Lead Pipes 5 – Updated Final EERP Document

3 thoughts on “Lead Pipes 5 – Updated Final EERP Document”

1. Ben Slavic

   March 29, 2012 at 9:02 pm

   There are fettered and unfettered responses to discipline problems. A fettered response would take into consideration all sorts of factors like who said it, the tone of voice, the history of the kid’s involvement in class, the kid’s grade, who their parents are, if the administration likes them, if they are a cheerleader or a football player, what they were wearing the day they chose to say in class the word “faggot” in class or some other equally horrific word about another human being.

   Unfortunately, most of us make the fettered response. Our response could even go so far as to be related to the weather conditions that day, or even our own mood. In that reasoning, if it’s a beautiful day in spring and we are having a good day and some kid calls a classmate a faggot, but it’s Friday afternoon and there is a big dance that night and everyone is happy, and the kid “really didn’t mean it”, did he, because he apologized on the spot, by that line of reasoning, calling a classmate that name just doesn’t look like it does on a cold Monday morning in January.

   The unfettered response to the above situation is the machine like response, the one described above. In this response, it doesn’t matter who said it, the tone of voice, the history of the kid’s involvement in class, the kid’s grade, who their parents are, if the administration likes them, if they are a cheerleader or a football player, what they were wearing or what the weather was like that day.

   This response is the proper response. It is the black and white response. The word was used in class, people heard it, the teacher heard it, someone suffered, and the teacher acted in an unfettered way, a way worthy of a fully functioning adult human being whom society has entrusted to make such decisions.

   We spend a lot of time thinking about how unjust everything is. We need to start thinking about how unjust we are when we allow children to hurt others in our classrooms or in the hallways and we let it go because we have a “class to teach”. There is nothing more important than a child’s safety, and many of us in this group, including me, don’t get that. It’s time we got that. It’s time we got our professional priorities in order of their real importance in our quickly crumbling society, crumbling because there are no leaders left anywhere.

   Log in to Reply
   1. Ben Slavic

      April 3, 2012 at 3:51 am

      Very interesting timing on what I wrote above. Yesterday, Monday, a kid did exactly what I describe in the first paragraph above. Exactly. Because of this thread, I acted swiftly. He was in the next room in a Spanish Heritage class within 30 seconds, writing a free write. It was surgical, no emotions, and I was back with the class in under a minute. Thank you Jody!

      Log in to Reply
      1. Ben Slavic

         April 3, 2012 at 4:00 am

         I would add here that, depending on the school of course, the burdens of teaching are due 99% of the time to the emotional interactions we experience in dealing with little or big pipers. It’s amazing. But, looking back on my career now, I see that the teaching part was a very very small part of the work. It was all about the little insults, the seemingly dead students, the hyper ones, the crazy ones, the sad ones, the needy ones, all of them. Such work we do.

         Log in to Reply