Teacher threw away my DDs bracelet and I'm cross about it - should I complain?

[conniedescending]

Title says it all really, she forgot to take her bracelet off yesterday and the teacher saw it and chucked it in the bin!!She only told me on the way to school this morning and teacher wasn't there to have a word with (was in a meeting apparently)

so should I ask her today or just seethe quietly?

Oh for heaven's sake, the OP isn't objecting to school rules, she's objecting to the teacher binning her dd's precious bracelet. I doubt very much the school rule is that children's possessions should be thrown in the bin. OP would have been fine with it if the bracelet had been confiscated, I bet.

The child would have learnt a lesson if the teacher confiscated the bracelet and was told that she could have it back in a week or whatever. To throw it in the bin is wrong. This is a 7 year old. Yes she needs to learn and she will but this was totally OTT and the teacher was in the wrong.

SLUG - I had a teacher like you in Grammar school. He used to throw my work on the floor. All he succeeded in doing is making me feel worthless and humiliated and I then dropped his subject. Do you have a chip on your shoulder about chn with 'special circumstances' as the op hasn't mentioned any special circumstances at all.

wHAT SORT OF SCHOO. DES HAVE A RULE THA FORBID SCARVES WITH THIS WEATHER? hugh caps, sorry!

In what possible universe does an adult breaking the LAW (by forcibly taking something that does not belong to her and throwing it away) teach a child anything about the importance of obeying rules, other than that bigger people can break them with impunity? If you are fond of rules, don't break them by stealing other people's property.

No issues with confiscating the bracelet, or keeping it confiscated for the day or the week or the term. But when you start stealing (and yes, it is stealing -- emotive choice of word, perhaps, but given we're behaving on this thread as though a 7 year old wearing a bracelet to school is a threat to civilisation as we know it I can be emotive, and deliberately and permanently taking away someone else's property is stealing) children's Christmas presents then you are Wrong. And if you're doing it when you are attempting to teach children about right and wrong then you are both Wrong and Seriously Misguided.

I went to a very strict school where uniform regulations were enforced with vigour. For e.g. we had 2 school badges to pin to our uniform and if you forgot/lost one, you had to go to the deputy head and get a note before you left the chool gates to go home and then return to the Dep H the next day to show that you had fixed the prob and get your name removed from the "gate book".
The reason for the stictness was simple - it taught discipline and the importance in taking pride in your appearance and in the history and traditions of the school of which you were a member.
Anything that you wore that was not uniform was confiscated immediately - BUT it was returned to you at the end of term if you remembered to collect it. I think this seems fair as most people seem to agree.
I think I actually got a lot out of the expereince and still judge schools by their students' neat and tidy appearance in the street, and I DON'T think it is healthy or helpful to teach a child to disobey school rules unless there is a very good reason why they are WRONG (not just because they seem arbitrary).
In the OPs position I don't think I would go to the head despite the fact that I think what the teacher did was wrong. I think I would write a letter to the teacher explaining your position clearly and stating that you are very dissaopinted in her over-reaction to the situation. I think making her feel guilty about it will be a strong enough rebuke and less damaging to the op's and her daughter's relationship with the school and the teacher.

They aren't allowed to wear scarves on the playground? That's mad!

Herbie, I think that is a good example of a rule that has no sound basis AND there is a good reason why it should be challenged.
If they said all students need to wear only blue scarves then there is no good reason to challenge that.

No, I bin work that is plagarised because it is not the student's work, it is someone elses. Students are told repeatedly that they must not plagarise. They are demonstrated the correct way to quote, how to reference and how to paraphrase. This lesson is endlessly repeated, especially before the submission date for assignments.

Legally, I cannot give marks for work that is not a student's own. So it is binned. If the student feel humiliated by this it is usually because they know full well what they have done and have been caught out. I never bin original work, however bad it is, I mark it with as much care and attention as I can, looking for any way to give marks.

It is not unusual for the least capable students in my classes to gain the highest marks in final assessments. This is because they tend to be the ones who actually listen to instructions and hand in their own work.

I don't have an issue with children with special circumstances. What I have an issue with, borne out of years of experience, is those who use the term as a 'get out of jail free' card. I could give you hundreds of examples, like the student in an external eamination who kept on raising his hand and asking for help then kicked up a tantrum, disrupting 300 other students, wailing "But I've got family problems!", or the one who would cry racism any time any teacher (black, white or any shade in between) gave him a poor mark.

May I point out here that according to certain adverts from a child abuse charity destroying the work or property of a child is abuse.If a child told a teacher that their parents were doing such things as throwing away precious items etc the techer would immediately be concerned.
I think that the teacher in the op's post should be disiplined by the school for misuse of her position to bully and terorise a young child.
As for some of the comments on here from teachers I'm reminded of my own days at school and why I thank goodness that I now don'tt put my children through the horror of the education system.

I totally agree with herbitea some rules are silly. I think that the OP is finding it hard that the bracelet has been binned (I for one would be very unhappy too), not the fact that her DD was told off for not applying the rules.

Bubbaluv, fussiness about tiny details of dress is not the only way to instil respect for others. I grew up in Scandinavia, where there was no school uniform whatsoever. We read with interest about the discipline problems in English schools. We were polite to teachers because we recognised that they were human beings, not because they could make us wear a particular kind of badge.

Our local secondary which has just experiencing riots has a far more formal dress code than dd's school which has been noted favourable by Offsted for its good behaviour.

X posted

Sorry, just saw your second post.

slug - there's a huge difference between binning a plagiarised essay and a child's bracelet. It's really not the same thing at all. Surely you can see that?

Exactly MadamAnt! And a huge difference between a 7 year old and a secondary student!

Cory, I didn't go to school in England and and am generally appauled at the scruffy way students present themselves in their school uniforms here. Obviously it's not the only way to instill the concept of respect, but nor is it a bad one.

Herbie, the reason why insisting that everyone wears balck scarves (for eg) is to stop the fashion parade that can develop when you allow students to accessories thier school uniforms without restriction. This can be very humiliating for poorer children (or children with parents with no style ).

Sorry about the spelling - can't blame school for that!

Cory, that was probably because during the OFSTED inspection all the badly behaved students were quietly shipped out on a school trip out of the inspector's gaze. It's a common trick

While I realise I come across as a raving disciplinarian, it's worth pointing out that one of the reasons I left teaching was because a student I had a run in with over classroom behaviour stabbed another student later that day. The realisation that he was carrying a knife at the time he was in conflict with me was just the final drop in the ocean. A disciplined class is a safe environment, something many of my students rarely had, and were grateful for.

Yet these students had parents who loved them and wanted the best for them. They had just never stood up to their children and made them face the consequences of their behaviour. I often got asked, by the parents, how I did it, how I managed to make their child behave when they couldn't.

I know it seems an extreme extrapolation, but surely it is better to make the child understand that there are consequenes for actions when they are seven than try to explain it to them when they habitually carry knives around as a teenager.

Couldn't the consequence have been that the teacher took the bracelet from her without binning it?

Slug - discipline (e.g. in the form of confiscation) is fine. Throwing away someone's belongings is not fine. You seem keen to teach children rght from wrong, and yet you cannot make this basic distinction yourself.

I went to a strict independent boarding school. If we wore anything unregulation, it would be forcibly removed from us (e.g. jewellery other than plain gold or silver studs; hairbands any colour but black or brown; etc.). I mean forcibly removed: I watched as a schoolfriend had a tartan scrunchy dragged from her head (causing her to bend backwards as her hair was pulled) amongst other scenes.

It was strict as hell. We knew the rules, sometimes flaunted them, usually we obeyed.

But all of the confiscated items were returned at the end of term.

We were quite scared of some of our teachers; but we never dreamed that they would throw away our property.

Discipline and fairness are not mutually exclusive.