Headteacher criticised my daughter's water bottle

But you can reuse shop bottles. I refused one for three years straight after my honeymoon before it was recycled.

My son's hard plastic bottle has a broken lid after 8m and is already unusable and unrecyclable.

@Suchevilforebodings you could perhaps explain to your daughter that single use plastics are an environmental problem which is why you don't usually use them but that this particular bottle won't harm anything because you are going to recycle it. She might find understanding the problem (and the solution) reassuring.

Presumably a reusable one?

this kind of bottle was "very bad" as it "ends up in the ocean and kills sea turtles" and a "proper" water bottle is much better

What, in his opinion, constitutes a 'proper' water bottle?

What he could have done is the next day gone out and bought a bottle of that type, and used that to demonstrate to the kids why they were bad.

So teaching the lesson, without singling out the individual.

I think the OP actually taking him to task over it will help make him a better teacher in the future.

Like lot's of other jobs every day/interaction is a learning experience. I think he got it wrong on this one. But his attitude towards what he thinks about the situation when it is explained to him will tell a lot about whether he wants to actually become a better educator or not.

Very well put @pikkumyy77 👏🏻

There are two separate issues here

1. should the HT have made a public example of one child on an issue like this causing discomfort and shame to the child? Is it good pedagogy?

2. What should OP do to help her DD shed the shame and recover from the HT i flicting a public humiliation and turning her into an object lesson to the other children?

OP really only asked about the first, I think. And she seems perfectly competent to handle the second which can be handled in lots of different ways.

Interestingly a lot of posters here see it as a great chance to put the boot in and accuse OP and her daughter of being weak/too sensitive/that mother/that child—these are all shame based strategies even if they masquerade in the language of “toughening up” thr child for her own good. Its obvious that a lot of these posters secretly enjoy taking the side of authority and ysing humiliation snd shame to achieve whatever ends they like. But just as no more turtles were injured by one 8 year old being humiliated in front of her vlass no more people will be enlightened or toughened up by this pecking and attacking OP for thinking about how to handle the inept HT in the example. Its really just a fetish for attack that the posters are displaying/-especially the one who accused OP of the ultimate responsibility for the incident because she chose to inflict an “eco warrior” school on her child.

Humiliation by teachers at school was big in my day. I thought we’d moved on a bit, but seemingly not. There are still a fair few teachers who go into the profession for the wrong reasons. Amongst which are being able to take centre stage and throw their weight around on a power trip.

But that's still a really small pool of data, with added personal bias of them being your colleagues. And parents outnumber teachers at least 30 to 1 in most scenarios, so you're working with mismatched samples.

I've worked with schools from a commercial perspective, and early years too. I encountered plenty of evidently bad teachers. My sister liked to tell me I was wrong based on her experience of working in one, high-performing school. She ate her words once she moved, and she acknowledges freely how many poor teachers there are.

Ah thank you!

No, the woman talking to him brought up Charlotte.
He neither initiated the conversation content, nor referred to his daughter.
He was caught on the hop and made an awkward response.
Understandably.

I can think of more than a couple from my experience of going to school as a child. But then I suppose even the rubbish ones were generally capable of putting on a show of being good at their jobs when other adults were watching.

Surely your child knows she normally uses a different bottle, so can bat off the teachers comments. Your daughter probably agrees with her, but you will no doubt have explained to your daughter why you bought it. So that’s that.

Just really needs brushing off.

Yes, put it into another context and it would be like the Head picking on an 8yo for having a poor World Book Day costume.

Ok!

I feel like a HT should be aware that 8 year olds don’t buy their own water bottles.

Your daughter needed a bottle of water on such a hot day.

I think this headmaster needs a gentle reminder that sometimes children take words/actions very badly and it can affect them for a long time.

My school friend died of bulimia and it all stemmed from a new headmaster demanding that all food be eaten at dinner time and she stuffed food she didn’t like in her mouth than spat it out in the loo and it became a habit.

It was a silly comment but definitely one worth an eye roll and no more said rather than a post and further action.

It's not a very nice thing to do, is it? One of my teachers in primary school humiliated me in front of the whole class in a similar way - basically said I was lying about something that happenend outside of school (I don't even remember now what it was). My mum had a word with the teacher, told her my story was true and that I was upset at being called a liar. Teacher was very understanding and said she would take me aside and apologise. My mum told her she could apologise to me the same way she humiliated me, in front of everyone 😂

Fair play, she did!

Are reusable ones best though?

What do you do with yours at the end of their life?
. . . bearing in mind they are non-recyclable?

Perhaps you need to follow the same advice and move on with your day? You seem pretty outraged by this post. Enough to reply multiple times.

Perhaps you need to work on your resilience? Or just be less sensitive?

This really upsets me, this was an important message for kids but the headteacher made it a subject of shame and embarrassment, and punitive that is NOT the way to educate the next generation on vital environmental awareness, also children are powerless, does the HT really think your child has much choice in what she gets sent to school with, like she demanded and chose single use plastic. It's the same as kids getting a row for lateness or uniform issues, it's largely down to the adults in their lives yet the kids get left with the embarrassment, punishment and shame. As a school counsellor I am sick of children being the buffer and scapegoat between adults issues, we need a lot more empathy including towards parents who are sometimes just trying to get through the week as best they can. Things like this can stay with kids.

This. You need to work on her resilience and perfectionist tendancies. Modelling situations where things aren’t quite right etc.

Thirty four years of teaching and I can admit to having coming across a couple of teachers who weren't particularly suited to the job. I could count them on one hand though.

However, the number of problematic parents I've encountered over the years would take me hours to count.

Seriously, we've reached a point where grown adults (who did not even witness this scene) are all up in arms about the head " humiliating" a pupil because he picked up her plastic water bottle and pointed out how they are terrible for the environment.