A Fair Blast

Due to unacceptable behaviour, a classroom teacher sent a student to me. The student complained that he had been sent out for no good reason and that he had done nothing wrong. As I listened to his story, I began to think he might have had a point. I explained to him that I could not comment on the situation until I received a report from the teacher and heard the other side of the story. The boy and I had a discussion about acceptable classroom behaviour and the fact that the teacher involved had been given a pretty rough time during the year. (The class was a particularly difficult one and contained a large number of boys with records of poor behaviour and uninspiring academic achievement.) The boy, to his credit, was able to see the validity of my suggestions and agreed that it was possible that the teacher might have reached the end of his tether with this particular group; and that the student was probably the victim of his own past behaviour as much as anything to do with the current situation.

After five or so minutes the boy asked if he might go back to the class, as he didn’t want to get behind with the work. This seemed like a reasonable request so I wrote a note to the teacher saying that the student had made a commitment to doing the work and following all of the teacher’s instructions without argument. I showed the note to the student and asked him if he was able to comply with the expectations of him. The boy agreed that it was reasonable and took the note back to class. Later in the day, I caught up with the teacher and asked him how the boy had worked. The response I got was, “You must have given him a fair blast. He didn’t say boo all period.”

The sad truth to this story is that the teacher saw this as the only possible answer to the student’s compliance. I told him that I had just had a quiet chat about the rights and wrongs of the matter, but he obviously thought I was joking. In his mind, students conform when they are faced with strong authority - not strong reasoning. “Yeah right!” he laughed as he walked away.