My sister tells me that my redheaded niece, who is in kindergarten, got sent to the Principal’s office again. For fighting! It seems that a boy at school smacked her in the face, and so she went upside his head (and must have made the boy cry, from the sound of it). She takes no shit. “Good for her!” I say. “Good for her!” my sister says.
But the Principal doesn’t say that, nosirree Bob. No, the Principal (male or female, I don’t know) explained to my niece and my sister that just because a boy hits her, she doesn’t have the right to hit him back. That’s right, a girl is not allowed to defend herself. As my sister put it (sarcastically, natch), “Sure, let’s program these girls properly, so that when they’re teenagers and adults and their boyfriends start slapping them around, they’ll know to just put up with it!”
The Principal told my sister that if this kind of thing happens again, she’ll have to suspend my niece from school. “Well,” said my sister, “If that happens then I guess I’ll just get to spend some quality time at home with my daughter.”
Me? I say “Screw you, Principal”. It’s people like you who continue to enable bullies by making sure everybody else knows they’re not supposed to stand up to them. Oh yeah, this is same Principal who busted my niece for bringing a “weapon” to school a couple weeks earlier. My niece found a piece of a broken hacksaw blade on the ground at her bus stop, and still had it in her hand when she got on the bus. Oh noes! She must be a little Scottish terrorist!
Was the principal specifically telling her not to hit back because she was a girl or was it a general policy for all children? I agree that it’s wrong to make gender-specific policies like that but I can see the principal’s point if the rule is “no hitting other students - even if they hit you first.”
I’m not sure. I suppose it’s not gender-specific. My sister was sure pissed, though. She’s as “take no shit” as my niece (which is where my niece got it, I imagine).
Yeah, how do you know your redheaded freak southpaw stepchield of a niece didn’t just flat-out attack the boy? Sexist much? She boarded a bus with a freakin’ hacksaw bitch!
It sucks, but I don’t think the scenario is particularly uncommon, or even new. Ages ago when I was in elementary school I had some trouble with being picked on, and my parents strongly encouraged me to fight back if I were hit (to go for the nose, in fact), convinced it was the best way to prevent future bullying. When they said as much during a parent-teacher conference, though, they were told it would violate the school policy and I’d essentially receive the same punishment even if it were in self-defense. “Run and tell the teacher” was the encouraged solution. (One which, as you can imagine, wasn’t really the best way to discourage future bullying.)
I guess from the school’s perspective they want to prevent all physical contact between students, and any fight will inevitably degenerate into a he-said/he-said (subsititute gender pronouns as required) over who started it.
My parents were more concerned about me not getting my ass kicked, however, and assured me that if I got in “trouble” for defending myself in school they would not be angry.
In a lot of schools it doesn’t matter if you hit first or hit back, everybody gets suspended. So you just can’t defend yourself, or you get into big trouble.
I’m not sure where Central Cascadia is, but I suspect that your niece has a right to defend herself. The rules change if this took place outside the USA or if she is in a private school. Besides, IANAL.
But speaking as a teacher, you really don’t want to get your niece trained in retaliatory violence. These days it doesn’t just make people leave you alone. It sometimes ends in death quite early. I would teach the child to grab the nearest witness and rat the offender out to the nearest teacher or go straight to the principal. If that accomplishes nothing, the parent should go to school. If the principal still does nothing, let the principal know that if the child is hit again by another student and nothing is done, a complain will be filed with the district office (or the principal’s boss). That will get the principal’s attention.
Please don’t teach the child to hit back. I understand why you and the mother would want to, but it won’t be long before the other kid goes home and gets a gun. It happened to one of my students.
my son’s school had a ‘no hit’ policy - the way it played out was that if two students hit ech other, both would be disciplined. if one student hit, it was considered ‘horseplay’ joking around. I pointed out that for a student who was hit that meant your choice was to hit back & get suspended, or be hit all the time w/o consequneces for the hitter. they stood fast.
Zero tolerance policies are indicative of laziness IMO. Everyone thinks their little johnny is perfect and the administration doesn’t want to put up with asshole kids’ asshole parents.
I hope the boy who started it was also disciplined.
When The Kid was in preschool she dealt with a little terror. She’s always been thin and she has a fairly delicate face. Bruiser was a chunk of a kid who delighted in pushing her around. The preschool wouldn’t take action. So I taught her how to throw a punch.
Suffice it to say, her father and I were called in a few days later. Bruiser pushed her hard into a door frame, bruising her shoulder pretty bad. So she punched him. Bloodied his nose.
When we spoke with the director I had my lovely calendar of every time Bruiser tormented her and every contact with her teacher. The director supposedly had no idea it was so bad (despite my having discussed the matter with her before). The Kid ended up okay. Bruiser was expelled. From preschool.
(And before anyone asks why she stayed there under that situation, I was receiving financial assistance to pay for the preschool. If I just upped and moved her I would have lost assistance and could not afford to pay full price out of pocket)
The bad side to having her taught her not to take anyones shit is that she thinks she can always “finish” it.
My school has a zero tolerance policy-- if you hit, you get suspended. I have a student who got a knife pulled on him. He was in a verbal altercation with another kid and there was shoving, but the other kid pulled a knife, and then fisticuffs. No one got hurt. Both were suspended. My student got 3 days out of school; the other kid got 5 + a disciplinary hearing, which could lead to more time out. I say, in a situation like that, you take your 3 days, be glad you didn’t get stabbed, and be careful who you get into it with as a life fucking lesson. I like the kid a lot and he’s a nice kid, and I’m glad he defended himself, but he did get in a shoving match, and has to have some consequences for that.
What else is the school supposed to do, take sides in a fight between kids? Usually when people lay hands on each other, both are at fault and contributed to the escalation; the punishment usually reflects the level at which you contributed to the violence. Tends to come out pretty fair usually.
You weren’t there when your niece and this other kid got into it. Likely it went both ways, and likely there were witnesses who would attest to that if it got to the point of suspension. If your sister doesn’t care that her kid is getting into fist fights in kindergarten on a regular basis (note that you said “again,” implying a chronic problem, not just one incident), then that’s bully for her (pun intended), though I think that’s a big red flag for a behavioral problem. Most kids don’t get into lots of physical fights-- it’s usually the same kids over and over, and they have problems. Hey, maybe your niece doesn’t, but maybe you’re biased too. I see that a lot: “my kid is the vicim/hero, the other kid is the Devil!” It’s a little old now, and rarely if ever true.
As for her spending time at home, I don’t know about your niece’s school, but here you don’t get to stay home if you get suspended. You go to a different place where you do work with a tutor, in isolation all day. Much better punishment IMO.
Oh yeah, and making this a gender issue? Bullshit. It’s not, I guarantee it. I could just as easily contend that you’re encouraging a girl to hit boys and implying that she should get away with it. You do see that’s absurd, don’t you?
Zero tolerance rules (which is what I assume happened in the OP) generally suck, and are indicative of administrative laziness: “don’t bother getting to the bottom of it; just follow the ironclad rule.” However, I don’t like the inaccuracy of the thread title, implying a gender bias when there is none.
I agree with you completely, Zoe, but I’m uncomfortable with the term “rat out.” I think we should tell the girl to “report” the incident. THEN, after talking with a counselor, and after a counselor has talked with the asshole boy, if it happens again, I say, GO FOR IT. At some point in their maturation, women should learn self-defense (unfortunately). The earlier the better. There should even be a class which a least tells young girls that if a boy molests them more than once in anyway, they should kick him in the balls. And they should report it and let the statistics reflect the reality.
“All right, now I want you to try to hit daddy. Make a fist and try to hit daddy’s nose. Ok, see how I used my arms to block you from hitting me? That’s defense. Ok, now do it again. Okay… okay, now, see, what I just did was retaliation for you hitting me. Okay… honey, I know it hurts, but you need to stop crying. It’s just a little blood… where are you going?”
Hee. Point being, if the girl in the OP struck back in retaliation, consequences are appropriate. If she struck him because otherwise he would have continued hitting her, consequences–if any–should be lesser. (Nobody said it was gonna be easy.)
You don’t teach a girl to protect herself by teaching her to get into fights. You teach her that it’s not all right for anybody to hit anybody and that if some idiot (boyfriend, schoolmate, whoever) hits her, she needs to notify authorities. Immediately.
What kind of people are saying she should be taught to ‘fight back’? Is this not the 21st Century? Are we not supposed to have progressed beyond stupid brute force as a way to resolve conflicts yet?