Today at the beginning of class, one kid (call him Matt) gets out a coin to spin it on the table. Now, the students are strictly forbidden to have spinners in this classroom (a spinner is a spinning top made out of paper). The spinning can distract them from listening. So, Matt got out this coin to spin. And I believe he did this partially to encourage his classmate at the same table, call him Lyle, to get out his spinner. Matt and Lyle are frequent offenders of the no spinners policy. They often spin them together and the teacher does not notice. As soon as Lyle gets out his spinner, Matt jumps up and comes to the teacher. "Ms. Teacher, Lyle has out his spinner!" he says smugly. The teacher tells Lyle to throw it away, and the special ed teacher who follows the class gives him a strict rebuke ("You want to go to this one college, right? Well at this college they are going to kick you out if you are playing. So get it together.") Lyle goes back to his table and gives Matt a look like, "Dude, what in the world!?" And later in the day Matt is making miniature spinners while I teach.
So tattling is obnoxious--kids often do it to be cocky and show-off or to try to impress the teacher at someone else's expense. Allowing it does not encourage character or depth in students. And we long for students to be kind to each other, and to leave being the teacher and authority figure to us.
On the other hand, I want kids to come to me when anything like bullying or cheating or stealing is happening. A few kids ago I believe a student came to the teacher and told her that two of the kids were passing around mean pictures of the other one. And another kid came to me to go talk to the principal about bullying that was happening on the bus.
So what can we do to encourage kids to come to us about important issues but not to tattle on each other? How do we keep kids from being snitches but not keep them from tolerating bullying?
I think this is something that all teachers need to work on in their classroom. I remember one of my teachers in grade school had a poster on her wall that talked about the importance of coming to the teacher in certain situations, but not every situation. It emphasized that we should come to her if something was dangerous, it someone was hurt (physically or emotionally), or if someone was likely to get hurt by someone's actions. These were situations in which we were to immediately come and talk to the teacher. However, we also learned about mediating problems so that we could attempt to figure out smaller situations on our own. We practiced solving fake problems in groups of 3-5. We tried to stop using “blaming language” and we learned how to involve an impartial party to try and help us solve the problem. This method obviously didn’t work to solve all of our problems because as 9-10 year olds we were still very emotional and we wanted to be right. (Kind of like a lot of adults I know too :).) While we didn’t solve all of our problems, we did try and solve a lot of problems without resorting to tattling. Also, our teacher noticed our efforts to solve problems, and she was able to step in when we were unable to do so successfully.
ReplyDeleteSo, I would emphasize the importance of telling if something is dangerous, but also try and teach students to solve problems on their own because that is a life skill that everyone can work on improving.