My son had a 6th grade teacher who used a similar punishment. Any kind of talking or disruptive behavior in class meant the loss of recess and that meant having to sit quietly on a low wall while everybody else played for half an hour. You can bet they were teased by the “free” children. Fair punishment? Maybe, except that it turns out that the “active” students are the ones who never get to play during the day, so, if the point is to make restless students even more restless then the punishment is working. It also turned out that mostly boys were punished in this way because, you know, they cause all the problems.
So, in 6th grade, my son probably got to have recess maybe once a week. We are talking about an active 12 year old who is not allowed to do anything, even for a minute, other than sit still for up to 7 consecutive hours each day. Seems unnecessarily cruel to me.
One day, as he sat watching the other kids play and endured their taunts my son decided he had had enough so he just stood up and walked off the school grounds and went home. The teacher noticed when another student told her after they got inside, at which point all hell broke loose as you can imagine. The principal gave the us (my wife and me) a stern lecture on how this was not acceptable and I passed the lecture along to the evildoer - but in my heart I cheered for the little boy who stood up for what was right.
Any kind of punishment that encourages or allows the public ridicule of other students as part of the punishment is inappropriate and cowardly on the part of school.
When did this all change? I graduated high school in 02 and even though I wasn’t regularly in classrooms alone with teachers, I’m sure it happened. So what do you do if a student needs to retake a test or get extra help and no one’s around? Grab some other students/teachers to make it respectable?
It was SOP when I was working in public schools in '98.
If I needed to give a student one-on-one help or administer a test, I would often do it in the library or some other public part of the school.
A lot of times you’re helping more than one kid at a time, though, in which case you can keep it in the classroom, but being all alone with a kid in a closed room with no one else around? Never.
Maybe others are missing the point. Standing outside is not in lieu of doing the homework, it’s in addition to. The kid still needs to turn it in with an automatic reduced grade for being late. The 20 minutes is not a meant to be productive, it’s meant to be an incentive not to repeat the behavior.
No recess is a good punishment. Sometime you had to work on the homework and other times you didn’t depending on what the teachers could manage. Any kid that was caught teasing the punished kid had to sit out recess also. When the parent won’t be sure that the kid does the homework the only discipline is at school. This sounds like the typical ma that complains the kid is failing and it’s all the teachers out to get their kid regardless of the fact the kid doesn’t do their homework for school.
I’m trying to remember my punishments at that age but I can’t. Mostly because I was a dork and always did my homework. It affected your grades in older years but when I was in elementary school we didn’t really get letter grades.
My son has regular time alone with his (male) teacher. He gets extra math tutoring. No one thinks it’s weird or accuses the teacher of doing anything questionable.
Obviously this varies, but at my school it’s no big deal.
Avoiding being alone with kids is done for the teachers’ protection, not because anyone would think it was weird or that anything questionable was occurring, but false accusations can happen, and it’s a mess when they do.
This is how our “time out” worked in elementary school in the 80’s. There was an actual line painted near the building and you had to stand there and not speak during your time out. And yeah, you got put there if you made fun of the kids already there. If you still couldn’t get your shit together while behind the line, you had to face the wall.
Now, I don’t remember if this was simply a recess punishment area (that is, for transgressions committed during recess) or if teachers could use it for things like missed homework…but it was there and it worked just fine.
I disagree. Your son probably picked up on your true feelings in this matter. He certainly didn’t connect his behavior to the punishment since he saw fit to just wander off. Nobody in my class would have done that when I went to school. Parents would have gone ballistic. My parents would have grounded me for a month without blinking an eye.
I was fidgety when I was 12 and was expected to behave in class. If I was punished at school it was after classes and it wasn’t for 20 minutes. The lectures alone were more than 20 minutes. If I was punished at school I was then punished at home again for the same reason. School was taken seriously and if I complained about a little peer pressure my parents would have immediately pointed out that the solution was not to interrupt class. All your son has learned is that he doesn’t believe he can control himself and therefore the world is unfair.
I don’t see where this punishment encourages ridicule by the school. As for allowing it, any form of punishment is subject to ridicule by the other kids. That’s life and you can’t stop that. If anything, the peer pressure to perform on some level of competency is a good thing.
This is my take on it. The kid could’ve been using that time doing the homework assignment. 20 minutes seems an awfully short time for recess, though. I seem to recall having had at least 45 minutes, not including PE.
Wow. From what I wrote you managed to get that we don’t take school seriously and that my son doesn’t connect his behavior with the punishment given? Let me be more clear. My son was punished for leaving the school and it never happened again. That doesn’t make what the teacher was doing correct. I was and am still stunned by the idea that fidgeting and/or talking should be punished by taking away the right to move and talk and that others are allowed to watch and taunt. Do we need stocks in the school?
For those of you who think draconian measures are appropriate, what is the appropriate punishment for a teacher who fails to do her job properly? One who punishes only some students (boys) and who leaves the actual punishment to the other students? I would say that teacher has failed at her job. If someone who just talks out of turn deserves the various punishments mentioned here then what would be comparable for someone who fails at the job we pay them for? Public flogging?
There’s a time and a place for talking, fidgeting, and running amok in school. In fact there’s quite a bit of time devoted to those activities between recesses/breaks, PE class, and lunch.
Teachers aren’t allowed to smack kids any more, withholding rewards is really their only other option.
Homework is to be done on the student’s time, not on the teacher’s. As much as I loved recess, it paled to being out of school entirely. I would have cheerfully traded away most of my recess time in favor of keeping homework away from my house. If the kid lets their homework pile up there should be consequences.
You equate having to stand still for 20 minutes with draconian punishment? What, were they tied up and dressed in rags while other students threw rotten fruit at them? No matter how they are punished they will be made fun of by other kids for it and, as punishments go, this is pretty mild.
It never occured to you that if he is having trouble in school due to lots of extra energy to wake him up half an hour earlier so he could run around before school started or something? Or to explain that if he doesn’t want to sit on the wall/stand on the line at recess he had better learn to control his impulses? Or even to call a meeting with the teacher and explain that you don’t approve of this punishment and see if some other means of behavioral correction could be used instead?
