Originally posted by Annoyed
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- A kid with a behavioral disorder (I swear that if I told him to breath he'd asphyxiate himself just to disobey me)
- A kid who suffered sexual and physical abuse, prevented from going to school (he was "homeschooled") throughout his elementary school years and most of his middle school years until his abuse was discovered. He had an enormously hard time adjusting.
- A kid who just wanted to do his own thing, I never knew what his issue was.
- A kid who had severe ADHD and negligent parents. I never heard back from them and heard more from his best friend's parents.
Many of the other troubled kids I've worked with never got to that point and rarely disrespected me. I've learned that some of the teachers in another department have had issues with respect with those same kids. The difference? They are super strict and anal retentive. They didn't act out against me because I found a way to develop a rapport with them instead of throwing the heaviest book at them the moment they slipped up. Those four kids above, number one is the only of those four that cursed me out. The other one that did that was an honors student (neither ever did it again).
Now I'll be honest about kid number 1, 2, and 4. They don't fit into the cookie cutter mold of the general population of the student body. They needed specialized care that they didn't get because reasons. Education shouldn't be a "one size fits all" endeavour and I feel that we as a school simply wasted the time of those three kids and did them a disservice by expecting them to be normal when everything about their background screamed otherwise. Suspensions won't fix years of sexual abuse, they won't fix psychological/neurological disorders, and they won't fix parental neglect/ineptitude.
As for the rest of the behavioral problems I have faced, I have found that parents' wrath are far more effective than suspensions. I'll disagree with Chaka here though, suspensions do have merit. The thing is that they are meant to get the parent's attention more than anything else, as well as to remove a possible threat to other students to allow things to cool down. A suspension for dropping the F-bomb by accident is completely meaningless and pointless.
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