Detention for wrong book - long sorry

[gleegeek]

My over conscientious, worrier dd (12) has come home from school distraught after receiving her first ever detention today. Apparently she had mistaken her RE book for her science book as they are the same colour. How would your school deal with this? Trying to work out if the teacher went a bit over the top or not...
The teacher said she was sick of handing out 10 min after school detentions (naughty class) so dd has to go a week tomorrow for a 25min after school detention. Poor dd is beside herself. She accepts she made a mistake but just wants to get the detention over and done with, rather than stew about it for a whole week!
Dh has looked at school policy which states level 1 offences like forgetting equipment for first time is note in planner/verbal warning/detain for few minutes if convenient to do so. Level 2 offences are for repeat or serious offences which can result in detention with 24hrs notice.
Dd is so upset and outraged at the teacher - it sounds to me like the teacher flipped and poor Dd caught the weight of her frustration. Dd is panicking the teacher will pick on her now, she is scared and doesn't want to go to school tomorrow
It's so hard when you get punished for a relatively small mistake when she tries so hard to always work hard and be organised...
Do I talk to the school or just put up with it? If it were tomorrow I'd probably ignore it but I know we'll have a week of sleepless nights...
Thank you!

You know best.

Yanbu it was unfair, but the issue here is your DDS lack of resilience. You need to let her take her punishment. Mummy wading in as soon as things get choppy might be the cause of her problem

Probably not because differences in behavioral traits are strongly influenced by the luck of your genes. It's comfortable to believe that life is overwhelmingly what you make it i.e. that a Fretful Mummy modelled and taught their behaviour to the Fretful Child, but it is more likely that when the dice were rolled the child simply ended up with a parent's fretful genes.

That said I'd quite like my DD to get a detention. She could pee all over some of the current fashionable grit & reslience tick-boxes and knows how trivial the punishment is via a couple of saintly friends who Forgot a Book, but DD still seems a bit to terrified of the prospect of a detention. Perhaps getting the experience over with will help.

Things really seem to have changed since my schooldays, which were admittedly a long time ago. Or maybe it's just on Mumsnet. But my parents just weren't that involved in the every day minutiae of my school life. We were often kept in for things like not handing in homework, redoing poor work, general messing about. Sometimes it might not have been fair. I don't think I even mentioned it to my parents most of the time. I don't think I'd have wanted them involved in every aspect of my school life. It was my life, not theirs. (Big things such as reports, parents' evenings, school events etc they were interested in and did involve themselves in.)

My advice to the OP would be to play it down. 'Oh well, it happens, you won't make that mistake again, will you, now what do you want for tea?' There'll always be stuff happening at school that she has to learn to negotiate, and the more you make a big deal of it, the more she'll think it's a big deal.

my parents just weren't that involved in the every day minutiae of my school life.

Absolutely.

In my day, if you mentioned getting into trouble at school, you were guaranteed a clip around the ear at home. Silence was always the best policy.

If you teach over 300 kids one not going her book in to be marked is bloody annoying.

As are over protective parents. Don't email in. Let her take the detention fgs

Exactly what iguana said. She is at secondary school now and she knows the deal.

imagine you only have two complaints are year you can give to school with this really be one of them?