This is a perfectly acceptable, if less than ideal, punishment. As noted elsewhere, making the kid stay inside and do the work would make more sense.
The objections about it cutting into the kid’s “play as exercise” time are ridiculous. It’s not going to harm the kid’s short or long term health to miss 15-30 minutes of activity one day.
As to the mother, everyone who has to deal with the entitled little twerp she’s creating should be able to egg her car without consequence.
…spoken like someone who doesn’t work in a public school. Classes have recess on a rotating basis, and recess itself should be flexible: some days we go right after lunch, some days at the end of the day, depending on what else is happening that day. The librarian doesn’t have an extra 30 minutes in her schedule to supervise this. Nobody does. Your proposal requires an extra person; the current punishment doesn’t. (Some teachers, in grade levels with assistants, manage this by having the assistant stay indoors. Sixth grade classrooms often have minimal time with instructional assistants, and they’re unlikely to want to waste this precious time by having the assistant supervise a small group).
Whoah, didja SEE those goalposts shift? First it was any job outside of the service or manufacturing sectors (massive sectors of the economy), then it was anywhere outside of a prison. [edit: I just noticed in the first example you were talking about structure, and in the second you were talking about punishment. Consider, though, that in the service/manufacturing sectors, the punishment for not following the rigid time structure is considerably harsher than 30 minutes of quiet eating–it can literally take the food off your table entirely.]
Yeah, actually, a lot of folks face tremendous structure in their work lives. Lemme rephrase that: a lot of adults who have already internalized time-management techniques and who have developed self-discipline have tremendous structure in their work lives.
People who lack self-control and discipline don’t last long in an office environment: they get invited to look for another job. But kids who lack self-control and discipline (read: most kids) are going to stay at school. There’s no firing kids from school, thank God. They stay there.
It’s our job as teachers to help them learn self-control and self-motivation. We work our asses off at it: I talk to kids about monitoring behavior, I read up on CBT and modify ideas from that for students, I create individual behavior plans, I provide them with short-term and long-term external rewards for good time management, I stop the class occasionally to point out how everyone is working well and ask people to notice how good it feels to have the class humming along like this, I discuss ad nauseum the deleterious effects of off-task behavior, and so on. A tremendous amount of my workday is devoted toward getting seven-year-olds to notice what they’re doing and evaluate whether it’ll fulfill their goals.
And one of the tools in my toolbox is external consequences. A kid might be having a crappy day at home, and I hate that for him, but if he’s rattling his pencil around in his desk like a steel drum while I’m explaining the phonics lesson, he’s clearly not accepted the importance of the relevant social norms, and if I don’t stress those norms to him, he’ll keep everyone from learning about the -mp consonant blend. Silent lunch will suck, and he’ll sit there hating it, and then hopefully, hopefully, next time when I say, “Eyes on me like LASER BEAMS DRILLING THROUGH MY HEAD!”, he’ll get those eyeballs up front and put that frakkin pencil down, because he knows that failing to do so isn’t worth it. And then maybe he’ll learn what synonyms are.
Well said. It’s ridiculous to hold up typical and effective punishments used on children and compare them to adult standards. Some people literally believe that children are simply miniature adults and should be treated exactly as such. Anyone who has worked with children to any significant degree knows that this is total nonsense. Children and adults are two totally different animals. Specific disciplinary techniques used on children have one essential goal: to force their little brains into a specific channel of development which results in more self-control and long-term thinking patterns.
In other words, they don’t need to understand why something is being done; they only need, for the moment, to make a connection between a behavior and a consequence, thereby discouraging that behavior in the future. They’ll connect the dots later.
Well, I’ll slightly disagree. It’s not that they don’t need to understand why something is being done, so much as that they’re often incapable of understanding it (this is often just a semantic quibble, I understand). I still try.
One of my greatest successes with a student who, on being punished, said, “I hate myself.” When I asked why, he said, “Because I always do the wrong thing.” So I bought him a tiny little journal and taught him to make a chart in it: when he did the right thing, he could put a smile in the smiles column, and when he did the wrong thing, he could put a frown in the frown column. At the end of the day, he’d see how he did. Over a week, he could set goals for himself. I made it extremely clear (and made it clear to his parents) that the journal was not to be used for any rewards or punishments, but was rather to use because he didn’t like himself when he did the wrong thing, and he wanted to learn to like himself by doing the right thing.
He went from multiple daily defiances down to zero defiances in about two weeks. It was remarkable. We eventually discontinued the journal, once he’d learned to monitor his behavior.
Would I do this with an adult employee? Absofreakinlutely not: it’d be insulting, it’d be treating them like a child. Would I do this again with another child? Of course.
Agreed 100%. I’m all for making an attempt to convey the “why”; often the abstract thinking just isn’t there yet.
Awesome story about the journal.
See http://www.naspeinfo.org/. NAPSE Position statement: Physical Activity Used as Punishment and/or Behavior Management- stating that administering or withdrawing physical activity as a form of punishment is an unsound education practice and the complete lack of support for such a practice makes it is legally indefensible from a civil liability standpoint.
This is also may be considered corporal punishment as it is imposing physical punishment. It is also likely to be categorized by a court as excessive and unreasonable punishment. The proper punishment for not finishing homeowrk or classwork is a bad grade.
The added component of humilating and ostracizing the boy by making him stand and face the wall is an even worse aggravating factor.
If you search the internet you will see lawsuits about this.
You may want to have an attorney send a letter to your sschool district’s school board and the Superintendent of your school about stopping this practice. You may also want to report this practice to CPS.
Oh, well if somebody, somewhere has filed a lawsuit over it, clearly it’s a terrible idea. :dubious:
Reported.
Reported for what? I mean, it’s a zombie thread but thats sort of allowed now.
Reported because you don’t like the content of the post?
My bad. I forgot zombie thread rules were relaxed.
If I remember correctly, not handing in homework in my day just meant you got a zero for that assignment. Do it enough times and you fail that subject.
Simple enough.
Obviously you’ve never seen the Brady Bunch, they had a whole episode about this. When Peter broke the vase, and the other kids owned up to it. So Mr & Mrs Brady, said that Peter should punish the other children. But Peter decided to let the other kids dictate their own punishments, all to typical hillarious results 
I kinda find it funny when parents here talk about “all the homework” kids get nowadays. In China, first graders have a couple of hours of homework per day and much more on the weekends. And it goes up from there.
Put me in the productive punishment camp. Kid should be doing homework in lieu of recess play, and probably should get extra homework on top of it. I’m not into the peer humiliation aspect.
I agree. We moved here to Utah from Philadelphia & you think your situation is ridiculous, when i found out what the assistant principal does at my daughters school i was furious… I enrolled her in a private school here in Provo… Now, this is a high school, not an elementary school, not a middle school… She is 15 years old & her English teacher has a 10 minute “quiet” study break at the end of class… She actually walks over to the chalkboard & draws a small circle on the board when she catches a student talking. Then, she sits back down in her seat, waits a minute, then announces the name of the student/students who were talking. She then asks them to stand, walk up to the front of the room, place themselves in front of the dot & stand there facing the board with their noses pressed right up to the center of the circle. She looks for any excuse she can to have as many students standing with their noses to the chalkboard… my daughter told me that when she was sent to stand, there were a total of 7 students lined up facing the board with their noses against it by the end of class… The bad part is, if they refuse, then they are given one week of detention… many of these kids including my daughter have soccer practice & many times cannot afford to stay after school in detention so they are put in a position where they feel forced to stand in this childish position… its humiliating for 14 and 15 year olds. ive never heard of such a thing in my life… i paid for the private school in advance and cannot afford to send her anywhere else now… to make it worse… Mrs Reynolds embarasses the students… She is a 70 year old woman about 6 ft tall & is an absolute nazi… i quiver when i see her… she makes these 15 year olds feel like they are 7 years old by reminding them every 60 seconds that they are to remain standing still with their noses pressed up against the board… i can’t imagine the embarassment… what do i do?
Roseanne, you may not realize but this thread is several years old.
What do you do? Tell your kid to stop talking in class.
Of course it’s acceptable. It’s punishment. It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to teach the kids who don’t do their homework a lesson.
If the stakes are high, they should take more care to behave properly in school so they can avoid ever having the negative consequences of doing otherwise. If I got a detention in middle or high school my little brother (in first grade when I was in seventh grade) would have been home alone and my parents would have killed me. So guess how many detentions I got? None. Ever. Not even one in all twelve years of school. If I, who was pronounced hyperactive by two different pediatricians before I was even in first grade and never medicated could sit down and shut up in class, I’ve got to think the poor humiliated 14-15 year olds are capable of it too.
In all fairness, they’ve had 9-10 years to learn the “no talking in class” rule and only a little while to learn the whole board-standing thing–if they can’t remember the one after all this time, they most likely can’t remember the other. The other possibility is that they remember the no-talking rule just fine but choose to ignore it–in which case they’re quite likely to choose to ignore the “stand still, nose in the circle” thing too unless she rides their asses.
As for what you do, the best thing is to tell your daughter to stop talking during class. Then she won’t have to worry about whether to be “humiliated” for 10 minutes or miss soccer practice for a week. This is a microcosm of how the adult world works–bad decisions like breaking rules leads to a variety of bad consequences, and you wind up having to choose which set of consequences is less crappy overall.
What is wrong with an unpleasant punishment? Seriously, they’re not supposed to like it. Here’s a good lesson for your kids-LIFE IS NOT FAIR. If you really think the punishment is so egregious, teach your kid to behave, and when they don’t, let them suffer the consequences. Oh the tragedy of facing a wall, please. Thats the problem with schools now, always catering to the crack babies and cry babies. If your otherwise healthy and normal child will not act appropriately in school, you are failing as a parent for not teaching them how to do that. And seriously, if they are not capable of acting appropriately, they should be in a specialized school.
OldnCrinkly
mother of 5 children who act like civilized people when it is required, and reprimands them when they don’t
(try it, its good for them and you, too!)
This would be awesome if the homework assignment was Plato.