Teachers physically touching students

There are two teachers in particular that DS15 has a problem with, they touch him. He hates being touched. When he is being told off each of these teachers have placed their hands on DS and one of them has literally yelled in his face. He said he placed his pencil case up to his face, she was centimetres from him. He has told each of them to get their hands off him and then been sent out of class. One of them has left a msg for me to ring and talk about DS's behaviour, I am going to tell her not to touch him again and if he is not behaving to send him to the principal. I don't understand why she rings me, yes I can talk to him about his behaviour but if he is messing up in class the school should be dealing with it, in my opinion.

Regards,
Dianne

If he is messing up at school then its EVERYBODY'S problem and as a parent you should be working with him and the school on trying to sort all this out instead of leaving it all up to the school and they probably think it's pretty important that you help support him and work through this as well and that is why they are calling you. I agree that if someone doesn't like their personal space invaded then something needs to be sorted out about that, but having spoken with teachers about different areas of behaviour management of children (for uni) their biggest gripe is the total lack of assistance from parents because it makes their job so much harder. If it were me I would do everything I could to try to help him out.

IMO I dont think it is solely the teachers responsibility to dicipline your child, when i was in school, if i knew i wouldnt get in trouble from mum for x,y,z i would do it, just cause i could get away with it. I think you need to ask him why is he acting out? As for the touching, totally out of line, especially if he likes his personal space. She rings you because you are his mother and the only person who can make decisions about his welfare and schooling. Getting your back up wont do your son any good at all.

Whenever I have received a phone call myself or DH have sat down with DS and talked about it. I appreciate the school ringing me to let me know if he is misbehaving but I don't see the school doing anything about this. He has never once been disciplined by the school so how can I work with the school?

Regards,
Dianne

Hun, he is still your son and it's his behaviour that is the problem here. Do you recognise that something must have been going on for a little while before that teacher went off in his face?
Could you ask your son what he could have done to change the outcome of that situation?
Alot of kids have some sort of problem with authority or discipline, but he has to know about respecting the teachers that are trying to teach him.

Ok, so what should I do, any suggestions appreciated.

Regards,
Dianne

Teach him about respect?

Do you honestly think I've never taught him about respect, I also taught him that respect needs to be both ways. We are talking about a 15yr old boy. He shows respect in my house because he knows that if he doesn't show it he gets disciplined but how do I enforce this when he is at school. My problem is that the school do not discipline him when he misbehaves. So should I be disciplining him at home for something he does at school?

Regards,
Dianne

I don't think teachers should be invading his space, or touching him if he has told them not to, but agree that you need to work in conjunction with the school and individual teachers where you can. Maybe a meeting with both of these teachers together with your son and you would be beneficial. Then together you can make a plan to move ahead with whatever the issues are.

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Do you honestly think I've never taught him about respect, I also taught him that respect needs to be both ways. We are talking about a 15yr old boy. He shows respect in my house because he knows that if he doesn't show it he gets disciplined but how do I enforce this when he is at school. My problem is that the school do not discipline him when he misbehaves. So should I be disciplining him at home for something he does at school?

Regards,
Dianne

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Yes. My parents certainly disciplined me at home for things I did at school. There was no separation - if I was rude to a teacher, I was being rude to my parents.
Being sent from class is a form of discipline.
I do think though I would like to know HOW the teachers are touching him, and I think this is an issue in itself, but not the core problem.
What behaviour is your son repeating that is getting him into a position to be 'yelled at' constantly by the same two teachers? They don't do it for no reason.

It's not just DS that gets yelled at, if he and his friends are talking or not doing their work obviously they are distracting the whole class so they get in trouble. If this was happening in Primary School they get sent to the principal's office and then disciplinary action is taken. I think I will arrange a meeting at the school.

Regards,
Dianne

But he is not in Primary School, he is 15 years old. And if he cannot control himself after being instructed to be quiet (repeatedly) then he is being sent from the class (which is punnishment in it means he has to use his own time to catch up on what was missed, and get homework etc etc - exclusion from learning is a major form of discipline in High Schools)
Where is he being sent when he is excluded from class? They cannot be sent to the principal everytime, it is beyond impractical - we had Caution slips, 3 = detention of some form, and a year level co-ordinator. More often than not, we had to sit outside the class next to the door. Embarrassment.

Anyway, if he is repeatedly disrupting the class this IS something you need to address. It is disrespectful to not only the teachers, but to his fellow students and YOU - you don't send him to school for a party, he is there to learn and preventing other from doing so demonstrates he is NOT showing respect to the students, the teachers nor the insitution - or you for that matter.

I don't know how this has turned into "respect". The teacher would be putting the majority of the class out into the corridor. The point I made about primary school is because there is discipline the children learn but it's not the case here.

Regards,
Dianne

Of course it is about respect - he is disrupting the class. You need to find out why he is doing this repeatedly.
Is he not being engaged? Does he dislike the subject? What can he do to become more involved in the class? Is it bad influence and peer pressure from other disruptive friends in the same class? Is he not picking up the coursework and feeling incompetant so acting out to cover it?
These are things you can work on with the school , his teachers and his year level coordinator, but you will need to be proactive and get involved - and he will need to know you are involved.
At one point my mum threatened to come and sit in on every one of my brother history calsses when he was 16 - hewas mortified, funnily enough he found a way to behave in class pretty quick smart. (And it wasn't a threat - she would have done it, she was like that)

Once you get to being 14, 15, 16 years old, the onus of 'learning discipline' moves somewhat from what hte teachers can teach you to what the student is will ing to learn and take on board. This usually relies on things like exclusion, for the reasons I mentioned above, but he needs to value the learning to begin with - this is where you come in.
He KNOWS what behaviour is expected, he knows that he will be excluded from the class (or moved to the front, or kept behind, or called on more often to answer questions) if he does not comply to the expectations of class - he is choosing not to obey them anyway.
What discipline would you like them to use? What expectation do you have of the principal if he was to be sent there everytime he was playing up? Why do you think the principal's words will have any more effect than the class teacher?

If you are going to talk with the school about htis, they will ask you these questions, and they are things you will need to work out before you go in - what are your expectations? What methods would you expect them to use?

*double post*

I think a meeting with the teachers (and maybe princible) to get thier perspective as to why this is occuring would be helpful. I also think including DS would be helpful, maybe they are singling him out?

FWIW I don't think it's appropriate for them to be touching or yelling at him. I don't see how thier behavious is going stop your DS from doing the wrong thing.

i think a meeting with the school would definitely be beneficial. i think in high school you are unlikely to be sent to the principal unless it's something really major. his year level coordinator would probably be a good place to start. explain your concerns re-discipline & let them know that you son has said that the teacher touched him & he doesn't like that. i have a feeling that your son saying get your hands off me would be taken more as a sign of attitude/aggression rather than accurately conveying that he simply does not like to be touched (i hope that makes sense!).

i do think it's good that the teacher has contacted you so you have the opportunity to meet with her/him & discuss the situation. i'm guessing if she went to the principal, they'd tell her to contact you first anyhow.

hope it works out for you :)

I just would like to point out DS has not been repeatedly showing bad behaviour, this has just happened recently. He doesn't like school work, he loves his elective subjects as they are "hands on". Soon he is starting an 8wk Automotive course which was organised by the principal, so I have been involved and DS knows this.

Regards,
Dianne

You do have to follow it up at home Di - and you want them not to just have respect at home because it needs to carry on outside - where ever he is.
Respect doesn't always go both ways in my eyes - to clarify, elders should always be respected. They aren't perfect but if it doesn't mean if they don't show you respect, that you degenerate in retaliation. I taught my daughter it's always about HER behaviour no matter what she is facing.

DD was really awful to her PE teacher (and I was called as a result) - I agreed with her stance (wanted to do soccer instead of cheerleading) I didn't agree with the way she carried on at her teacher in front of everyone.
We talked about the best ways to get your point across (and how to do it with style!), I explained how losing control and yelling means NO ONE listens to you.

Do you attend parent/teacher interviews regularly? You can get a good feel for the teachers and establish a relationship of some sorts. This way I learnt what a kind and gentle maths teacher DD had, and that her german teacher really was kind of a biartch (but she still wasn't to be rude), and told DD if she was ever unkind to her lovely soft-spoken english teacher again that she wouldn't be going out for a week.

ETA - Aww hun - getting caught smoking on the oval isn't awesome either. It doesn't matter if he doesn't want to do the work. We would all love to only do the good/easy parts in life. All the boys love the hands on part.....which will be no good to any of them if they can't spell 'automotive'.

:hug: Dianne - I don't think that having teenagers sounds very easy or straight forward. It is a tough situation to be in because I agree with you that it is difficult for you to give consequences to him for things that happen in the classroom. While I was a behaviour management teacher, the advice we gave to parents was that it was the school's responsibility to give consequences for behaviour until the behaviour became an inconvenience to the parents and then the parents needed to reinforce the consequence. I think it was about respect for the child and not double discipline for issues that had already been dealt with but I also worked with primary aged kids and things were a lot more straightforward.

I think the teachers are calling you because they have no idea how to manage the behaviour themselves to be honest. High schools generally don't send kids to the principal like they did in primary schools and the teacher is a lot more responsible for the behaviour management in their own classrooms - the teachers may be feeling very unsupported and have no idea what else to do either.

Some teenagers respond to strong consequences and others really don't because it is actually not about how strict parents are, but more about the teenager themselves. Some teenagers realise very early on that they don't have to let consequences affect them and if they choose not to care about what is going on around them, then they are very difficult manage. I was a very compliant child and teenager and did what my parents told me to. Their discipline and management worked on me because of the sort of person I was. My younger brother would shrug his shoulders and just take off with friends and not come back for a couple of days. He chose to not be controlled by them and so he wasn't.

For this reason, I think we need a different approach to teenagers. I don't have teenagers and have never tested out my own theories so ignore me if you wish, but I don't think negative consequences work on teenagers. Teenagers are in that stage of life where they are transitioning from dependence on their parents and the other adults around them to independence as their own adult individual. They are experimenting with their freedom and chuck into that mix that their body is producing hormones to make changes but there are no set levels (think the first few days after having a baby when your body doesn't know how much milk to make so it just goes ballistic until it figures out the right levels) so they have a lot of extra stuff going on.

I would recommend reading a book called 'Parent Effectiveness Training'. I have just read it. It has some pretty challenging concepts in there (for me anyway) especially in the first few chapters, but keep with it because it really makes a lot of sense by the end. It is about how to change the way that we talk to our kids and teenagers. I am a big fan of the line of thinking that if there is a continuuing behaviour problem going on, often it is our own attitude that has to change rather than the child/teenager. This book just gives some new strategies for talking to kids/teenagers about what is going on in their life and talks a lot about active listening.

Anway, very side tracked from the title of the thread. I agree that teachers should not touch students if they are uncomfortable with it - actually, I think all physcial contact should be avoided when a teacher is correcting a student's behaviour. Touching in those circumstances is not only inappropriate but puts the teacher in a lot of risk. I saw a teacher touch the chair of a child that she was telling off one day and that child threw themselves on the floor and despite having witnesses to the incident, the teacher underwent full investigation from the Education Department. She was eventually cleared, but she left herself wide open. Also touching a child in those incidences, can lead to a violent outburst in return because touching kids crosses a boundary and if the teacher is the first to break that boundary, the child can often slap the unwanted touch away. Sometimes teachers do need to take responsibility for how they inflame the situation as well. I am not saying the student is innocent, but our actions can provoke behaviours in others and I have done formal observations of teachers who get into power struggles with kids and very quickly start playing a victim role because they have it in for the kid from the beginning. Teachers are just human too and just like people in society behave like that, there are teachers that also behave like that. Their classrooms become their power realms and some kids don't respond well to that kind of authoritativeness. Sorry, I am getting side tracked again.

I think you are well within your rights to ask the teachers not to touch your DS. To be honest, she sounds like she is touching him because she feels out of control of the situation. Yelling in the face of a student is the sign of person who is out of control and teenagers are exceptionally good at picking up on that.

There are some things in life you can change and there are other things you can't. You can't change the teachers attitude, you can't even necessarily change your DS's attitude, you can only change yourself and how you approach the situation. The best thing for you to do is probably try and get a few different strategies if you feel that it is not working at the moment. You are in a tough situation too because you are also trying to maintain some form of relationship with your teenage son and having to be the bad guy and deal with school's left overs at the end of every day is not always the best relationship building steps.

Anyway, I am not really sure what point I am trying to make. I don't have teenagers yet, I have worked minimally with teenagers but I do understand the issues are complex and delicate and what works for one family, doesn't always work for another. I guess 'power over' forms of behaviour management (while not at all ideal) work on smaller children, but on teenagers, you need to appeal to their growing independence and need for recognition of that.

I will stop waffling now since I have written this whole post and don't really think I have a point ... sorry.

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Ok, so what should I do, any suggestions appreciated.

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OK, We recently had a problem with our eldest child. He is only in year 4, but what we did can apply here too I think. His problem was a total lack of tolerance towards the kids who aren't as smart as he is so he was acting out in class calling out answers etc. So for 2 weeks after initially speaking with his teacher I was in constant contact with her and we took things day by day to make sure he was improving. What we did at home was to find out exactly what the problem was (frustration at kids not knowing answers etc and not being called on to answer it himself) then I told his teacher what he told me and we all worked together to get him to change. and within that time, just by me asking him at home how he was going and the teacher helping in the classroom we were able to get him to turn his behaviour around. At your sons age, they are quite egocentric, meaning that they think the world revolves around them, so they are unable to see that there is a problem with their behaviour and when you ask, it's probably that all the teachers are on his back and picking on him, yeah? but in reality, he needs someone at home to make him accountable for his behaviour, because rarely do teachers just pick a child to have a set against, there is always a catalyst and 9 times out of 10, it is all in the students head kwim?

Thanks Trillian, I'm going to have another talk to DS and let him know that if his behaviour continues at school there will be consequences at home. I will also let him know that I will be ringing his teacher and asking her to keep me informed. I have always gone to interviews, they have only been with his home group teacher, usually unless there is a problem you don't see any of the other teachers.

Regards,
Dianne

I have found when teens (I have 2sds's and 1x sdd as well as my own 18yo) is that you have to lay the boundaries are clearly as you do when they are 3.

This auto course will get him nowhere if he continues to act like a turkey. No one wants to employ a turkey so you have to give him the bigger picture so he can see how his behaviour stuffs HIM up in the long run. Then he makes his choice.

They get what you mean by "stop it" but sometimes they don't know what to do to replace the negative behaviour - so give him some tools for that. Like I said - asking him what he could do to prevent another classroom screaming match (whilst reminding him of his own responsibilities when it comes to his behaviour) might surprise you.


GL xoxo

Thanks Lulu.

Regards,
Dianne

Actually Lulu with the smoking he was suspended for a day, I didn't receive a phone call in that case. Comparing the two I would have thought being suspended would warrant a phone call to the parents.

Regards,
Dianne

Did you get a letter from the school though? They would have notified you somehow?

At the end of the day though, you have to take back responsibility for your DS and his behaviour - it really isn't the schools fault and you should try and take back blaming the school as your focus.

It's just my experience that even as they get older and grow away from you, or get taller than you that you think they don't need you to spell things out for them. They just do - it's sort of like the parenting needed goes right back to what it was when you needed to help them get dressed. It's just a different kind of attention.

xoxo

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They get what you mean by "stop it" but sometimes they don't know what to do to replace the negative behaviour - so give him some tools for that. Like I said - asking him what he could do to prevent another classroom screaming match (whilst reminding him of his own responsibilities when it comes to his behaviour) might surprise you.


GL xoxo

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THat is exactly what we did with him, we told him to think of other things during the times when he felt frustrated, like a happy place LOL and telling him ways of how he could take his mind off it really helped.