.
He has just seen too many episodes of law and order and is practicing for the Fifth grade.
Why the hell do you care what sort of accommodation he’s getting? That’s between his parents and the teacher and as long as your son’s education is not suffering as a result, then why don’t you mind your own business and let the professionals deal with the situation?
We’re friends with a family whose 10-year-old daughter talks very little. She’ll speak privately to my daughter (who is the same age), but I’ve personally never heard her utter a single word, even in situations (like a Passover Seder) where everyone at the table is expected to talk. The family is working with therapists, and the parents are thrilled that the girl has decided that my daughter is someone she can trust, but in general when we’re with them we ignore it and try to treat her as normally as possible without making a big deal out of her refusal to speak.
Do you actually think that threatening the kid with academic failure and public ridicule will help him get over his problem? :rolleyes: More likely it will just making things worse, increasing the likelihood that a temporary childhood condition will turn into a permanent adult disability.
Having had a variant of this as a child (and this thread is the first time I ever knew it was a recognized disorder and that there was help for it), all those here who are recommending confrontation, failing grades or outright mockery/shame should know that is not the way to go.
I had the opposite: I would talk at school (although I was still shy), but I didn’t talk at home–to my mother and only very reluctantly to my father. Let’s just say the dysfunctionality in my childhood home and their subsequent prolonged and nasty divorce didn’t help matters.
It took me years to break my silence. Perhaps if those who have no experience with it can think of it as a type of phobia, that might help. To just be able to say hello, how are you? is huge.
I hope this kid is getting help. If he’s 3 years into this, he needs it. Life will not wait for him, and life is cruel to those who are different.
I can’t believe that the school doesn’t voice their policies against bullying or at least let the kid know that its ok. By letting him do this, they portray to him that it is his only solution to the problem. Our state has laws against bullying, and our community schools enforce **0% ** tolerance policies.
If one day the school decides the kid should speak up, I suppose it’s only fair that they do something about the bullying. Of course, the bullying could be in the past, or is already non-existent, and the kid is just being defensive.
The school used to have a wimpy principal who couldn’t figure out how to deal with the bullying that went on. Since the beginning of this year we have a better principal who is very strict about not allowing bullying to happen.
But it hasn’t helped the kid to start speaking.
At risk of a hijack, bullying will always exist in school. It may be forced out of view by vigilent adults at the school, but it won’t go away. Social aggression is a fact of life. Heck, look around these parts.
It’s much more effective, in my opinion, to help teach kids how to defend themselves psychologically from teasing and bullying.
And kids with elective mutism are in a special category whom I do not mean to include here.
When my daughter was 6, girls in her 1st grade class started bullying a friend of hers. The school’s solution? Take the girl who was bullied (the victim) and put her in a special group of OTHER bullied kids. They stayed IN at noon recess (which is purgatory when you’re 6) and had a “special friends caring circle”. I wish I were making this up. I remember Daughter telling me that she hoped every day that she wouldn’t have to join “the special friends group”. She didn’t. But I still think that was an asinine solution to a chronic problem. Take kids who have already been socially isolated and make them more so. Why not just call it the Loser Lunch and be done with it? I don’t know what that school does now. I hope something more systemic and enlightened.
Rigs, that’s the most screwed up thing I’ve heard in a long time.
Slightly off-topic, but relevant:
Ages ago my mother volunteered for a special needs school in the afternoons.
One of the kids, a boy about 7 or so, was deaf, but quite bright and seemed to learn well.
One day the boy was in a bad mood and did something to one of the other students.
My mother, having raised 3 boys, just let out her usual yelp and said very loudly, “Stop that!”
The boy had his back to my mother but jumped at her voice, as it was the first time he had ever heard her wrath. (Boy, did we kids at home know that voice well!)
Mom realized the kid was not deaf - and he had heard what she said.
Sure enough, the jig was up. Within a month or so, the kid was out of the special needs school and back into regular school. All I remember from that time is my mother saying the school psychologist told her it was rare for such long periods, but some kids were able to “fake” being deaf so they could ignore everyone around them.
We moved to where we live now about two years ago, when my daughter was 3. We left behind everything she had known and shortly after my husband left too on a extended trip, just as my daughter started school.
She went from a quiet, shy kid to selective mutism.
Since new kids being shy is not uncommon, when she started at her new school the teachers accommodate my daughter for a while. After 3 months the teacher sat with us and told us about the ongoing problem. Our kid did not talk to anyone at school, even though it was obvious to anyone that she was a bright child. My daughter would yap incessantly at home, but not with anyone else. Not even our friends, whom she’d known all her life.
The school did the right thing. They set up a meeting with the school counselor (a psychologist) and she then spent some hours in the classroom observing my daughter. The counselor then met with us and the teachers and gave us some ideas on how to deal with the situation. None included antagonizing her, or prying the words out of my kid.
Eventually it passed. My child is healthy, mentally and physically, so it was just a problem with the circumstances at the time. I am very, very grateful to the teachers and counselor who treated her with respect and protected her from other kids teasing her (that didn’t happen much though, but even a little is bad with kids who have this type of problems). It’s as if the teachers and counselor knew what they were doing.
Today my kid is a chatterbox who would make you wish you were deaf within an hour of meeting her. Exactly like most other 4 year-olds.
I would suggest that maybe the teacher and parents know better what’s going on. It would take some monumentally bad parents and astonishingly unprofessional teachers to just let this go on for years without working on it. Something you and your son might not be informed about, so there: a pinch of noneofourbusiness and a cup of youdon’tknow.
I thought the OP was just being speculative. Like a “what if you were in this situation?” or “what would you do if it was your kid?” kind of thing and not an actual exercise that the OP would be meddling with in RL. So, geez, no need to pounce.