If a person approaches me with a lead pipe and starts to use it on me I would probably want to discuss it with him in a calm and rationale manner. If it were done in front of others, people I work with, I would probably ask the person to meet me later to talk about it. It would just be so embarrassing to be beaten over the head with a lead pipe in front of other people.
One thing that I could do during the attack would be to tell the person how very rude I think it is to attack others with lead pipes, especially if it were done in front of other people. I would definitely tell the attacker that they shouldn’t do it. If the person were young, I definitely would call their parents. I might even threaten to bring in the police later, if the person refused to be nice and put the lead pipe down.
Here are the above paragraphs with the words “lead pipe” removed and “rude words” inserted:
If a person approaches me with rude words and starts to use them on me I would probably want to discuss it with him in a calm and rationale manner. If it were done in front of others, people I work with, I would probably ask the person to meet me later to talk about it. It would just be so embarrassing to be beaten over the head with rude words in front of other people.
One thing that I could do during the attack would be to tell the person how very rude I think it is to attack others with rude words, especially if it were done in front of other people. I would definitely tell the attacker that they shouldn’t do it. If the person were young, I definitely would call their parents. I might even threaten to bring in the police later, if the person refused to be nice and put the rude words down.
Since words can indeed be a form of blunt force in a classroom, I would suggest that perhaps my version of the Emergency Emotional Readiness Plan that we are trying to create here would in fact be to act a little more forcefully and quickly than in the above image. I don’t think we would even be having this discussion in this blog space if we realized the awesome power of words to hurt people, and if we realized how important it is to resist such verbal attacks from students with aggressive force each time they happen. What would such a version of a possible EERP – the Lead Pipe version – entail?
The first step for me, as I have suggested here earlier, would be to simply acknowlege the attack. I would want everyone to know that it happened. Then, since we work with children, I would take out my cell phone, in which I would have the names and numbers of the parents of about ten of my students, those who have shown me that they can’t control what they say in my classroom, and I would call the parent then and there from the classroom, in front of the class.
Ideally, as a third step, I would then remove the child from the class and send it to the principal’s office for further action, so that the principal acts as my ally, instead of what they have become with most teachers today, their enemies. Since most principals (the police) think it is the job of the teacher to enforce the law in the classroom (the citizen as police officer), it is no longer possible, in most schools, to get this kind of support in the moment of the attack.
I would say that it is this failure, this break, in the chain of command, that is the key factor in why schools have become so severely dysfunctional – the actual real police and building security are only there for recognizable offenses (attacks with real lead pipes in schools – this is what we have become), whereas the building supervisors cannot address every single brutal attack by a student because said attacks are “only” made with words).
This is the part of this discussion that, quite frankly, amazes me. Except for Laurie and Jody and a few others, I think that many who read this blog haven’t yet figured out the need to act and act firmly in every instance of attack. I don’t even think that some of us even know how to recognize when we are being attacked! That kind of blows my mind.
Now, if there is such a person on the administrative staff who could help me, a person with power who would be willing to act within hours (certainly before the school day ended) to swiftly address the verbal abuse/bullying by the student, then I would welcome that and use it as a third step in my EERP approach. But that “ain’t gonna happen” with most of us, so let’s skip that third intervention as a possibility and consider what we would do after the phone call to the parent.
If anyone has any suggestions to fill in concrete action step 3 below, pls. write it in a comment field below. Refer to the list provided in the blog post below this one.
Concrete Action Step 1: sit and let the gorilla (the offending words) be acknowledged by all in the room.
Concrete Action Step 2: call a parent then and there to set up a physical meeting with the offending child present that day, and refuse to put it off to another day.
Concrete Action Step 3: