I wrote a post, Don’t Judge, in 2017. This post was written in response to a judgement call that was made on my classroom, students, para-educators, and myself. Well, it happened again… not to me, but to another person who has devoted her life to working with students with severe disabilities.
As I stated in my first post, judgements are made all of the time. People do it all of the time. Some form of judgments can lead to positive change, while others do not. Poor judgments lead to nothing but poor things happening! On any given day, you can walk into a special education classroom and make a judgement call on what you see, hear, and observe. There is a lot that goes on, add behaviors to the mix, and well… bring the judgments on!!! And that is exactly what happened to my friend.
When dealing with behaviors, especially students who try to go after other students/staff, pull away, drop to the ground, hit, kick, bite, pull hair, or is just overall combative, a lot can happen. Especially in a matter of seconds. In those matter of seconds, a person can walk in and observe something that looks questionable, but actually is not. Can see something that looks one way, but is another. What do I mean by that?
Similar to what happened to my friend, I had a student who became quite combative when he was pissed off! In that moment, his goal was to attack… primarily us, his teachers, but if he could not get to us, he would go after whoever was closest to him, his classmates. His desire was to hurt someone, and he was quite adept at doing that. For safety, our goal was to get everybody else and us out of the way until we could get our boy back under control. On this particular day, it was the end of the school day and we were prepping to head to the busses. My boy was wearing his backpack and, already having had an off day, went from 0 to 60 in a matter of seconds and the closest person to him was one of our most vulnerable students. His gaze zeroed in on her and I knew what was coming next. My goal in that moment… prevent my boy from attacking my girl! All it took was one second for him to slap her, and two seconds for me to get to him, grab him by the backpack to put distance between him and my girl, grab him by both arms (he hits/slaps with both) and lock those arms to his side before he got slap number two off!!! Now imagine if you walked in my classroom at that very moment? What would you have seen?
Unfortunately for my friend, the same thing happened to her! A person walked into her classroom and saw a teacher inappropriately dealing with a student. A teacher who became unnecessarily physical with said student. A teacher who was harming the student. Instead of voicing her concern to the teacher, asking questions as to what was going on, this person chose to go straight to the teacher’s principal and lodge a formal complaint!!! This, of course, opens up a whole other can of worms!!! In the meantime, a teacher is being put through unnecessary stress and her actions scrutinized under a microscope for simply trying to keep one student safe and the other from seriously hurting his classmate! Keep in mind that this teacher’s actions in no way hurt or injured the student! This teacher’s main objective was to get the aggressor off of the victim.
In this sensitive climate we are in when it comes to dealing with students and aggressive behaviors, we often overlook the victims, the other students who have come into harm’s way because of aggressive, combative, dangerous, harmful behaviors. People don’t understand the phone calls we as teachers have to make to the victim’s parents. Having to explain to them why their daughter’s face is bruised from a hit, why their son’s arms are scratched and bleeding, how an expensive pair of glasses became broken, how that knot ended up on their daughter’s forehead, or why another has a potential concussion! We forget about the teachers and para-educators who have had to miss work, have surgery, or nurse an injury because of a student’s aggressive behaviors.
The majority of teacher’s, when dealing with behaviors, have no intention of hurting or harming their students! Our only goal is to diffuse the aggressor while keeping everybody else and ourselves safe. To the person who judged, then condemned this teacher, how about asking if she could use some help next time!