"Isolation booths" - normal?!

We had an isolation room in my high school. It was basically a row of desk round the walls of the room with small desks on top of them on their sides to make the booths.

I ended up there once (for forgetting a textbook, my friend was happy to share hers as we were sat together and on the same page but teacher said no) and you literally done nothing, you could do work if you wanted but the booths were so tiny it was impossible to lean on the desk and write.

"People forget pens all the time! In my office of 30+ year olds there was always a shortage of pens."

I have never seen this in any office I have worked in. Most people have plenty of spare stationary equipment because they engage their brains and understand that stuff runs out or goes missing. Do you work in an office full of gremlins?

If your son goes to school and cannot be responsible for his own equipment, get him into the habit of checking his school bag every Sunday night and ensuring that he has plenty of extra pens, pencils and other things.

As for the inclusion units: We're talking about making a kid sit on a bloody chair and get bored for a bit, not birching them like in Eton in the year 1700.

'Steal theirs'. Ffs autocorrect & your illiterate homophones.

Walking, have you been in a school - or any modern workplace - recently?

We aren't creating pens by pulling a tail feather out of a passing goose & trimming it into shape with a penknife - they are everywhere. Pens are cheap.

So as far as I'm concerned, if as a consequence of some mishap you & your pen have got separated, I would rather you took another pen than I had to listen to your story & decide if it's legit or not.

& if you are grandstanding about having no pen when really you just want a chance to go & chat to Jack in set 1 under cover of 'he borrowed my pen before break', then I'd rather you just took a pen.

'Learned helplessness' kicks in when you are mithering on about pens despite having known since September that the thing to do if you can't find your pen, is to take one of the ones from the helpful jar.

I get cross about students who don't have laptop & charger, turn up late, or faff about rather than going quietly to their seat, sitting down & opening a reading book while I take the register.

(I have a shelf of spare reading material too. Just in case someone has had a crow steal there's to build a nest, or something equally implausible ).

By the time students get to me, they are 11 & up & know perfectly well that they should have a pen in readiness for the moment a teacher asks them to write something down. I'd rather they learned from me that they should check for their pen as they arrive; should it somehow to AWOL, fortunately there's a quick & practical solution to that minor problem, & it's down to them to avail themselves of that solution.

Noble used a phrase there that explains it well, "Learned helplessness".
Purple, you provide them with pens but come down on them hard about the next thing that comes along. Surly all your doing is postponing the problem treating the symptom rather than the cause! Why not just deal with the problem when it first arises? What does it teach when you compensate for one issue and are punitive for another equally as trivial one?

Shouldn't a teacher be teaching the most basic skill of learning. aka bringing in a pen to school to write with?

Yeah, I get the frustration with persistent penless wonders.

We have a system (Engrade - it's ok but slightly cumbersome for recording positives & negatives in lessons).

My take on it is that you'd have to go out of your way to get an equipment negative from me, given aforesaid jar of freely available tatty pens.

So I then take no prisoners with anyone holding up the lesson because they are penless. There's the jar, you know the system, witter at me about pens & you get a negative.

It costs me nothing to provide a jar of discarded pens, whereas I'm absolutely not going down the route of individual pencil cases all round!

I suspect I may be coming at this slightly differently because I'm overseas, in a private school & our faffing is usually 'I need to get my macbook charger back off Omar in set 2' related. Which gets very short shrift.

Pens, meh. Pens I have.

I’ve had a really difficult class this year and have been mulling over the pen thing. I don’t lend out pens, I lend out scraggy pencils. Bonus 1 is that they can’t explode/run out and bonus 2 is when the kid moans about the state of them they get ‘beggars can’t be choosers’.

But what I’ve got is a class where we’ve got to the end of the year and half of them never have a pen. Ever. It’s not that they’re disorganised and forget a pen, or their only pen ran out in science, it’s that they simply cannot be arsed to bring a pen to school and they expect one to land in their lap. And it does. Learned helplessness.

So I’ve avoided penalising kids for SEN/chaotic homelives or whatever, but they’ve learned nothing about organising themselves. It goes for their learning too. They don’t pay attention, then expect me to tell them exactly what to do.

I’ve got a friend in a different school who had a similar class and she bought them all a fully stocked pencil case which they kept in her classroom. A term in and half of them had empty pencil cases.

These kids will turn up for their GCSEs with no equipment and we’ll run around after them again.

So a bit of sympathy for coming down hard on penless wonders.

They were at my school in 2006, they're to stop all the kids egging each other on and having fun when they're being. Punished.

It works for me, Walking, because it just ceases to be a thing.

Occasionally disorganised types can grab a pen. Anyone who is using 'haven't got a pen' as an excuse not to work can grab a pen.

Then, to be honest, I come down like the wrath of God on anyone wittering about pens, still, when the solution is there.

It's not so much pandering. More, as you say, pens are dirt cheap. Pens left lying about are free.

My battles are over charged laptops these days. Pens don't need to be an issue.

There's also a bit of headology involved.

I used to supply a jar of pristine, uniform biros.

They were treated like crap - chucked about, snapped, dumped on the floor & trodden on.

Now I put any discarded pens in the jar & let it be known that I am RECYCLING & that at the end of each term, left over pens (& other stuff - I have jars of discarded rulers, boxes of rubbers etc etc on the same table) will be donated to the orphanage we support (I'm not in the UK).

This actually works - kids don't give a shit if they think it's school bunging them pens etc from some mysterious & inexhaustible supply. Whereas this way they just take one if they need it, & quite often donate stuff because they know they will be buying new pens & whatever over the holidays.

I have a certain sympathy with the whole zero tolerance thing! But for me it kicks in once a student is actually being a knob about not having a pen.

There are pens, take a pen, let's get on.

Type A still needs to learn to be organised and responsible for themselves, rather than relying on their Dad, or Maisie to do it for them. And also learn its perfectly possibly to bring a backup pen in case one dries up. They are so cheap they almost give them away.

Type B will still find an excuse to disrupt the class even if the teacher provides a pen. And what do they learn if there is always someone pandering to their cant be bothered attitude?

Yes purplecrowbar thank god the voice of reason! What sort of teacher cannot understand why some children may not be organised?

I was disorganised at school never did my homework, forgot pens etc. My father commited suicide when I was 13 so our house wasn't terribly organised and things like stationery came way down the list.

Walkingdeadfangirl you actually make me want to cry for it was teachers like you that made my already difficult childhood almost unbearable. Give yourself a clap.

There are two types of penless students.

Type A would honestly rather they did have a pen. They want to participate in the lesson, or at least stay out of trouble & not have me grumbling at them. But they stayed at dad's house last night & neither he nor they remembered to grab school bag when he collected them from mum's. Or they lent their spare pen to Maisie in Physics & now their other pen has run dry. Or they've stashed their bag in their locker before lunch, gone straight to PE & then dashed to my classroom without remembering to go back to the locker outside their form room 3 floors away. Or they've had their bag nicked & hidden by a Type B student.

Type B probably do have a pen somewhere. However, they aren't really on board with the whole 'going to lessons equipped & ready to learn' business. They quite like the idea of winding everyone up by mooching about aimlessly for 10 minutes trying to borrow a pen. They aren't necessarily horrible kids in any way; it's just that they don't much fancy having to sit at a desk & do writing. (They also tend to be chronic toilet requestors). If they do have a pen, they will often fiddle with it until it comes apart in their hands covering them with ink, which is a double win - no pen AND you can insist on leaving the lesson to wash your hands!

So I'm pragmatic about it. Jar of pens, on the table by the door. Don't have a pen? Just grab one. Now let's crack on.

This works with both types of penless students, although only one type is remotely grateful!

I don't mind the odd forgotten/broken pen. Some are consistent offenders, never have them....always have a fully charged phone, trainers etc. No pen though. Every lesson. Grinds my gears.

People forget pens all the time! In my office of 30+ year olds there was always a shortage of pens. Perhaps if they had been put in isolation for forgetting their pen at school then they would be a bit more 'organised' as an adult.

I dont want disruptive students ruining the education of 29 other children in the classroom, never mind my DC. The idiots who disrupt learning because they have forgotten a pen, planner or not done their homework should be removed from the class immediately. If you learn that lesson in Y7 you wont have a problem with it in Y8-11.

The problem is when schools dont nip these problems in the bud and allow children to act out their whole school lives, destroying thousands of learning hours.

MissMarplesKnitting

But that is the insidious thing about the inclusion agenda, MissMarple. It implies - nay, insists - that it is possible for a person to extend their time, reach and efficacy indefinitely. And it isn't. You are only one person. There are limits to what you can do.

It's fantastic for some kids. But for others it's a nightmare, and for them it's just so unfair. I teach some ASD pupils who should get so much more of my time but me in a room of 32 pupils makes it hard to give everyone the attention they need, never mind someone who needs me for more of that. I do my best, but I can't help but feel I let some of them down.

MissMarplesKnitting

I agree. I am not a supporter of inclusion, as, when it comes down to it, I see too many kids let down by it.

And also one has to question how effective inclusion is where a pupil cannot access the curriculum, and whose needs lead to poor behaviour. They deserve an environment better suited to their needs than most schools can provide on the budgets they have.

drnectarine

I don't disagree with this, because the inability to access the curriculum is certainly going to be a factor in exacerbating poor behaviour. BUT that poor behaviour is, more often than not, still a choice. When teachers have exhausted strategies to support a child with SEND who still has control over his or actual behaviour, at some point you have to stop making it an excuse.

And I say that whilst fully supporting the idea that some children aren't able to control certain behaviours, and where that is the case, shouldn't be punished for them.

Kids with SEN are far more likely to be excluded that kids without.
The majority of kids who are in isolation will most likely have SEN.

Our isolation unit is used for one day internal exclusion.

So in lessons they have a system involving warning, then demerits and detention. The idea is at each stage the pupil is given chance to reflect and change behaviour. Most do. They get demerits for forgetting equipment, nothing more. Those are separated from behaviour ones.

So by the time we get past giving a detention, SLT are called to then remove as pupil is consistently not following instructions etc.

We have to provide written report on each removal as 'evidence'.

Dangerous/reckless behaviour would be immediate removal but I've never had to do that. Occasionally it's happened but not that often.

Obviously we are all aware of SEND pupils, and treat them accordingly eg. I have a pupil with ASD prone to outbursts but I wouldn't punish them I the same way.

Whoops. Fat fingers.

Are you at the Michaela school?
What do you think should be done with children who have additional needs?

@Clairetree1 are you at the

I'm not in favour of zero tolerance behaviour policies. But 10+ kids not having a pen at the start of a lesson is disruptive. Low level disruption is what stops learning. Not big violent outbursts, swearing at staff. Those are rare in most schools.

They aren't just "annoying" they are disruptive. It stops kids from learning, kids that nearly always bring a pen, nearly always do their homework, nearly always do as they are told. In any lesson they spend at least a quarter to a third waiting for the disruption to stop.