To complain about teacher weight comments

[jd88123]

My Daughter is in S1 aged 12 and was in biology class. Her teacher made them all weigh themselves.
My DD went through puberty age 10 and has boobs and a bum. Her BMI is 22 which is normal.
She said the teacher told them to "put 50kg down if you don't want to put your real weight as this is normal".
I am fuming about this as my DD is already weight conscious and has said she is going on a diet which I don't condone as she is healthy.
I think the teacher was very irresponsible to comment this and I sent a complaint about it to her guidance teacher which they've said they are looking in to.
I feel it's so wrong for children to compare themselves to each other as everyone is different. It's so damaging to their self esteem and at this age all girls especially have so much pressure to be thin and beautiful from the media.
Would you have complained?

I was injured in a car crash and I was wearing a seatbelt, therefore there’s no point wearing seatbelts

Teacher here. I think it’s completely inappropriate to weigh children in front of each other. There will definitely have been some overweight children in that class who will have found that very upsetting and it could easily lead to bullying.

When I was a slightly chubby 9 year old, we were having a classroom discussion about the school holidays and I said that I had had chocolate Ready Brek at my GP’s house as a treat. The (young male) teacher made a smart remark, “that’s explains a lot, maybe lay of the chocolate Ready Brek.” I can feel the mortification now in my 50s. At the next breaktime, a horrible boy in the class started laughing about it and thereafter bullied me mercilessly. It was the most upsetting time of my life for the next 2 years and all triggered by a bloody teacher humiliating a little girl in front of a class.

YANBU. There is no good reason for a teacher to be weighing children in front of each other. Especially 12 year olds, they are old enough to be body conscious but are at wildly different stages of development.

This. The teacher is trying to personalise a practical lesson to teach an important science concept. Using body weight is not a good choice of variable, and easily avoided, to prevent exactly this sort of reaction.

The ‘normal’ BMI for girls doesn’t account for those that have hit puberty early & developed a ‘full’ figure.

At 11y my DD came up as overweight on the BMI chart for her age. But when I put in the same weight & height but age as 14y, she had a ‘normal’ BMI. These girls who develop early can already feel incredibly self-conscious, so teachers do need to be sensitive to this.

In this case it sounds like the teacher was trying to be helpful but the OPs DD took it that her weight was not ‘normal’ and something to be ashamed of.

I remember having to do this in school for a maths lesson (handling data or something), and the memory has stuck with me decades later. Looking back now, I wasn't overweight, but I was clearly one of the heaviest girls and at the time, like many teenage girls, I was incredibly sad and conscious about my weight. I was mortified when we all had to write our height and weight on the the board.

Basic common sense should tell teachers this kind of thing is a horrible idea.

That's how I read it! She WAS trying to be sensitive to avoid comparisons between individual kids.

Stop teacher bashing - so ridiculous - you get out what you put in - so let’s all put in sensible kids - must be like walking on eggshells being a teacher these days.

I’m a science teacher and this could have been in a couple of lessons. One is when they are doing about weight being different on different planets due to gravity. We always just use a fictional person/object for this. The other one is when you can draw around your foot and work out the pressure that you exert. Again, I never get the kids to actually use their own weight, I normally give them an average to use. The very old curriculum used to get kids to work out their BMI but that’s not been done in classrooms for years. There’s just no need to get the kids to do this in a classroom.

Gosh it’s strange on here. About 75% of posters are empathetic, understanding humans and the other 25% are fucking nasty, or at the very least painfully ignorant. Aren’t people just bizarre.

It was completely unnecessary OP, I would talk to the school and I also appreciate the numerous teachers here who have also commented that it was inappropriate (the weighing AND the comment).

Because I think adults should be careful how they speak so children don't have lifelong insecurities.

But there’s no actual reason for them to do the activity in the first place.

There’s other options to study though. If you are looking at the normal distribution of characteristics then arm span and finger span are less problematic.

I wasn't being entirely serious.

The drama around the weight is being created by parents like OP. The teacher did not single out any child at all and is not in the wrong.The only "fault" is her use of the word "normal". If trauma and triggers are what you are feeding into your girls' heads, you are going to raise very fragile kids.

I think you need to stop whining. The teacher said they didn't need to write their weight down, surely so no-one would be embarrassed.
You and your daughter need to develop resilience.

Did she say average or normal? I suspect she said average and your daughter interpreted it as normal. They don't mean the same though.
Having said that I don't think getting self conscious teenagers to weigh themselves in class was a good Idea.

children should not be weighing themselves in class for any reason although obviously the collection and analysis of data is an important scientific tool.

Just for the sake of accuracy though 50kg is not a relatively low number
50kg is at the upper end of nhs data
For a 12 year old girl it lies between 30 kg and 59kg.

It’s tricky - there’s so much pressure on teachers as is it, and I’d hate to make someone’s life more stressful by reporting this teacher.

However, there’s no doubt teachers comments matter. I had an eating disorder as a teenager and though there were many factors that led to it, one of the factors was a comment made by a teacher when I was around 12. We were in a German lesson learning the words for tall, short, thin, fat etc. And then the teacher pointed at the tallest girl who had to say the German for ‘I am tall’, then the shortest who had to say ‘I am short’ etc. And you can see where I’m going with this - I was the fat child who had to say ‘I am fat’ in front of everyone.

For what it’s worth, looking back objectively I was a chubby child and slightly overweight, but not massive or obese.

They did this to us 40 years ago and the weight was written down on the board. I feel horribly anxious even thinking of it now. I am short, solid and muscley so relatively heavy though I don't look like it. For other people it was even more humiliating. I can't believe they are still doing this knowing what they do about teenagers and eating disorders

though yes, it is unfortunate that she did choose a relatively low number

Apologies if someone else has already pointed this out, but the average weight for a 12 year old girl is 42kg, so 50kg isn't a low number at all.

Absolutely not. The teacher was being very fair by asking them to put down 50kg if they did not want to put down their real weight. She has a lesson to teach and a curriculum to follow. She can't take into consideration every little upset for poor darling child. Also, they need to learn to deal with differentiation. It is all part of being part of a tolerant society and growing into the adult world. I would readjust my lense if I were you, and explain why your daughter has to adapt and change, rather than lodge a complaint in this already overworked blame culture.

Never a more apt username.

Stop telling posters what they should and shouldn't think of this outdated mechanism for teaching data values.

Find myself hoping some of these posters aren’t actually parents.

when my kids did this in biology, the teacher was sensible and said that weighing yourself and measuring your height was optional.