On Monday, I was observing in a fourth-grade classroom as part of my teacher education program; I’ll be doing my student teaching there in spring. It was my first day.
The teacher was working with a reading group while a second group did seat-work, and one kid (I’ll call him Emmett) was going crazy, shouting across the room, looking up dirty words in the dictionary loudly, and generally being a pest. After calling him down several times, finally the teacher got up and called his home to find out what was going on with him.
Turns out that the kid is on medication for some sort of impulse-control disorder, and his folks had run out of meds several days earlier. The teacher asked the parent to rush the medication over to the school as soon as she could get some. Meanwhile, I offered to sit with Emmett and help him one-on-one with his work so he could focus on it.
This worked beautifully. He took a strong shine to me, wanted me to sit with him at lunch, introduced me to his friends, the whole deal. He even showed me in his desk where he had several text-messaging toys (they looked sort of like PSPs) which, he informed me, he’d bought from the school’s book fair.
Only, you see, about half an hour earlier I’d heard a kid ask the teacher, “If someone steals from the book fair, will they get caught?” The teacher told them that yes, last year someone had stolen and had gotten suspended for it; the kid gasped with that look of gleeful shock that kids get, and started to say something before the teacher told him she didn’t want to hear it.
2+2=
So during recess I told the teacher what I’d seen in Emmett’s desk, told her I wasn’t sure if it meant anything, but that it raised some flags with me. She investigated, and I just found out that, sure enough, Emmett had stolen them, and is being suspended, and may have charges pressed against him.
And the thing is, it took me more than an hour to decide to tell the teacher what I’d seen. I’d seen Emmett snarl at a girl for tattling, and he so clearly thought of me as his new friend, and I’d been able to get him to do some work that he otherwise would never have gotten done, and was I really supposed to rat him out?
Of course I was. I’m an adult, and there’s no way it would have done Emmett any good to have let him get away with theft. He needs to learn, while the consequences are still temporary, that this is a very, very bad idea, and that he needs to learn to control his impulses even if it’s harder for him than for the rest of us.
But I still felt like a treacherous dirty snitch.
I can’t wait to be a teacher!
Daniel
This is almost word for word what my co-op teacher told me. I think there are a lot of people who want book fairs to go back to selling, y’know, books. My impression, though, is that it’s the glurgy crap that makes the serious dough, even if it sometimes gets stolen. The problem seems to me to be the intense temptation it creates for kids to steal.