Piggybacking off of DS'ers are mean

    WOW You look AWESOME !!!!!    

Thank you...

 Ok...come clean everyone--WHO flunked the DS Forum Board Sensitivity Training Class????

ME!!!!!!   

 Oh sh*t!  There was a sensitivity class?  I told you I was still learning   LOL

 Me me me!   Multiple times!

Oooh oooh - MEEEE!

 I am a teacher in the poorest district in the state of Michigan.   It is culturally diverse, rural, and poor, poor, poor.    Intergenerational poverty poor.   I have children of incest, sexual abuse, drug abuse, families openly living in menage a trois settings, single parents, living with grannies and aunties and great grannies and older siblings.    I have children of extreme family violence, homelessness, poor medical care, running from Child Protective Services, the whole gamut.   My students have head lice, bed bugs, scabies, secondhand drug exposure, cognitive disabilities due to lead exposure, and asthma from breathing in improperly running wood and propane stoves - you name it - we have.   I have a family that lives in a storage unit, and another family the heats their house with their kitchen oven.     Not to go on, but I think you get the picture of what I'm dealing with.     Our children act out in various ways, depending upon their coping mechanisms and temperments, and some of their behaviors are just awful.     We have the highest ratio of emotionally impaired boys in the state....and our district is only 600 kids!

When I interviewed for this position, I was told I would have to be much more than a teacher to these kids, and that although I could seek to UNDERSTAND the reasons for their behaviors, that I should never make excuses for their behavior or enable them.   It's tough - you want to protect them from the world and excuse their sometimes absolutely awful behavior, but you can not.      We teachers are tough and consistent.    The children ultimately learn to respect us and trust us, and most will toe the line with us.    Most of them don't like us at first, because they've never had anyone SET LIMITS with them before.   Trust me, the tough love thing works.     Also, we have lots of problems with social workers who come into our schools to help our children deal with their problems, and often it makes our job more difficult.   I had a student come to class the other day clutching a journal.   She sat there during class writing and writing in this journal and not paying one bit of attention to what I was trying to teach her.   I finally said, "Amber - what are you doing - you're supposed to be paying attention to the lesson," and she said, "I went to my social worker and she gave me this notebook and told me that whenever I feel angry, to write in it, and write now I'm feeling angry at you because I don't like the song we're working on and so I'm writing in it."    I was pissed as hell.    I told her I didn't care if she was angry at that moment or not, that she was in school and she was supposed to be attending to school tasks.      So.....my very long point?   Sure, as a social worker, you are trained to help people deal with their emotions....but sometimes it's not as constructive or as practical as what the person needs to deal IN THE REAL WORLD.   

Some DS'ers use the tough love approach because they know that enabling their DS brothers and sisters can KILL them.    Most people give and respond to advice with grace and kindness.   Some don't.   I, for one, don't *****foot around in my classroom and hand out happy notes and shiny stars for behaviors that I expect my students to know, because we've pounded the rules into their heads from the first day of kindergarten.   I don't do it on these boards either.

Did you forget the Moms turning tricks in the motel room while the kids wait in silence in the closet?  I always found THOSE kids easy to deal with in some of the settings where I engaged with them. 

 Not many motels where these kids are......mostly cabins in the forest....but we did just have a really sad situation of a ten-year-old boy being sexually abused by his uncle while his mom, 32 years of age, was busy getting it on with one of our 15-year-old high school students.       I also have students who are 14 having babies - and the grandmas of these babies are 28!!!!!    My friends from my little middle class background do NOT believe me when I tell these stories.