I would now like to share a seasonal tale which involves bullying, a runaway, a seemingly innocuous pencil and the first of several times I had to give a "statement."
It was October, maybe a week or two before Halloween. One sunny Thursday, I had a surprise new student join my homeroom class. I say surprise not because I got a new student; that happens all the time at my school. He was a surprise because he came to me from another 3rd grade teacher's room, unbeknownst to any of us. The other 3rd grade team had done all the necessary steps to legally have him removed, mainly for excessive aggression, but they did not intend for him to be pawned off onto Mrs. Campbell and me.
Anyway, so the principal (we'll call her Mrs. Sullen) walked him to class midmorning. She pulled me aside to tell me this was his "second chance" (don't get me started on the misuse of that notion at my school) and that I should ignore the small stuff and send him straight to her with any real problems. Ok, fine. The student - let's call him Hayden - was fine for the rest of the day.
I should probably also mention that I did not have enough desks for all of my students with the addition of Hayden (something that was actually counted against me in an evaluation; even though I was told THERE WERE NO MORE DESKS). I bring this up to help you visualize the room: Four tables of four or five desks and the aforementioned kidney bean table in the back right corner in front of the bookshelf. I had no choice but to sit Hayden at that table, and, given his history, I thought it better for him to be physically separated from the others.
By lunchtime that day, I could tell Hayden, who in all fairness had entered my class the day before with every intention of making good on his fresh start, was getting restless. We got back to the classroom after lunch, and as I was getting the kids settled down, a few of them were bickering. I don't remember exactly what Stephen, a slightly pudgy and usually fairly quiet student said, but it the provocation and craving for attention after a day and a half of toeing the line were too much for Hayden.
"Shut up, you chubby pumpkin!" he yelled across the room. It was almost Halloween, after all.
The rest of the class stopped in their tracks and either gasped or erupted into giggles.
Now, I had been instructed by the principal to ignore small infractions. However, this put me in an impossible situation. I couldn't simply ignore the outburst and move on when the entire class had heard and seen Hayden bully another student. They would think, "if he gets to do that, maybe I can do that too."
So, I followed the grade level discipline plan and sent him out of the room with a reflection sheet. The man who was subbing for the assistant principal happened to be walking down the hall and said, "I'll take him." Fine by me.
Some time later, Hayden returned, reflection sheet filled out, and class resumed without incident.
Until it was time to pack up and switch classes.
This is where it gets weird. Hayden had borrowed a pencil from me earlier in the day, so I asked for it back. He insisted it wasn't my pencil (although it looked identical to the pencils I supplied). I maintained that it was, and told him he would not be dismissed until he returned it. Keep in mind that I was about 8 weeks into a year of trying to determine when I was and was not being lied to. I was trying to stick to my guns.
Finally, he thrusted the pencil into my hand and stormed out of the room in the direction of the line forming to go to Mrs. Campbell's room for science. But he didn't stop at the line.
He rounded the corner at the end of the hall and made a sharp right turn, where his only option was to go down the stairs toward the main office. I assumed he was on his way to Mrs. Sullen, with her whole "he can come straight to me with any issues" plan. I calmly went back into my classroom, pushed the emergency call button and informed the secretary that Hayden had just left my room and was headed in the direction of the office. She said ok, and I went about the rest of my afternoon.
About 15 or 20 minutes into the next block, the counselor, Mrs. Adams, appeared in my doorway and said that Mrs. Sullen wanted to see me. She informed me that Hayden had temporarily disappeared until the security officer found him in the first grade bathroom downstairs. Upon being found, Hayden had run out the front door of the school before eventually being convinced to go to the office. I gave my spelling test to Mrs. Adams for her to administer and went to the office, dreading the conversation I was about to have.
It seemed that every time last year I had to go give some kind of account of something that happened, it was something that completely blindsided me. It was always something I never thought would be an issue until there I was, being called to the office like the student who was in trouble. This caused me a great deal of anxiety, as I would have to think about how I was going to defend something I never thought was even worth discussing. It's hard to explain, but somehow I was always walking to the office with an accelerated heartbeat and sweaty palms.
I had no idea what had set Hayden off to this degree. I assumed he was mad at having to submit to my authority, and the afternoon of getting in trouble and visiting with the assistant principal had pushed him over the edge.
Nope. He was mad about the pencil.
When I arrived at the office, he was sitting on his knees in the reception area, rocking back and forth, fuming as elementary boys do (see previous post for full description). I was called into Mrs. Sullen's actual office, where she of course asked me what happened. I relayed the events of the afternoon that involved Hayden. She immediately gave me a disapproving look when I told how I had sent him out of class for bullying another student.
"But I told you to ignore the small things," she interrupted. "What does that even mean? When you guys say 'bullying,' what does that mean?"
So I told her he had called another student a chubby pumpkin and continued to tell her how he had made his escape after arguing with me about the pencil. I told her I had no idea why he had gotten so upset, not the first or last time I felt like a complete idiot, like I was playing dumb in front of her, but I wasn't playing. I really didn't know, which was more frustrating than anything. Again, blindsided.
That's when she told me he was angry because the assistant principal had given him that pencil when he was filling out his form, a detail he had neglected to tell me. Then she asked me to call Hayden into her office while she called his mom.
So I poked my head out, and said, "Hayden, will you come in here and talk to us?"
He stared at me pointedly, and growled, "MM-MM."
I kind of shrugged and went back into the office. I guess the security officer convinced him to come in, because a minute or so later, he crawled into Mrs. Sullen's office on his knees. Meanwhile, Mrs. Sullen had his mom on speaker phone and was debriefing her of the situation. She then asked Hayden to talk to his mom, and he did. As they began their conversation, Mrs. Sullen whispered something to me, which caused Hayden to explode all over again.
"Don't interrupt me!" he screamed, and ran out of the office and out of the front door again, security guard and secretary hot on his tail.
Mrs. Sullen turned her attention back to the phone, where Hayden's mom was now yelling at her.
"You told him to tell me what happened, and then you just interrupted him!" she said.
"Ma'am, I wasn't talking to him!" Mrs. Sullen said, clearly exasperated.
But Hayden's mom had already hung up.
At this point, Mrs. Sullen handed me a notebook and a pen and told me to write my account of what had happened. When I was finished, she said, I could go back to class. She left the office, I assume, to join the search party for Hayden.
I wrote my version of events and returned to my room. I didn't really hear any more of it, just through the grapevine the next week I learned that Hayden's mom had enrolled him in an alternative school.
He did return to us in January for about six weeks until he was finally officially removed. During that time, he threatened to punch me in the throat and (on a separate occasion) picked up another student off of a bench on the playground and punched her for no reason, among other exciting antics we got to be a part of.
If that story was all over the place, confusing, and hard to follow, even absurd, that's because it was. That was exactly how it happened.
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