AIBU to think teachers should be respectful to pupils?

[mammaplay]

DS 11 has just started secondary school. He has mild SEN needs which the school are aware of (effects speed of work and presentation).
Today in front of the class, the maths teacher screwed up his worksheet, threw it in the bin and simply handed him a new worksheet (with no verbal communication) as he'd made a minor mistake in not leaving enough space on the page.
AIBU to think this type of behaviour from teachers is a bit 'old school' and unnecessary, or am I being completely precious about my little snowflake?

YABU.

Your thread title should have read: AIBU to think this teacher should have been respectful to my son.

But then you might not have got so many replies as when massively generalising from one teacher and one action.

HolySh¡t
your poor DS OP...that perfectly illustrates the rampant adultism rife in schools-disgusting especially considering hisSEN.. id be expecting far better behaved adults.Sadly its a common theme-whilst constantly preaching"respect,manners&work ethic"! Its also why i chose an alternative route when my DC were little-what i witnessed from the PE teacher at after school club through to the handsy belligerent old mysogenist assistant principal at our zoned secondary..urghhh.Think about homeschooling or distance ed-mine were miles happier/more relaxed&excelled without the institutionalised punitive school system to stifle their spirits&love of learning..There were many meet up groups&they mixed well with kids of all ages rather than30-35of the same year😂give the teacher a mouthful &ask if that is respectfulbehaviour-itll give them something to think about.Good luck

I think students should respect teachers but in this case the teacher was being a bit odd tbh...your son made an honest mistake and the teacher ruined his sheet...very childish.

give the teacher a mouthful &ask if that is respectfulbehaviour-itll give them something to think about.Good luck

Probably not the best advice on here OP.

malificent7

The teacher didn’t ‘ruin’ anything. The sheet wasn’t fit for the learning it was intended to facilitate, so the teacher threw it away. End of story.

HolySh¡thmm
your poor DS OP...that perfectly illustrates the rampant adultism rife in schools-disgusting especially considering hisSEN.. id be expecting far better behaved adults.Sadly its a common theme-whilst constantly preaching"respect,manners&work ethic"! Its also why i chose an alternative route when my DC were little-what i witnessed from the PE teacher at after school club through to the handsy belligerent old mysogenist assistant principal at our zoned secondary..urghhh.Think about homeschooling or distance ed-mine were miles happier/more relaxed&excelled without the institutionalised punitive school system to stifle their spirits&love of learning..There were many meet up groups&they mixed well with kids of all ages rather than30-35of the same year😂give the teacher a mouthful &ask if that is respectfulbehaviour-itll give them something to think about.Good luck

What an advert for home ed. 🙄

I don’t think I’d complain at this stage in the year. Rushed teacher trying to get through work set for the class? See how it goes for the next week before acting.

So again, what do you expect to be done with it?

Leave it with the kid to dispose of? Take it back to his/her desk to dispose of later? Fold it neatly and quietly put it in the bin? That way no one else would have known (except those sat immediately next to the pupil).

There was no need to make a big, noisy, song and dance about it which meant the whole class knew.

It's that kind of attention-seeking, out of control behaviour which makes a pupil's social anxiety worse and encourages bullying behaviour.

echt
Or even better post to the education threads asking if it's worth seeking clarity on a situation and if so what's the best way to raise it.

Of course that would be no fun. It's much better to generalise about teachers and lack of respect on AIBU, not consider that there's probably a lot more to the situation with the aim of getting ridiculous replies of the usual "teachers are so mean and bully children" type.

Kazzy
If we're expected to put paper in the bin/recycling in a delicate way to avoid being considered bullying then there needs to be a bit of toughening up going on.

I wander round the room picking up left over sheets, they get scrumpled in my hands and thrown in the recycling. Equally if someone needs a new extract to annotate, I give them one and bin the old one.
There's no drama, no attention seeking, no out of control behaviour. I just happen to put pieces of paper in the bin like any other person (who doesn't go around gently folding things for fear of being described as out of control )

I love how the simple act of binning some paper has been turned into some monumentally terrifying out of control dramatic behaviour.

There was no need to make a big, noisy, song and dance about it which meant the whole class knew.

No one danced a jig. No one appears to have “known” about it (as if there was anything to know). Some toughening up indeed. What a palaver.

As a non-teacher who grew up during the learning styles period, I now think the reason learning styles became the in-thing had to do with undiagnosed special needs. I was a reflector or whatever; that's the one that learns through reading material, copying it out into detailed notes and writing essays and struggles with aural information. Other people in the class learnt best through spoken explanations. A few years later, it turned out I have auditory processing disorder and it turned out that the people who "didn't take anything in when they read it because of their learning style" had dyslexia.

There were a lot of people with issues like that flying under the radar, so no wonder learning styles became so fashionable, and this is why it persists today. Everyone who's ever been in a classroom for more than five minutes has encountered a "kinaesthetic learner", i.e. a normal-looking kid who doesn't do very well when working from the course book, but seems to excel at the practical side of the subject if you show them what to do...

Everyone who's ever been in a classroom for more than five minutes has encountered a "kinaesthetic learner", i.e. a normal-looking kid who doesn't do very well when working from the course book, but seems to excel at the practical side of the subject if you show them what to do...

That's not what a kinaesthetic learner is, unfortunately and why research has debunked these myths.

There are many articles and documents explaining why. The link below shows a summary:

www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/four-reasons-avoid-learning-styles-one-alternative

In a nutshell, it is the tasks themselves that guide to a particular way of teaching, not the person. You wouldn't learn to ride a bike by just watching a youtube video and you wouldn't learn how to solve quadratic equations by doing a play about it.

You make an interesting point about SEND needs but 'learning styles' as described, are not for differentiation.

I agree kitty
Often learning styles did more harm than good too.
E.g. if you're someone who finds reading difficult then of course on a quiz asking your preferences you're not going to say you love reading and learn best reading.

Under learning styles teachers then had to take your preferences and cater to them, and in doing so actively prevent you mastering the skills you are weaker at, actively preventing you from overcoming barriers because you had a learning style so cater to the learning style rather than deal with the issue. (I still wonder how many dyslexic students and students with SpLD fell through the net under this approach).

Abandon learning styles and you get "Child A finds reading tough, so for this task I'll explicitly teach a range of reading strategies that they can use, I'll support them in taking notes, I'll break the reading down and put questions and summary tasks at regular intervals rather than at the end". In this situation Child A learns strategies that will help them achieve their potential and they can use in a range of subjects.

Under learning styles, Child A would be told to discover the learning by walking around the room to collect slips with bullet points on and glue them in their book (where they'd not be in a logical order, they'd collected the information in an illogical order so struggled to connect their knowledge and had also not been taught anything useful)

Everyone who's ever been in a classroom for more than five minutes has encountered a "kinaesthetic learner", i.e. a normal-looking kid who doesn't do very well when working from the course book, but seems to excel at the practical side of the subject if you show them what to do...

What will happen is that child may well excel at football or another task involving co-ordination or movement, but no amount of changing reading, spelling or arithmetic to make it “kinaesthetic” will allow them to learn those things. They are not kinaesthetic activities, they are cerebral. If the child struggles with them, he or she needs spaced practise, recollection and retrieval, and lots of it.

That's not what a kinaesthetic learner is, unfortunately and why research has debunked these myths.

Sorry, I didn't double-check how my post read. I don't mean that such a child actually is a kinaesthetic learner. I mean that it was my observation that such kids were used as evidence that kinaesthetic learners and reflectors and theorists were naturally-occurring phenomena. It doesn't really matter what a kinaesthetic learner is, so long as people think they know what it is and that they've encountered it for themselves.

In hindsight, there are a lot of more applicable terms. Like "dyslexic", f'r instance.

@Kazzyhoward - exactly - I really don't think some teachers realise how their actions can enable and reinforce a bullying culture - have seen it so many times working as a School Secretary in Primary.

TBH unless you have a child with any kind of learning difficulty really have no idea of the anxiety levels - parents need to be listened to and supported.

TBH unless you have a child with any kind of learning difficulty really have no idea of the anxiety levels - parents need to be listened to and supported.
Absolutely no idea at all. You're right. It's not like staff might also have similar experiences. We're not parents of school aged children so have no idea.
Point taken. In future I shall ignore the fact I've had experiences of anxiety since my teens because clearly I know nothing about anxiety or teaching and should seek advice and guidance on how best to dispose of paper in my classroom in future.

Or I'll do my job, work my backside off supporting students, backing parents and helping them navigate what can be a really hard system to get around and still manage to take no crap when someone wants to micromanage how I dispose of worksheets (all of which I've managed to do for years despite having "no idea" about what I'm doing).

Everyone who's ever been in a classroom for more than five minutes has encountered a "kinaesthetic learner"

Pretty sure this ‘learning style’ theory was debunked a few years ago already.

No, LolaSmiles we have no clue. None of us have kids, especially those with SEN 🙄

We are just there to bully kids, and have no clue at all.

Oh yes we're all good for nothings without care and compassion. We couldn't possibly have children of our own, or for that matter a life outside of school. I'm surprised any of us are even humans that may occasionally display emotion.

OP - just talk to the teacher. Ask them - from their point of view- what happened. There really is no need for all this angst.

Unless similar incidences occur over time -don’t do this. People get very upset about patients wasting valuable NHS time - I wish parents wasting teacher’s time was frowned upon in the same way. To me this is the same as showing up at your GP’s with a cold...

@puffhuffle5 - I completely agree with your anology, I wouldn't bother either (as a teacher I would also do a massive eye roll!) But OP is saying she's going to store it up til parents eve and then apparently give advice to the teacher which would just be hugely cringey on all counts. So given that info I think she should find what happened absolutely bloody nothing so she can move on.

You are all extremely defensive & don't seem able to empathise from the comments on here tbh

But OP is saying she's going to store it up til parents eve and then apparently give advice to the teacher which would just be hugely cringey on all counts.
I missed that pearl of wisdom.

The best thing would be to either:

1. Calm down, stop creating a catastrophe (so avoid ridiculous claims that some posters have suggested about it being bullying, dramatic, attention seeking, out of control), call the teacher for a calm, open minded and reasonable discussion.

Or

1. Calm down, move on and avoid being the sort of parent who spends each day grilling their child seeking more drama and issues (which in turn seems to create anxiety and stress in the child because they then learn from home that they should expect issues in school).

Alas, i fear sensible and reasonable advice isn't what's been sought here. It's much better to hope others will jointl the fury over a non issue.

How are people being defensive? Where did you get that from?

'Dont seem to be able to enpathise' and 'rampant adultism' - this thread is comedy gold.