Topical Teaching

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.