What about a good smack to the head?
Cured me from my tantrums.
Now before everyone starts spouting about child-abuse : I think it is a lot less traumatic for a kid to get a spanking, than to get cuffed and tossed in the back of a police cruiser.
Yes, that’s pretty huge for a five-year old.
50% percentile (“average” for these purposes) for a girl of 5 years is 42" (3’ 6") and between 35 and 45 pounds, for all ethnicities.
4’5" and 60 pounds is the median for a 9 year old. So either those stats are wrong, or we have a big girl on our hands.
Well the link in the OP says she weighs forty pounds, which is a lot more reasonable. Who knows which (if either) is correct.
Last time I talked to my friends who teach, they aren’t trained in child restraint. If your kid can’t control themselves at school…you need to raise your kids better. Had they thrown the kid in a room, they’d be in trouble too. The state of Wisconsin is reviewing several schools for using safe rooms as discipline. Had they physically restrained the kid, that mom would have sued for abuse. Had they spanked the kid…they’d be sued. The very same mom would be the one shouting to every news camera about the need for school policing if some other kid had hit her little baby. If I were the teacher…I’d say good riddance to bad rubbish.
Thanks guys (I missed that bit in the first link). My first thought was that it might be understandable if a girl that much bigger than her classmates had a few issues, but on second thoughts I think the second link just got it wrong. Otherwise surely her size would have been mentioned by somebody.
I’m speaking from imperfect knowledge here, so take all of this with several grains of salt. This is all anecdotal so caveat noted…
My mom was a public school teacher for years, and I knew several other teachers quite well on a social level. One taught Special Ed, as it was known then, i.e. kids with known mental and developmental problems. From what I gathered from them, schools are very tightly regulated for how much physical contact/force they can use on students, even in self defense. Mom had some 6th graders who were pretty damned scary. One hauled off and kicked her, causing blood clots in her legs that lasted for months. (Another little charmer just put an ice pick through the hood of her car and raked the paint on the sides–and this was in an upper middle-class highly rated school.) It wasn’t remotely right, it sucked and it’s why she finally took early retirement, even though she lived, ate and breathed the job. But that’s the way it was.
She always said she wouldn’t dare even touch a kid, even if attacked, because she could be sued for everything she had. Even if she won the suit, the cost of defending it and resultant professional damage would be horrendous. Maybe she was overly paranoid; she was meta-cautious about a lot of things. But more than one teacher echoed her sentiments, so I tend to think regular school staff are pretty reluctant, not to mention untrained, about dealing with violent kids.
The Special Ed teacher was another matter. She was frequently bruised, scratched, etc. as part of her having to physically restrain out of control kids. But she, and they, were slotted into a different set of offical necessities, so to speak.
It looks to me like the teachers in this story did what was prudent and wise. They let pros control the immediate problem, and started the process to get that poor kid evaluated.
FWIW.
And this is literal for many teachers I talk to as well. Don’t touch. Don’t give a hug to the girl who is crying and distraught because the other students called her an ugly fat whore. Don’t pat the boy on the back when he triumphantly succeeds at long division for the first time ever. Don’t tap someone on the shoulder to get their attention or issue a silent warning. Don’t take a child’s hand to help them stand up if they fall down. Don’t take their elbow to march them down to the principal’s office if they’ve been caught fighting.
Don’t. Touch. Ever.
It’s ridiculous. And horrible, considering humans’ very real developmental need for physical contact. To put a child in a classroom for most of his waking hours and not allow touch at all - I really do wonder if that’s at least one reason for acting out in school. Touch = boundaries. These kids will flail around and go berserk until finally someone touches them - even if that touch is to put on handcuffs.
I’ve actually given all my son’s teachers permission, in writing, to touch him in appropriate ways such as those listed. It’s in his IEP. (Individualized Educational Program - he’s got some learning disabilities.) Some of them choose to, and some not. And he always does better with those teachers who choose to touch. Coincidence? [/hijacky rant]
Yep, my mother’s an aide at an elementary school, and a couple years ago, a little girl who was transferring to a different school asked my mother for a goodbye hug on the last day. My mother had to turn her down and she felt soooo bad. Little kids usually feel the need for physical contact-not in the Michael Jackson way, but they do need occasional hugs, hand holding (when I was observing a classroom, the little girls begged me to hang out with them at recess and they always clamored to hold my hands, play with my hair, etc).
It’s pretty damned sad. I’m wondering if this poor kid is being molested-it might explain the freak out.
I think it’s probably different in every school district, and across different regions of the country different norms prevail.
A friend of mine who I went to K-12 with became a history teacher and couldn’t find a job in a “normal” HS when he graduated. So to earn his pay he spent his first 5 years teaching in a public school that educates the kids who were expelled or removed from all of the other schools in a 3-4 county area.
He said he had to attend several learning sessions where he was taught was allowed and was not allowed as far as the Commonwealth of Virginia was concerned. Trying to inflict physical pain; ie punching, kicking, et cetera was only acceptable if the teacher felt he was at serious risk and had to fight back to neutralize the student. In all other cases the teacher was supposed to use various “wrestling type” holds he was taught specifically to restrain teenagers with and to call the office on his radio for further assistance.
If there was a fist fight between two students he was supposed to radio it in and do nothing until one other male teacher was at the scene. The rationale behind that was if you pull one guy off that just makes him an easy target for the other, and that’s what happened years ago so they implemented this policy. The caveat to that rule was if one student had any sort of weapon the teacher had to jump in to do whatever necessary.
He said it was rough at times but there were ways you could earn the student’s respect, although you would always have a problem with students fighting each other.
All I have to say is:
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
See what you “pc’ers” get when you take padd’lins out of school?
Classic truely classic.
Yeah, the police comming to hog tie your little girl and thrown into the back seat of a squad car, at the ripe old age of 5, is MUCH better than a couple of smacks on the ass. :rolleyes:
Oh fuck you. Do you honestly not see the difference between a rule against corporal punishment and one that prohibits ANY physical contact between teachers and students?
Thanks for all the feedback on this thread. I was so flummoxed when I read the original story that I really felt I needed to thow this out into a community with divergent, but not uneducated opinions. That’s what I got.
This is gonna sound so suck up-ish, but what the hell. I got responses that pretty much ran the emotional gammut of what I was feeling. And nobody posted without some thought. I came into the board at a bad time, and was gonna let my trial period lapse, because of the whole TubaDiva thing. I was really shocked by the response to that, but hell, I may not be a grownup, but I play one at work, ka-ka occurs. I can move on.
But this thread has made me feel like I may not be the only confused SOB in the U.S. anymore. What, 13 plus years of polarization? Pubs, Dems, all the same, my way or the highway, toe the line or out the door was all I felt like I was seeing. But this thread made me see, allowed me to see, that while some may have pre-formed oppinions, others can be just as shocked and confused as me. Confussion is OK. I support confussion. You guys rock!
I was warned otherwise, but I’ll be paying the cost to become a member. And on those threads where I was an asshat, can I plead I thought everybody was wearing one?
Oh please. In my school, 9 times out of 10 the children who were “violent” were either neglected or abused at home. I don’t think corporal punishment would’ve done any good there because most of them would’ve been used to getting hit harder, and it would’ve alienated them from teacher authority really quick.
One guy I remember acted out at age 10, hitting, kicking. Later in the year he was taking away from his mother, who was beating him and then locking him in the closet while she left the house. If a teacher had paddled him, I doubt it would’ve done any good.
Exactly. People who favor corporal punishment are people favoring teachers as disciplinarians - which they shouldn’t be. Parents should not abrogate their duty to properly raise and train their children and then blame teachers for not resorting to the paddle (which decent parents don’t need either.) If a parent wants a teacher to paddle their child, effectively, they want their child to be beaten at school to make up for the neglect and lack of discipline at home. How sad.
I guess you missed this part:
Dude, there’s a BIG difference between corpral punishment and physical abuse.
I got plenty of smacks to the ass as a kid. To make it even more humiliating for me; my dad had this paddle. Just befor he would smack my ass with it, he’d make me write on the paddle with a magic marker what I had done wrong, then proceed to give me an ass whup’n.
Having said that, not ONCE did I ever feel like I was being abused.
Also, not once, have I ever beat any of my GF’s or commited a serious crime.
So go figure.
If anybody tells you they’re not just as confused and lost as the rest of us, they’re lying. And probably not open to learning anything.
Stick around awhile - you’ll see just about everything here. And if you don’t see it, maybe you can be the one to supply it.
To say nothing of the blows to the head you’ve clearly suffered, if your posting history is any sort of indication.
I have a mental image of jellybeans wearing masks and talking amongst themselves on handset radios, waiting for the perfect opportunity to bring the target down.
No, I didn’t get enough sleep last night, why do you ask?
Maybe that’s how you were punished, but if you got a paddling in MY school, it was at least three hits (maybe even as many as ten, depending) from a paddle with holes in it. Even if you were a younger kid. I remember getting a paddling at 5 (for something I didn’t do, actually) and it hurt much much worse than “a smack on the ass.”