The sign says:
“I was rude to my teacher. I can’t come to school. I’m sorry.”

I ran across this post about an old school mama that I found interesting. As a parent, I would never presume to tell another parent how to parent their child. I certainly wouldn’t want to to hear it! It doesn’t mean that I don’t wish I could though. Although this parent’s technique is definitely different and old school, I can see my grandmother doing something like this, I admire her for taking the steps to teach her son discipline and for showing him she cared. Most parents will say they care about their child, but how many will take time out of their busy day to stand their child in the corner to apologize?

I know most parents would probably have just said, ‘well, he got suspended from school, that’s punishment enough’ then just let the kid stay home and watch tv while they go on to work and about their business. This boy will certainly remember this lesson. I don’t think he’ll be acting up in school or be rude to his teacher again.

I say, way to go, mom!

I am lucky that my girls are relatively well behaved and haven’t had much discipline problems at school. More often, they have been on the affected end of kids who are disruptive in class. They’ve come home numerous times complaining about how they’ve missed out on doing something in class because the teacher had to deal with a disruptive student. I have been in my daughter’s classrooms, on occasion, since they were in kindergarten and have witnessed how some kids misbehave and burn up the teacher’s time and distract other students. I can’t believe how rude some of these elementary kids can get! I wondered what their parents were doing? I wondered if they even cared? I kept seeing the same kids with the same discipline problems year after year. Sadly, I also watched them get farther and farther behind everyone else. Until, as in the case of one boy I know, by the time they get to middle school or high school, you don’t see them anymore. The streets have swallowed them up. I see this boy occassionally on the street. He doesn’t hold up a sign. He stands with others like him.

Maybe if, when they were in second grade they held up this sign, they wouldn’t be standing on the corner today.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 5:17 am and is filed under found on the web, parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.