Apparently a few kids were caught smoking on school grounds the other day. At a primary school! That is, these were 4th, 5th, 6th graders smoking on the playground. If this isn't shocking enough, the parents were confronted by one of the teachers about their kids' behaviour and the parents said that they give their kids cigarettes all the time because they're so stressed out at school. Holy. Moley.
This triggered a huge debate amongst a few of the teachers. The debate topic was: discipline. From being able to hit a kid (including where to hit and how hard) to how much yelling you can possibly do as a teacher, these teachers had differing views. Some were very old fashioned about their preferred sort of discipline (think Spanish Inquisition), and others were more lenient. However, the most lenient of the teachers still insisted that it was perfectly okay to whack a kid in the back of the head if they weren't following directions! As much as I wanted to do that to some of the kids I've had the "pleasure" of having to work with, I would absolutely never hit a kid.
Where did I fit into this conversation? Well, I didn't. I was actually kind of afraid to say anything after hearing what remains of the Spanish Inquisition's torture methods in the disciplinary methods preferred by some teachers.
Holy moses!
ReplyDelete