Why is the teacher so angry in the first place?
Ummm... because a special needs student that she is
responsible for is hiding in a potentially unsafe (and unknown) location-- where she doesn't have continuous means of supervising and monitoring him for his safety and that of his classmates?
Honestly, in a classroom setting, this
is a pretty big deal. This is the kind of scenario where a teacher loses their job-- and their licensure-- when something goes horribly wrong in an instant. True explanation of her (understandable) annoyance... but probably not an appropriate explanation for a group of middle schoolers, either.
It's not really the teacher's "job" to explain it in the first place, either, other than to note that it isn't permitted to do this.
I do think that Val's points are good ones. In building empathy and social skills, it's good to practice the other person's point of view when possible.
It's not even about right/wrong (and I'd argue that in this instance, that's ambiguous at best, since this presumably took up class time and the teacher may well have been shutting it down so as not to rob the rest of the class of instructional time over it, yes?).
I also think that it is CRITICAL to have such a child understand that
correcting an authority figure who is correcting YOU (or has stopped you and is exercising their authority) is seldom a good idea. It's not a good idea with a police officer, a teacher, a judge, a boss, etc. So that is, IMO, the bigger picture here.
Might even be worth addressing with the school-- that this is clearly something that your child does not yet understand is a social rule, and it's a work in progress.
