I do wonder whether some of the punishments passed out at my son’s school aren’t a bit over the top. Now J is a junior he is expected to take more responsibility for his own work, behaviour and homework, which is fair enough. That’s all part of growing up after all.
So far though J has complained about being held back in at break time to read because his reading diary hadn’t been signed by me. The idea seems to be that he has to take responsibility for this being done. I had a look in his book that evening and was at a bit of a loss to understand what the problem was as I thought I’d done it. Now though he is paranoid about having it signed.
Now J does read most evenings after school and at the weekend, but now and again, we have a busy evening where that doesn’t really happen. To me that is no big deal, in fact, I’m not sure he needs to do this formal reading daily anyway as he is a very good reader for his age and enjoys reading books. Sometimes we have made something up because we had a busy evening and we write in a book he read for fun earlier in the week say. The thing is it all feels like a bit of a farce.
The other thing that seems to be going on is that if the children don’t behave properly when going back into school (I think some are chatting when they shouldn’t be), then their class isn’t allowed to play with the outdoor toys provided during their next break. Now I’m sure J isn’t whiter than white on this one, but he says that some children break the rules all the time, but everyone suffers. I know I used to hate this sort of blanket punishment when I was at school: it just makes the kids who didn’t do anything wrong resentful and I didn’t respect the teachers who did it. I was too much of a good girl to let it show, but I don’t have a lot of time for teachers who think that these sort of punishments at school are a good way to maintain good discipline.
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