Today I faced one of those moments, when as a parent I had to decide whether to support the official view or to applause the individual's performance.When I reached school this afternoon to collect my son at 4pm, the head of his class told me she had to give my son a written warning (This is a kind of written punishment for kids at school. It is one of the worst, or most serious punishments - in fact, the written warning given by the Head of the School is the worst and this one comes second) for an especially unacceptable behaviour.
While I was gasping for air, she began describing the sin my son committed.
It turned out that he, with another boy, were running along the hallway (this is alone is considered a moderate crime at schools - isn't that crazy?) towards their room. My son and the other boy went into the room and then left it - through the bars of the window. The classroom is located on the ground floor and there are bars at the windows. The distance between bars are relatively small.
My gut reaction was: wow - my son's gonna be the next Houdini, isn't that a nice ability to escape from a barred window? Isn't it a courage to let yourself fall onto the floor while coming through bars? Isn't your body a miracle to perform this at all?
But I had to suppress my admiration as the teacher kept repeating how dangerous and forbidden that action was.
I had a hard time to cover up my laughter....
When we were alone with my son, I told him how able and skilled he had been. But I also reminded him that this skill had to be practiced somewhere outside the school :)
My husband told me he agreed with me. If our son takes lessons in buildering, than why not let him practicing some bar-climbing, too?
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I'm totally with you on this one. Schools sometimes get very bent out of shape over what seems silly little things. So yes, give the appearance of redirecting his behavior...but let him know when he does something very cool! :)
Thanks for being with me :)
When I was young, I want to be a rock climber!! Now I can't do it.
If there are rock climb kids schools near my house, we must go to schools. LOL
Actually I wanted to get marry rock climbers...Huhuhu
I'm not with you, but hear me out. Schools are responsible for hundreds of children ... not just their education, but their safety. What if your son's incident, God forbid, turned into his death? Squeezing through bars has actually killed children through suffocation. Would you have thought the serious silly then?
Whenever someone reprimands my children, I try to ONLY look at their side of it and ONLY their side because I know as a mom, my side is biased. I'm always surprised by teachers and principals saying to me, "You wouldn't believe how few parents think the way you do ... they naturally want to defend."
I want to defend too, but thankfully, I've only had two incidents in 14 years I've had to answer that were considered serious by the school's standards, one of which turned out to be false and the other was my son writing a curse word. Haha. Most of the time I'm contacting teachers to check up on the kids and I do it from the standpoint of, "Want to know how they're REALLY doing."
The problem here is culpability. If children get hurt doing daft things at school, parents want to blame the school for allowing it to happen, even if the school had no control over the situation. Kids do crazy things, they get caught and punnished. It's all in the script...
Re-directing his energies is a good move. It doesn't happen often enough with kids.
To Beth,
see my separate entry. Thanks for your remarks. I considered them and have thought about them over and over again. Our children's safety is a topic that should no be overlooked.
To IllMan,
thanks and see, I agree.
redirecting energies has always been one of my key factors during child-raising....
It is of essential importance.
To Lucy,
yes, you should go and try it.
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