Why do some teachers have to be SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO defensive?

[hobbgoblin]

My son is always in the naughty books. He is lovely, and always commended for adorable polite behaviour with friends on play dates and so on - all my mummy friends love having him over. However, he is naughty in an attention seeking way or when he feels lacking in confidence.

I liaise with the school regularly and we all know it stems from self esteem issues.

This term he has been excellent to date and was very good for me in the 6 week hols.

All good.

However, last week he had to be reprimanded for catching the Head's foot with his chair as he was being silly. Today he had to stay after school to clear up yogurt from the carpet. Apparently he made a mess with it but it was actually another boy who was to blame really and my DS caught the tail end of some shennanigans. The other boy went home, my DS had to clear up.

So, I decided to ask his teacher what had brought about the sudden downturn in behaviour as was disappointed but also to find out why it was only my DS doing the cleaning punishemnt.

Teacher explained that other boy escaped before she could get him to clean up and that she would be telling him off in the morning. I said fine but surely that this means my DS has been the one getting the punishemnt whilst watching the other child 'get off' with the bad behaviour. I said we all know that some of the behvaiour is due to low expectation of self and also DS's view of what others think of him, i.e. 'always the naughty child'. I said they perhaps ought to have been punished together instead of making DS clean up just because he went and confessed to the teacher whilst the other scarpered(she told me he confessed and soon after realised that it was not actually DS's fault at all).

Anyway despite acknowledging all this about DS being branded naughty and avoiding any dodgy ground re. self esteem and expectation she concludes with "it was my decision and it is up to me how I deal with it and I'm not leaving yogurt on the carpet for the caretaker".

I wanted to ask why she didn't flippin' clean it up then rather than making DS do it because that was easier. I didn't, but it makes me so mad that I go in and raise reasonable questions about what happened in a reasonable manner to be met with the response I was.

What do you lot think?

[mathanxiety]

Well, I'm not in marketing; so much of that concept/ branding stuff is rather silly, imo, unless you're trying to sell soup. But as far as managerial and communication style goes, many school administrators could use a bit of training, maybe some new ideas.

[scaryteacher]

You spoke of an elementary school for one of your dds. Are you in UK? I ask, because many of the schools in the UK don't have an administrator as such. There'll be the Head's PA; the resources manager; the exams officer who may also coordinate reports; the ladies who do the photocopying for you; the finance officer, and sometimes someone who line managers all of these, but at my last school, she was off so often that I've forgotten her title. Sometimes there won't be an overall line manager either, but little offices doping their own thing.

[mathanxiety]

Private (Catholic) school in an urban area (prefer not to ID the area for MN privacy reasons. I would stick out like a sore thumb ). I have a large and very spread out, age-wise, family and some of them have experienced the US ed system(s), both private and public/state.