"They've made two girls unhappy to make one boy happier."

[GreeboIsMySpiritAnimal]

So said my DD, on her return from school having today, having been separated from her female partner, whom she got on really well with and worked well with, so that a boy, who didn't get on with his partner, could be sat with her instead.

It just seems like a microcosm of society in general. Let's make a large number of women unhappy, so that a small group of men can be happier.

Then deal with the bully surely ? Not pass them on to another child?

There's far to many schools doing this whoke boy girl boy girl seating plan thing for it to be a coincidence

Absolutely.

My PGCE was in computer science, my first placement there were no girls in the GCSE classes, in my second about 1/3 of the class were girls.

The girls were all in girl boy girl boy arrangements, when I was allowed to do my own seating plan I put them all together because all the boys at some time had been next to another boy but the girls had not.

I remember this from my day, I don't think I managed to positively influence a single badly behaved person I was paired with. I'd just do my own work as best I could in that situation.

Teacher did this to me in year 5. Put me next to the worst behaved boy because I was a clever, nice girl. He whispered and jiggled and irritated me until one day I went absolutely ballistic and stood up and screamed and screamed at him in front of the whole class. The angriest outburst of my whole life. May have hit him with a softish book, but it was all a red blur. An extremely unexpected thing for me to do. I remember the frozen horror while they all watched. I was very surprised that I didn't actually get into trouble. I like to think that both he and the teacher were better for the fright they got. He was moved, and next year (same teacher) we sat in ability groups, which was much better. I certainly was better for realizing that I could also be BAD sometimes and tell penis-owners to fuck the hell off.

I remember this from my day, I don't think I managed to positively influence a single badly behaved person I was paired with

I have a couple of friends who moved their kids for this reason. No sooner would one kid calm down then they would hand her another one and it started all over again.

Teachers were thrilled at their easier to handle class. Meanwhile the child was in tears at home every day ...

In dds case the teachers got bloody greedy and sandwiched her between 2

She was small at 10/11 so they were alot bigger than her and they just shouted at eachother through her ears and she had to work on her lap as tgey took up all the space

This happened to me at school! It hasn’t scarred me or anything, but I still remember the injustice!

I was sensible, my best friend was also, we were split so I could sit next to a naughty boy and be a “good influence”. He was gross. He used to loudly fart on purpose to get a reaction, and pick his nose and wipe it on the table near me.

I have no memory of whether or not I was a “good influence”, but I missed sitting next to my friend!

Dd3 is always sat next to the naughty boy in class because she’s good. I had the same thing all through primary and it annoyed me because I never got to sit with my friends. During my 11+ I had to sit opposite the nastiest boy in class. We both had long legs and he kicked me throughout the maths exam! My mum was furious because my legs were blue with bruises.

He’s been in prison for years for armed robbery and none of us are surprised.

The concept of pairing/grouping more able with less able students is down to the idea that explaining/teaching is a good way to cement your own knowledge and understanding of something. It's a popular trend among teaching and 'mastery' in education at the moment. Not entirely sure I buy into it (I think it depends massively on the subject and the kids in a particular class) but anyway, I think the problem comes more when brighter or better behaved children are paired with disruptive or difficult children. This is a totally different situation (though of course it may often overlap).

I am very careful in my classes not to use the 'good girls' to dilute or babysit the 'naughty boys'. If that means I end up with a group of more difficult kids seated near each other, so be it. I refuse to have kids who are trying to get on with things and work together well brought down by those who won't cooperate. But like I said, that's behaviour rather than ability. I do sometimes put kids of very different abilities together.

Oh and I should add - totally agree that using girls in the way described in many of these posts is horrid and yes, it's an example of girls having to get on with things while boys are pandered to and accommodated.

totally agree that using girls in the way described in many of these posts is horrid and yes

And what about using boys to buffer loud/disruptive/less able girls?

Oh and I’ve just remembered (because this sitting next to disruptive kids thing happened to me a lot)! I was sitting next to a another badly behaved boy the day of some important exam (maybe year 6 sats? I don’t remember). It was multiple choice and he dared me to colour in random choices, like he was about to. And - for some idiotic reason - I did.

I obviously didn’t do well in that test and my parents kicked off at me (strict family). It had no baring on my life or secondary school overall, so maybe it wasn’t sats, but I don’t think the practice of sitting “good” kids next to badly behaved kids necessarily works!

I totally agree this happens, but as a teacher we have very few things we can actually do to minimise poor behaviour (I know behaviour wasn't the issue in the OP, but when we do new seating plans that's usually why) We are basically controlling with smoke and mirrors and don't always get a positive reception from home when we pass on the problems. Shuffling people around works and there's little else we can do. I wouldn't use the same child in the same way in two plans, but obviously I don't know what happens elsewhere in the school.

I would sometimes do this when I was teaching. The theory behind it is it helps both the more able child - in this case you daughter - and the weaker student

I was the more able child in this scenario. I used to just do the work myself for whoever they'd lumped me with, so I wouldn't have to be bothered with them slowing me down. Which they probably did find helpful but I'm sure wasn't quite what the teacher intended.

I did that too. And for the teachers above, what I learned from this was that I should never ever ask for help with anything. I was the one doing the helping so I shouldn't need it.

Even now, I feel shame around asking for help with anything at all and it has held me back.

Your DD learning would be much more disrupted if there wasn’t a seating plan and everyone sat next to a friend- equally they would spend for ever after each break trying to work out where to sit, and the shy quiet child would stand there not knowing where to sit and would look embarrassed and sad.

I’ve grown up in a country where sitting plans are never used. What you describe has never happened.
The few times when things were more strained WAS when we were told to sit in specific groups (for whatever reason).

@Persipan, yep exactly what ds1 has always done. With him also moaning how much of a pain it was because he was doing all the work on his own.

The other factor is often the good child will have been badly treated by the misbehaving child. It doesn't make us very sympathetic to their academic struggles. Pairing a bright child and a nice but struggling one wouldn't be so bad.

I was another more able pupil, throughout school I was paired with disruptive boys or girls. At secondary I was paired with a horrible nasty bully of a boy in sciences. He would sneak his phone in and play porn clips, not for himself, just to watch my discomfort and embarrassment.

These pairings just made it harder for me to concentrate and learn so I missed important information, and like fuck was I going to help the person next to me who couldn’t be arsed to actually listen or work anything out themselves and thought they could just copy my work. Why should my hard work, made harder by their twatting about be of benefit to them when they were essentially teacher-sanctioned bullying me?

Using quieter children, whether boys or girls, to save the teachers from having to actually deal with poor behaviour is such bad practice.

But wrt your op, girls have always been the ones to get the shittier deal in pretty much every aspect of life and are conditioned to accept this. So it’s great your daughter is recognising and questioning it. She’s right, two girls shouldn’t be made unhappy just for the happiness of one boy.

There's a big difference between "that boy chats non-stop with his mates but will be quiet next to Lucy" and "I'll ignore that boy watching porn on his phone next to Lucy".
I'd make a student put their phone away but I also would have no idea what was on the phone unless someone told me, or I'd walked up right behind them. That's disgusting behaviour and he would have the phone confiscated and his parent called if he were in my class.

How does one know the boy is ''happy''?

I was also the bright child who was sometimes sat next to the low achievers. It’s such total crap that the more able child gets anything out of it. I had the kind of personality where I was impatient and dismissive of the less able child. I received no help to improve these aspects of my personality or my behaviour - we were just left to it. I was good at self protecting (thanks to a tough mother) but I look back and think I must have harmed other children’s self esteem in the process.

The ONLY way this works is if there are students who are trained to mentor properly. Just imagining that it will all just happen is actually dismissive of teaching as a profession. Is an 8/9/10 year old really going to be able to support and guide the less able child with behaviour problems with no guidance about how? Teaching - and mentoring - is a nuanced and complex skill in which no child is an expert.

Much better to isolate on a separate table the misbehaving pupils, sitting them singly, and then concentrate TA support on the lower ability tables. Then raise confidence by ensuring lower ability tables regularly answer questions that they have prepared answers for, and getting them to lead bits of the class that you know they will flourish in. Alternatively, regularly change where people sit so no one suffers. It also means particular dynamics won’t be ingrained between certain pupils, which helps counter the self-adoption of a learning identity (ie the joker, the disruptor, the lazy one etc) as they can’t as easily form that binary relationship (“I’ll sit back and do nothing while you do all the work”) if they keep on sitting with different pupils with their own ways of learning and treating others.

God, this happened throughout school.

I will always remember Aaron Davis. Exact same scenario, I was sat next to him in year four because he was disruptive and I never complained.

One afternoon, he once slapped me round the face with a wooden ruler. I remember Mrs bitch Reynolds looking me dead in the eye and then pretending she hadn't noticed. I didn't say a word and cried the rest of the afternoon, never once did she reprimand him or ask if I was alright.

My Dad picked me up from school with this fuck off red welt on my cheek and frog marched me back in. I never sat with Aaron Davis after that.

Nice little girls are taught to placate naughty boys from when they are old enough to talk and they get called 'bossy' or 'rude' if they ever complain. I'm so sick of a lifetime of it.

The fact it's 2020 and still going on is maddening.

Having been the “good pupil” who was sat with disruptive kids in order to moderate their behaviour, I found it bloody awful and it resulted in me refusing to go to school. If I had been asked to help a nice but struggling girl, it would have been okay. Being sat with three rough, disruptive boys was daily misery.

That used to happen to me all the time. They thought my good behaviour would rub off on them, which is not how it works- they just used to wind me up for an hour.

Sorry, where does it say specifically that OP's DD is the more able child? She could well be, but OP hasn't said this. And where does it mention that the boy has been disruptive? It sounds as though he and his partner didn't get along, so the teacher split them up. Someone was always going to be put out by this. I'm always intrigued by the way in which some posters add in their own details.

But I do agree in general that girls are too often used as a buffer for the poor/substandard behaviour of other pupils, usually boys. My DS has ADHD (still undergoing diagnosis) and is very inattentive and disorganised. He tries really hard to focus and to be tidy, but his brain has other ideas. His primary school teachers would place him with girls on either side and encourage them to help him organise his things. It was very unfair and demeaning for the girls to be given that responsibility. It was also frustrating for DS to have his stuff lifted and put away constantly (there were tears!), but worst of all, it was teaching him that it was the job of girls to organise boys. Terrible message.