Maypole, what's the difference between a grown man hitting a child and a child hitting another child?
What's the difference between a grown man getting off on some level from the infliction of violence on a child and a child doing the same thing?
Why can't children learn when one or two children are being disruptive? And imo, clicking a pen may be annoying but it is not disruptive -- I have seen 'disruptive' at the secondary school I attended. Some classes had over half the children not even open books and never stop talking, some children turned up to school hung over, some decided that throwing furniture, books and supplies was the way to behave in class and kicking in lockers was fun after school before the building was cleared. A fistfight once broke out in an art class I was in. A potato was shoved into the tailpipe of an English teacher's car.
I spent my first year of secondary in grotty prefabs where there wasn't room to swing a cat. Five of the students who shared my prefab with me in that first year of secondary school went on to university; four went to prison, and that was from just one of the six prefabs where we worked. The other prefabs produced similar numbers. The rest who fell somewhere between prison and university are productive members of society.
There comes a point where you have to expect your children to put their ears back and do what they are supposed to do whether the teacher is paying attention to them or not. No school is ever going to be perfect, and there is no workplace where you are going to encounter a whole fleet of colleagues who are all pulling their weight, have no annoying tics, etc.