Month: August 2015

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You say discipline, I say humiliation! by Guest Blogger, Kelli Gander

 

Sad little girl sitting in a cornerIt is no secret, teachers are like circus performers. They are  constantly juggling tasks, performing classroom magic, taming, orchestrating the show and entertaining and engaging a very tricky audience. All the while they do this they are also walking a very fine line between creativity and control, process and product, function and freedom.

That line will vary class to class and teacher to teacher. It will depend on personal philosophy, experience, training, skill sets and individual expectations but what happens when the line gets crossed, particularly when it comes to behaviour management of children?

I had a recent experience of this that was close to me. The teacher described her actions as discipline, I considered it humiliation. She said she was using a routine classroom strategy and I said she was shaming in order to achieve compliance. So where is that line?

I know for me personally, publicly shaming a child is never appropriate. Whatever short term gain the teacher may feel they have made is out weighed, considerably, by the emotional anguish and negative feelings the child suffers as a result.

I spoke to many adults, both friends and colleagues, who had stories of school day traumas that stay with them still, after being made emotionally vulnerable by a classroom teacher. Did it change their behaviour long term? Apparently no!

It would seem that research agrees. After a 3 year study by the University of South Australia, it is evidenced that exclusion and isolation of children is an ineffective means of affecting a change in student’s behaviour.
So why does it still happen routinely in our schools and why is it tolerated and considered acceptable? Perhaps not enough thought or attention is put into considering the rights of the child. That is not to say that the teacher should be left powerless but surely isolation, naughty chairs and public shaming are old and antiquated methods for our modern, emotionally intelligent and creative educators.

Surely we don’t have to make children feel bad about themselves in order to achieve a behavioural objective. Let’s use our powers for good, not as an emotional weapon to achieve a short term goal with possibly very long lasting emotional effects.
You say it’s discipline, l say It’s humiliation and I know my voice is not alone!

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Another brick in the wall?

Robot child reading a book.

What sort of an education do we REALLY want for our children?
Maybe it’s time to listen to the Pink Floyd song again but this time really listen!


Do we really want to turn our kids into robots or “just another brick in the wall?”
There are clear choices:
Choice A: Do we want happy, well rounded kids with high emotional intelligence and a wide range of talents and interests? Do we want kids who will become life-long learners? Do we want kids who love reading and love to express themselves in writing and enjoy the elegance and challenge of mathematics?
Choice B: Or do we want kids who just regurgitate facts like trained seals and do not know how to think or even have anything to think about?
Most definitely the British and Australian Governments are choosing the latter and this will have hugely negative effects on children’s well-being and ability to think, create and dream. We are in effect, once again abolishing childhood!
This is a really interesting article about the British Government trying to adopt a more test oriented approach to education- somewhat like the Chinese one; and strangely, at a time when China is moving away from this because it simply does not work!
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgu.com%2Fp%2F4b8h7%2Fsfb&ref=responsive
The Australian Government is doing exactly the same. It has used the big NAPLAN stick to try to beat schools into some sort of results driven shape and reduce them to the type of school written about in Dicken’s Hard Times.
“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times
It doesn’t have to be like this.
Children CAN learn the basic literacy and numeracy skills without the hugely expensive and inefficient NAPLAN process.
I don’t think all testing is wrong. As teachers we need to be aware of levels, learning styles and have practical plans to help ALL students reach their potential. However, teachers need to be given the tools to teach effectively, the resources and mentoring they need and to be trusted to get on with the job!
Term one in many schools is now given over to the new subject: NAPLAN! Kids do long, boring tests that effectively teach them how to pass tests but not much else. This means that 4 terms of work have to be crammed into the three remaining terms. No wonder teachers are tired, stressed and unwilling to teach the NAPLAN years.
We have to wake up from this soporific educational haze and look at what DOES work. I for one am sick of all the sycophantic praise given to Finland’s education system (one that DOES work) and then watching the Aussie Government totally ignoring good practice and reverting back to the big stick of testing!

Now the problem with standardized tests is that it’s based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can’t, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.

Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.
Sir Ken Robinson

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Careful- I can hear you now!

loud1 I can hear clearly now the wax has gone. I can hear all sorts of things I should not hear!

I can hear clearly now the wax has gone. It’s gonna be a loud, loud, interesting year!

(abject apologies to Johnny Nash!)

I have just had my ears syringed out by a wonderful health professional who knows me well. She warned me I might feel unbalanced and she was frankly amazed I could still hear anything at all! I fly frequently and over the last few cold and flu infested winters had built up my own candle making factory.

However – the magical moment arrived when finally the sound came in and for the last week I have felt like Alice in Wondersoundland!

My aunt and I had champagne and oysters in Harrods straight afterwards and I swear I heard enough whispered conversations to bring down the House of Lords!

For the past week I have heard EVERYTHING and I am like a kid with auditory processing issues. What shall I listen to? They are ALL interesting???

I am like an owl inclining my neck this way and that to catch all the things I should not be hearing!

Kids will NEVER be able to have hidden conversations again- I can hear the lot!

The dishwasher is so loud it frightens me and don’t even talk about the dryer- that puts me under the table!

But the point is- what to listen to? All these competing sounds and many of them boring so I am paying attention to the interesting ones- like the whispered conversation between the middle aged business man and his secretary on the table next to ours at dinner last night!

No wonder children choose not to listen to us! While I had the wax issues, all I could concentrate on was what I was doing. Now I am an ADHD nightmare going from one inbox DING to the next and eavesdropping on naughty conversations! There is something to learn here but I am too busy listening to the very loud bird noises outside this window and the traffic noise from the highway that I never heard before!

What a very loud world we live in!

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