Posts Tagged ‘Parenting’

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Huge Setback for the Fight Against Cyberbullying

January 19, 2012

Today is a disappointing day for all Americans (and the vast majority don’t know it). The Supreme Court’s decision not to overturn a previous decision which found in favour of students who harassed and slandered two Principals on the grounds that the school did not have the authority to punish them for deeds committed outside of the school gates.

The court let stand the suspension of a West Virginia high school’s “Queen of Charm,” who created a Web page that suggested another student had a sexually transmitted disease, and invited classmates to comment.

The court also left alone rulings that said schools could not discipline two Pennsylvania students for MySpace parodies of their principals that the students created at home. An appeals court, following 40-year-old case law on student speech, said the posts did not create substantial disruptions at school.

Lawyers on both sides were disappointed that it will be at least another year before the high court wades into the issue. Federal judges have issued a broad range of opinions on the subject.

“We’ve missed an opportunity to really clarify for school districts what their responsibility and authority is,” said Francisco Negron, general counsel of the National School Boards Association. “This is one of those cases where the law is simply lagging behind the times.”

This is a bitter blow for American society. Cyber bullying is a significant problem. It is my opinion that schools should most certainly get involved when its students are bullying each other (irrespective of where they are when they do it). By working with the parents, schools can play a vital role in deterring  bullies from victimising others online.

I am very saddened to read that the Supreme Court is of the opinion that when a child call their Principals names like a “big fag”, “whore”, “hairy sex addict” and “pervert”,  their posts do “not create substantial disruptions at school.” Really? I would have thought it would certainly undermine the authority of the Principal. And should she/he is unable to take any action, it sets an awful message that you can get away with saying anything online.

Is this progress? I think not!

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Posted in Cyber Bullying | Leave a Comment »

The Role of Parents in Preventing Innovation in the Classroom

January 17, 2012

Whilst I believe that it’s the right of every parent to decide what is and isn’t appropriate at school, sometimes they go overboard. The parents that pulled their primary aged children from their school’s massage program (a program which gets children to massage each other) on the grounds that it was inappropriate, had every right to do so. What bothers me, is that by making the school’s program a big issue, they are in fact railroading future programs which may benefit their children.

As much as they may have disagreed with the outcome, the intention of the school was clearly commendable. They wanted to provide a more relaxed and harmonious environment for their students.

Parents are up in arms at a primary school where youngsters have been giving each other massages before lessons.

The ten-minute massage sessions were introduced at Sheffield’s Hartley Brook Primary School to help calm down pupils after lunch breaks.

School head Mrs Chris Hobson said the massage sessions have been a big success but some parents have withdrawn their children from the massage programme claiming it is ‘inappropriate’.

The Massage In Schools programme is designed to help pupils relax and concentrate after energetic lunchtime playtimes.

Parent Rachael Beer who has two children at the school said: ‘I just feel it is inappropriate for children touching each other. I do understand that children need calming down after lunch.

I just think there are better relaxation techniques out there that can help with that, such as yoga, that have the same benefits as peer massage that don’t involve them touching each other.

‘I think children like their own personal space. 

‘Many parents do feel the same way as me. If the head had consulted parents better, she would have a clear view of how parents feel about it.

‘Other parents are telling me they didn’t even know peer massage was being rolled out in school and they do feel uncomfortable with it.

‘I have opted my children out of it. They are then sat doing the actions to peer massage. I feel that those 20 minutes could be better spent doing something more academic.’

One of the big challenges educators of primary aged children have, is the ability to get their students to maintain concentration. It is very hard to keep young children engaged. Anxiety is also often prevalent, posing extra challenges on teachers to reduce the tension and keep the proceedings positive. An extra 20 minutes of academic studies is useless if the children are having trouble concentrating.

When parents make a school’s attempts at innovation difficult and take an idea born out of compassion and turn it into controversy, they discourage schools to want to do something new and different.

Innovation is the way forward in education. We all know our education system is flawed and it requires some fixing. That can only come about from thinking different and acting differently. When parents take a worthwhile idea and make it a media circus they are in effect rallying for the status quo.

Take a step back and observe the status quo. Is that what you really want?

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Posted in Parenting | 2 Comments »

Shy Students Should Be Allowed to Tweet Their Teacher in Class: Study

January 17, 2012

Last week I wrote a post on the challenges of teaching shy students. I gave an account of my struggles with one particularly shy student and the strategy I used to get him to talk. I have great empathy for the child that is too afraid to speak and understand the frustrations involved when teaching such a student.

However, I feel a bit uneasy about a recent study that promotes conversation via Twitter between shy student and their teacher.

The Courier-Mail reports new research from Southern Cross University has found strong benefits for the use of Twitter by students too embarrassed or uncomfortable to ask teachers questions in the time-honoured raised-hand method.

Southern Cross business lecturer Jeremy Novak, along with Central Queensland University’s Dr Michael Cowling, studied the use of Twitter among university students as a method for asking questions and gaining feedback without having to stand the stares and scrutiny of fellow students.

The positive feedback from students, particularly international students, has convinced the research team the use of Twitter technology could also be embraced by classrooms at high school and even primary school level.

In my opinion, shyness is not a genetic disease or impenetrable condition. To me, shyness is a result of a lack of self-esteem. Shy children act that way because they don’t feel valued. Instead, they feel judged, ostracised or labelled.

A teacher can do one of two things. They can either enable the shy student by using Twitter, or they can actually attempt to help that student find their feet and feel good about themselves.

“But who has the time for that? We have the curriculum to cover!”

This line sums up my frustrations with current educational thinking (as perpetuated through teacher training programs). In my opinion, it is every bit as important for a teacher to assist their students in matters of self-confidence as it is for them to teach them the curriculum. In fact, I would suggest that it is more important. Facts are learnt and forgotten. The average person on the street has long forgotten calculus and how many chemical elements make up the periodic table. What they wouldn’t have forgotten is how they were treated and how their experiences at school have changed them for the better or worse.

Why placate a shy person when you can change a shy person? Why play the game when you can show them that they have a voice and it’s special and unique and something to be proud of.

And besides, receiving Tweets in class is so unprofessional.What, am I supposed to stop my class so I can check my phone for a Tweet?

Trust me, as good a feeling as it is to teach children new skills or concepts, helping a child discover that they are important and that their thoughts and opinions matter is so much more rewarding.

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Posted in Child Welfare, Social Media | 9 Comments »

The Bid to Make Barbie Bald

January 13, 2012

I am not a big fan of Barbie. However, I think the initiative to get Mattel to include a cancer suffering “Bald Barbie” has plenty of merit:

Most kids in America recognize Barbie immediately.

She’s tall, she’s thin, and she’s…bald?

Rebecca Sypin is one of the people behind this Facebook campaign urging Mattel to create a bald Barbie, one she says children battling cancer and other diseases that cause hair loss can relate to.

“When you go to the supermarket, sometimes you have little kids who’ve never seen it before, staring, and I think it would make it much more mainstream and more normal for kids to see that,” said Sypin.

Sypin knows about children and cancer all too well. Her daughter, Kin Inich, is battling leukemia.

“Everybody else has hair, even a boy has hair and you don’t. So it would make you feel like you’re Barbie, you would be the glamorous girl with the big lifestyle and everything now,” said Kin.

The Beautiful and Bald Barbie Facebook page has been up and running for less than a month, and already has more than 65,000 friends.

But despite that support, Sypin says the bald Barbie idea has gotten a cool reception from Mattel, saying that the company has told her they do not take unsolicited Barbie doll suggestions from outside sources.

A bald Barbie may still be a possibility though. Mattel released a written statement Thursday saying the company is honored that so many people are looking to Barbie as the face of such an important cause.

“We receive hundreds of passionate requests for various dolls to be added to our collection,” the statement reads. “We take all of them seriously and are constantly exploring new and different dolls to be added to our line.”

Let’s face it. The reason that Mattel seem less than enthusiastic about the idea, is that it would almost certainly make a loss. That, and the fact that the Barbie name is synonymous with looks and dimensions that lack realism and are deliberately out of proportion. A doll that humanises the Barbie name and presents her as flawed and vulnerable is not what they are setting out to do.

I will be watching closely to see whether or not Mattel has the conviction to bypass profits for this extremely noteworthy cause. If they don’t, it will only serve to reaffirm my current dislike of the product.

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Posted in Body Image, Child Welfare | Leave a Comment »

The Practice of Sending Troubled Kids to the “Scream” Room

January 12, 2012

The “scream” room could be quite useful if used differently. At present, some schools are using “scream” rooms as a way to provide disobedient students with a place to vent their anger.

I have an alternate use for them.

I believe the “scream” room should instead be reserved for teachers who have no control over their class.

And for teachers who have outgrown this room and who are so devoid of answers that they are at their wit’s end, I suggest using a “panic room.”

In all seriousness, the problem that I have with a “timeout” area is that students are often sent there without a proper understanding of what they did wrong and without the skills to manage further impulses. It becomes a very temporary band-aid solution to an often far greater problem.

In this case, the problem is further compounded by a seeming lack of supervision. Children should never be sent out of the classroom unsupervised. That is just poor management.

Parents, many of whom have children at Farm Hill Elementary School in Middletown, Conn., are outraged about the way the school is dealing with misbehaving students.

Teachers and staff put the children, including those with special needs, in what parents call “scream rooms.”

“My 1st grader is there and is not learning because there are so many behavioral problems at that school,” Tricia Belin said.

One parent described the rooms as, “scream closets, where kids bang their heads off of concrete walls.”

“The building custodians had to go in and clean blood off the walls and clean urination off the floors,” the parent said.

At a Board of Education meeting on Tuesday night, many parents questioned the use of the rooms that the district calls “timeout rooms.”

“I learned last year from my daughter that she was put in a closet that had holes in the walls and no windows and (was) locked in there,” one mother said.

My advise to the students currently sent to a “scream room”, is to please evacuate and give us poor teachers a chance to scream and  head bang.

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Posted in Classroom Management | 1 Comment »

Teachers Administered “Slave” Maths Problems

January 11, 2012

When I first heard about the story of a teacher who wrote maths problems such as, “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?”, I was as angry as many of the people calling for the teacher’s sacking.

After further contemplation, I am no longer as irate.

This teacher made an awful mistake (and one that will brand him/her, rightly or wrongly, as a racist). It was a very poor choice of maths problem and I am sure that the teacher involved feels very ashamed about their role in this incident. I have to say, that I don’t think this teacher was being racist. But I wont go too far in my defence, as some acts of stupidity defy any plausible defence.

A Georgia school insisted today there was no “maliciousness” intended when a third grade math quiz asked students to compute the number of beatings a slave got a week and to calculate how many baskets of cotton he picked.

But the Gwinnett County School District has launched an investigation to determine how the offending questions made it onto the students’ homework sheets.

The math homework assignment was given to more than 100 students at Beaver Ridge Elementary school in Norcross, Ga., as part of a social studies lesson, Gwinnett County school officials said. The assignment outraged parents, community activists and members of the Georgia NAACP.

Sloan Roach, a Gwinnett County school district spokeswoman, told ABCNews.com that the students were studying famous Americans and as an attempt to create a cross-curricular worksheet, one teacher used Frederick Douglass and slavery beatings for two of the questions.

Although only one teacher wrote out the controversial questions, another teacher made copies of the assignment and it was distributed to four out of nine third grade classes at Beaver Ridge, Roach said. The school is not publicly naming any of the teachers who are suspected to be involved.

In lashing out against the school and its teachers, I think people are missing a small but still important side story. There is a growing obsession in educational circles to integrate the curriculum. Teachers are called on to integrate all subjects under an unbrella topic. For example, as this year in an Olympic Year, many teachers will plan their maths, language, science, art and music classes around the Olympic theme. This can work well, as the topic lends itself quite easily to the subjects listed above.

But then you have a subject like American History and Slavery. You are the maths teacher, and you have to find a way to cover the curriculum whilst at the same time, covering the topic of slavery. This is neither an easy task nor a fair one. I am glad that I haven’t been asked to combine the two, as I would find it all too hard.

It is time we realised that not every topic can be integrated across the curriculum. Sometimes you have to let the maths teacher teach maths, without imposing on them a topic that doesn’t fit well with skills such as chance and data and order of operations.

Was this teacher in the wrong? Absolutely! Was he/she a racist. Probably not. Should the teachers found administering this worksheet be fired? I don’t think so. Should a maths teacher ever be expected to combine maths problems with a slavery topic?

I would have thought the answer to that question was obvious.

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Posted in Maths, Professional Conduct | Leave a Comment »

Eight Tips for Teaching Shy Children

January 11, 2012

I once taught a child that refused to talk. He was already in fourth grade by the time I had him and some of his previous teachers had told me that they hardly recall a time when they heard the sound of his voice. No matter what I tried, nothing was working. By the end of Term 1 I was beginning to doubt I could do anything for him.

Then it hit me. It was a long shot, but I couldn’t think of anything else so it was worth a try. The boy reminded me of Harpo from the Marx Brothers. Not only didn’t he talk, but he had the same facial features and a similar haircut. I decided to show the class my favourite Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, and dedicate the screening to this student that refused to talk. I mentioned how Harpo Marx is cool and so is this student who happens to share a resemblance.

I figured that instead of trying to get him to talk and making his silence a negative, I would celebrate it and cannonise it. The class loved the Marx Brothers and particularly enjoyed Harpo Marx. In fact, no one loved it more than this particular child, who would mimic Harpo, get his parents to order the Marx Brother’s DVD’s and yes, the positive attention from peers in particular made him start to talk!

I recently stumbled on a valuable website that deals with helping parents and educators deal with shy children. The website is called shakeyourshyness.com and it features some useful tips. By following the link provided, the tips below are explained in more detail.

  1. Normalize shyness and depict it in a positive light.
  2. Make regular contact.
  3. Give shy children a job to do.
  4. Comment on their successes and post their work.
  5. Help Children Learn To Initiate Contact With Others.
  6. Educate Parents.
  7. Reward Small Improvements
  8. Keep an eye out for teasing

It turns out that he was just waiting for somebody to at least attempt to understand him. He didn’t want people to try to change him, he wanted people to appreciate him for who he was.

Later that year, this very child performed in the school concert. Thank you Harpo!

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Posted in Child Development | Leave a Comment »

Healthy Eating May Help ADHD Kids: Don’t Tell the Doctors

January 10, 2012

I find the ADHD trends highly frustrating. I am not a doctor or medical professional of any kind so it’s not for me to speculate whether or not ADHD exists. What bothers me, is the rapid increases in children being diagnosed (and more importantly, medicated) with the syndrome. To me Ritalin and other types of ADHD medication must be the last resort. It’s side-effects are often quite pronounced and sometimes quite sad to experience. Kids with larger than life personalities and great bursts of creativity can often be left following their own shadows (I have personally witnessed this!)

When I first entered into the profession I was given medical forms to fill out about a particular student. A previous teacher must have recommended that this student be assessed due to the belief that she may have some ADHD symptoms. In my view she was just a child with poor self-esteem who lacked concentration. In my assessment of her I made it clear that I felt that beyond her concentration being poor there was no other reason to suspect that she may have ADHD.

It didn’t help. Unfortunately, within weeks of being presented with this patient, the doctor prescribed her with Ritalin. No suggestions of a change of diet, no therapy to examine if there is any cause for her low self-esteem and no evidence that she was sent to have her language skills tested. Just the “go to” method, the “one pill fits all” strategy – the blasted pill!

I am proud to say that this child is now off the medication. Her parents decided it was not something they wanted her to be on permanently so they eased her off it. Doctors would be shaking their heads right now and accusing the parents of being irresponsible. But the parents were right. She is now a happy, focussed, non-medicated young teenager.

Doctors can be far too quick to diagnose and prescribe. In my view, they do this out of self-interest. If they were more considerate they would seriously look at diet before prescribing Ritalin.

SIMPLY eating healthier may improve the behaviour of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) if therapy and medication fail, says a study published in the journal Pediatrics.

Nutritional interventions should therefore be considered an alternative or secondary approach to treating ADHD, not a first-line attack, said the review by doctors at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, published on Monday.

What they mean by that is first pop the pills and then consider your sugar intake. This is ridiculous. What is the big deal about investigating diet and other possible causes before, as a last resort, prescribing the medication?

Click on the link to read Who Needs Quality Teaching or Parenting When You Have Medications?

Click on the link to read Get Your Kids on Ritalin Before Their Grades Suffer

Click on the link to read It is Doctors Not Teachers Who Are Helping Children Get Good Grades

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Posted in Children and Medication | 9 Comments »

The Sad Reality of Teacher/Student Facebook Communication

January 9, 2012

People who draw attention the benefits of teacher/student Facebook communication miss the point. There is no doubt that there are some fantastic innovations through social media that would allow teachers to respond to the educational needs of their students. But all benefits go out the window when one considers the dangers.

High school teacher Jennifer Kennedy has a prepared response for students who send her “friend” requests on Facebook.

No. Or, at least not until they graduate.

It’s a rule she said she shares with fellow teachers at Sacramento New Technology High School.

Increasingly, school district officials across the region and throughout the country are coming up with their own guidelines for what kind of online and electronic communication is acceptable between teachers and students.

Is it OK to be Facebook friends?

What about direct messages on Twitter?

Or text messaging from personal cellphones?

“We have a generation of kids who communicate this way,” said Kennedy, who teaches sophomores and seniors. “If you say absolutely no Facebook or texting, you are cutting off an important relationship with students.”

In districts with policies against such behavior, officials have said social media sites blur the line between the professional and private lives of teachers. And then there are the rare but widely reported allegations of abuse initiated or intensified through social media.

These allegations of abuse spoil any chance teachers and students have of communicating via social media sites. Perhaps this if for the best.
What is your opinion on this issue?

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Posted in Social Media, Technology in the Classroom | 8 Comments »

It’s Time to Change the Culture of the Classroom

January 5, 2012

I have a confession to make. As driven as I am to help my students master the curriculum, there is something more important to me than their academic achievement. I would not be even remotely satisfied if my students were at or above the national standard in numeracy and literacy if they also happened to be bullying, bullied or struggling to cope with everyday life. Conversely, if my students were below national standards but were functioning well and getting along with each other, I would be far more satisfied.

That’s not to say that I don’t understand that a vital function of my job is to educate. I know that all too well. It’s just that I wont let that distract me from my mission in setting up a classroom that is caring, friendly and allows each child to express themselves in their own unique way.

I am sick and tired of reading about how bullying is causing kids as young as 7 to diet. It infuriates me that so little is done by teachers to protect young kids from this stigma and prevent bullies from causing distress. I know what I am claiming will be seen as a gross generalisation, but how many teachers are prepared to overlook a hurtful comment about weight or ignore the activity by the “in-crowd?”

No classroom should have an “in-crowd”. In-groups cannot exist without a readily defined “out-group”. It is a teacher’s job to foster a classroom environment without such divisions. It is more important than any equation or scientific experiment.

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Posted in Body Image, Bullying | 4 Comments »

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