One of the things I find myself wondering every now and again is whether we adults (and I mean all of us, not just teachers) are just a little bit scared of some kids.
OK, I put my hands up, one of the reasons that I made the decision to leap into primary teaching was that I didn’t fancy the idea of instructing some 6ft student on the finer points of the history curriculum while they loomed over me.
It is rare that a primary child is bigger than me (even if by Year 4 they usually have larger feet than I do). They hold your hand when you are on playground duty. They skip about and gambol. The very last thing they are is threatening.
Except, I do wonder if even some of these children seem scary to other people. Those pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), mainly.
I remember the first time I taught a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I was a few years into the job, so I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing. But I gulped when his father gave me one of those serious nudge-nudge-wink-wink looks with no hint of a smile and said: “You’ll know when the drugs wear off.”
Would he start leaping off the tables and chucking the chairs around while the rest of us cowered in the corner, unable to do anything to stop this uncontrollable child? That comment planted a seed of fear in me that, thankfully, withered and died the day he did run out of tablets and the sky failed to fall in.
Warped responses
Let me be clear: it’s not just ADHD that has this effect. All sorts of special needs make us feel a tiny bit afraid, and our feelings warp how we respond to the children who carry these needs and bear our labels. And it doesn’t seem to matter which label.
We worry that a child will “kick off” if we ask them to do something that they don’t want to do, and we back away, afraid of confrontation. We find them a different task, something easier, less challenging, something different, something pacifying - something that, if we aren’t very careful, lets us off the hook of attempting to teach them.
But when we talk or write of young people in lurid, sensational terms, or give advice that at first sight appears to appease rather than adjust - when we tell only the first half of the story about letting the situation calm down and forget the part about saying sorry and the consequences that we must all face - then we forget the adult that the child will become.
There are consequences to our behaviour, too, and we won’t have to bear them, they will.
Nancy Gedge is a teacher at Widden Primary School in Gloucester. Her book Inclusion for Primary School Teachers is published by Bloomsbury. She tweets @NancyGedge
This is an article from the 10 June edition of TES. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here
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