Right… so teachers must carefully explain the difference between being in pain and being injured, despite the point being that there are too many interruptions happening for learning/the particular task to be done because these are small children who are not to be treated as adults. But, also, teachers must speak to children exactly as they would speak to an adult…? One would expect not to be this abrupt with adults, because adults wouldn’t need to be told this in the first place. Would you tell an adult to ‘go and wash your hands for dinner’? No, it would be rude and abrupt, but we do say that to our children because they don’t know yet how to behave in certain situations and won’t automatically go and wash their hands.
The reality is, in a busy classroom of 30 6-year-olds, you have to sometimes firmly shut down the interruptions and this kind of instruction usually comes after they’ve already tried the usual range of ‘everybody needs to be focusing on their work’/‘we need to work now, not ask questions’ gentle guidance. If it had been me, he wouldn’t have been given the chance to say it because when his hand went up, I would have asked him: ‘Are you in pain?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you injured?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you need the toilet?’ ‘No.’ ‘Fantastic! Hand down then. Now, let’s all get on with our work.’ (Said with a smile.) No reprimands needed, no derailing the lesson, and he’s helped me reiterate my expectations! However, it’s taken me 20 years of teaching to learn to handle things that way - to kindly but firmly take back control of a classroom is really difficult. Many people struggle to get one or two children to do what they ask, but then expect that a teacher can get thirty children to do what they ask every time without ever losing their cool or so much as upsetting them (especially hard when they’re the centre of their parents’ world and aren’t used to being expected to compromise their wants).
Nobody should be ranting/shouting at a 6-year-old but you need to be very sure that’s what happened first and not just a firm ‘telling off’. OP, I’d be more concerned about his general unhappiness and try to get to the bottom of that - it may need a conversation with the teacher, but it also may need to be a conversation with your child about how school changes each year as you grow up a bit - you need to balance being alert to a genuinely poor classroom environment/serious problems with the teacher(s) and encouraging your son to be resilient when things are just less enjoyable/fun and harder work. Year 2 should still be somewhat relaxed and they are still little so there should be plenty of active learning/crafts/physical activity, etc. but there will also start to be more occasions of quiet/silent work. (E.g. I would ask, when he says they had to work in silence, whether they had been asked to work quietly before the teacher asked for silence? In which case, they probably weren’t managing ‘quiet’, which is subjective, so were asked for ‘silent’, which is clear. That can be a way to build towards more appropriately quiet working. Don’t ask how long they had to work in silence, but instead ask what they were doing when working in silence - you can judge how long the task(s) might have taken. I’d be surprised if they can keep 6-year-olds actually silent for more than 5 minutes at a time unless they’re sat listening to the teacher (and even then!)