Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy F

Moomin--you are absolutely 100% sure that it is officially called the bad girl chair and DD was called a bad girl? Because I would be calling some folks about that like, NOW.

Is it possible she was put in time out and just interpreted it that way?

We are sort of slumping/inching our way through the start of K over here. I'm being patient. DS is trying hard. On the positive side, DD9 seems to have an AMAZING teacher.

Oh, sorry--I see that was just asked.

Moomin-perhaps it is time for homeschooling. I just feel for your daughter so much. (and for the parents who must contemplate stepping out of career to do so)

From what you have said here...it seems to me that maybe it wasn't called the bad girl chair, but that "bad girl" came from somewhere. Why did she bring it up in the letter if she wasn't refuting what she heard the teacher say?
Aside: this also reminded me of when I studied in Chile, and meant to tell a professor that I had really enjoyed her class and got confused and used "enojar" (to anger for non-Spanish speakers). It was a politics class and we had had some spirited debates. The professor was like, "umm, yeah, Freudian slip much?" lol!
Anyway--your dd sounds like an amazing little person, with some big challenges and lessons to learn. I hope the school can figure out how to accomodate her if homeschooling isn't possible.

#1 on my list for her would be a prescription (likely offered by your private professionals) for how social mistakes are to be handled to maximize her learning and minimize disruption. This would include positive praise for good participation, but also a very concrete plan for what to do when things are going wrong.

(On an IEP this would be called a behavior plan.)


This is a good plan. If school won't find an effective way to solve school problems, it's next to impossible to solve those problems from home. You need the whole school team on board.

DeeDee

That's our policy. I looked over DD's teacher's behavioral policy with DD, and I pointed at the very lowest level, where the teacher notifies the parent, and I said, "Unless you behave so badly that it gets to that level, I don't care. Anything else that happens for the day is between you and your teacher."

DD8 is a behavior perfectionist, and perfect behavior in a bad educational environment has caused her some significant stress in the past, so I find myself in the unique position of overtly encouraging a limited amount of mischief.

Soooo.... and exactly how is that an issue? Just curious... I'd have been tempted to ask the principal. My kids have always been in schools where parent participation was welcomed in the classroom at any time during the day (including being able to just drop in with no advance warning). I've helped out quite a bit in different classrooms over the years, so have a few other parents, but the vast majority of students' parents don't or want to and can't because of work schedules. I've never seen an uprising of young students refusing to do schoolwork because one student's parent is present and their own particular parent isn't there. Instead what I've more often seen is that most of the kids get excited about having any parent in the classroom and they appreciate it and it can add a little bit of motivation to the classroom as well as helping the teacher out with grunt work.

So I just find the principal's statement curious. I can guess a bit about where it's coming from - some of my friends who are teachers don't like having parents in the classroom because they think the parents are focused on the teaching, maybe questioning it or somehow making it more difficult for the teachers feel they are free to do their thing without eyes who don't understand teaching and haven't learned how to teach watching with opinions. I haven't heard them say that they don't want parents there because the parents are distracting students or because it makes all of the students want to have their parent in class.

polarbear

ps - the comment about "dd gets to have a parent in the room" - that's not really how it works usually with parent volunteers - ie, the parent isn't personaly accompanying their child and ignoring all the rest of the kids, unless that's what you were proposing, which I doubt it was! A parent in the classroom is usually shared among all the kids....

I agree with this too - and I hope the school team is able to come up with accommodations that are effective. The one tiny thing that I'd add is that while I wouldn't use consequences at home for school behavior, I would talk to my child about appropriate behavior at school. I realize you must be doing this moomin, but for instance, chair-throwing - you can have empathy and understanding for why your dd threw the chair - I can see my impulsive dd doing something like this because she's mad, frustrated and her body "just does it" without thinking - but I also need to work with her (talk through it) to help her understand it's not appropriate behavior no matter how frustrated she is. You throw a chair and someone can get hurt - even if you don't throw it purposely at another person and you're just throwing it because you're mad. My youngest dd does lash out with her body when she's upset - and she is an anxious child who gets upset. WIth her we have to work in parallel paths - one path is working on understanding the anxiety - where it comes from, what triggers it, etc - and the parallel path that we work at the same time is how to control her frustration and anger so that she doesn't get in trouble, and so that she doesn't accidentally hurt someone else.

I am so happy for your dd that her day appears to be going well today - I hope she enjoys her new friends and school gets better

Best wishes,

polarbear

ps - don't know if this would happen with your dd or not, but I can see my anxious dd saying that she'd been sent to the "bad chair" and had a teacher say she was "bad" in front of the class - not because the teacher had specifically used the word "bad" but because she (my dd) *felt* bad during the event. So the suggestion from the teacher isn't a word, it's in the teacher's actions and how they are internalized by the student.

Could we have that in English, please, for those of us who are woefully and shamefully not fluent in Spanish? I can make out "I'm sorry", "I'm not a bad girl", "My papa says I'm a good girl...", but I'm stuck on the rest.

Nautigal I had to run it through google translate.