Kid Gets 'Catastrophe Award': Mean or Meaningful?

It's, "ferme ta bouche," and if you think you have to dig in your heels in response to my comment, you obviously completely missed my point. Parce que vous etes stupide!

Apparently Canadians butcher English AND French.

Children will act under the guidance of the adults around them. The reason the culture of bullying remains entrenched in our schools, is adults will perpetuate it rather than suppress it, and in this case the adult was not only participatory but the instigator. The adult may have seen this as a joke but the child just got a bullseye painted on her head that will last for as long as she is among the same students, or among any students that have come in contact with those students.

It's been shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, that when actual professionals take the reigns, bullying stops. Apply the same rules to all students in the same manner, no matter who they are in the "social structure" or who their parents are, and furthermore, hold the teachers to a high standard as well, then the cliques die out and the bullies lose their posses and, with them, the ability to control the social interactions. Create a means to anonymously report bullying, and the bullies will be turned in by their own best friends. Because no good friend really wants to see their best friend turn into a monster. And any adult which publicly shames a child, needs to seriously reevaluate his or her career choice, because that person obviously has no business being an educator.

LORD!!! *facepalm* We are raising a generation of sheltered BRATS!!!
Humiliation, humility period builds character. It's not ABUSE any more than taking away video games and tv for not doing your homework is ABUSE!!!

If it gets the point across to the kid that she's got a LOT of excuses for why she's not doing her work, then it's served a valid and useful purpose.

Now, if the teacher had slapped the girl or called her a complete failure, I'd be more inclined to say abuse. This is not abuse, it's creative teaching.

Humiliation DOES NOT BUILD A SHRED OF CHARACTER!!! It does NOTHING but tear people down, and instruct the herd who to ostracize. What the teacher did here was FAR FAR WORSE than slapping her and calling her a complete failure. It was marking her and telling the students around her to call her a complete failure... If she had been slapped the children would have viewed the punishment as more complete. Humiliation is not Humility, but a wedge which tears it from us by making us insecure about our weaknesses and prompting us to seek routes to pride and glory, the false shelters of the self which are the destroyers of humility.

HAVE YOU ALWAYS BEEN SO STUPID????????? oR SHALL i SAY ABUSIVE????
Lets see now, a grown adult humiliating a child (and in front of class to top it off) is a building tool for character building????? Its a sick control tactic....that is only used by the most disturbed people!!

ya i am talking to you Jackson. Anybody have another dunce hat handy?

Meaningful isn't the word, but the teacher didn't mean any harm to the kid.

It also doesn't help with this poll's legitimacy that the name on the award is Cassandra Garcia, not Valdez.

I'm not that surprised by the name discrepency. Children will often retain the legal names of their fathers even when they go by their mother's present last name.

Never mind the fact, that if you believe the situation to be fiction, then you have to work on the hypothetical. Hypothetically, no teacher should ever publicly shame a student. Punishment is a private matter and must be handled privately, and any official recognition (The teacher's an official even if the award is not) of poor behavior is a punishment.

Of course if you have facts on the actual situation which show it in a different light, then the scenario changes. Still what the teacher did was in poor taste.

An interesting way of putting it. I did think about the possibility of her mother retaining her name after I posted that, but I decided to keep the comment as is for the sake of laziness.

Hypothetically and objectively we will also never know whether she meant to harm the student, and therefore we cannot brand this as public humiliation.

I don't dispute the poor taste of the teacher, though. I just think that people overreact to this. The teacher tried, in her own way, to guide the student back to a path of doing her daily work. If you stop doing homework in later grades, it can be a huge problem. There are obviously other methods that should have been employed by the teacher, though.

I don't think people are overracting at all. The teacher accidentally brought on a situation of humiliation, and she's supposed to be able to anticipate these things. Being able to consider and somewhat predict the consequences of ones actions is part of the job description. Now I'm not saying everything goes on the teacher, but I am saying the teacher is directly responsible for the direct consequences of her actions, unintended or not. The teacher should have known that she was shaming the student, but obviously she couldn't pull her head out of her ass long enough to understand the implications of her own actions.

She is directly responsible, but people are in complete outrage here. She misjudged how hurtful she was, and a lapse of judgement is something that happens to all of us. We shouldn't blame her as much as we are for this.

Probably not, but that teacher and the school need to get those issues discussed and in place before they do this to kids. Any of this type of "lesson learned" is bullying and needs to stopped being practiced. There are so many other constructive ways to get kids to get it together.....and they work much better. Example, I had the same problem with a girl in third grade, she never had her homework in on time for weeks, and rather than do something like that, I asked her quietly why she didn't turn in homework on time...I found out that her mother was very ill, she had 2 younger siblings that she got ready for school in the morning, (made their lunch, got them dressed, fed them.) She was so tired at night after the younger ones went to bed she would fall asleep before she could get it done. Her Mom was bedridden..no family or father around. She was doing all she could to help. Now that would have been really nice if I did something like that to her, right? Teachers need to find out what is wrong first instead of thinking the kid just doesn't care.

I wholly agree. My point, though is she didn't intend to hurt anyone and thus all of this uproar is unnecessary.

If she was sensitive, that was a bit mean, but if not, it's just the mother attention seeking...

Maybe next year the child will do her homework and Mom will see to it that she does AND bring it to class!

or maybe she will bring a gun and kill the teacher...

OMG!!! So shelter the lazy children so that they don't show up at school with a gun!!!
Jeeez,

This is awful. I know firsthand what it's like to have a teacher humiliate you at that age. When I was in 4th grade, my teacher would make fun of me and belittle me in front of the whole class fore everything - if I forgot my homework, got an answer wrong, did bad on a test, because I was chubby (yes, really) and if I would cry, he threatened to hang a pacifier from the ceiling over my desk. It was terrible. I can't remember a day that I didn't dread school or go home crying. Looking back on it now, I know that he was just a miserable, arrogant man with a napoleon complex (he was only about 5'2") and a sad life that was pissed off that his 4th grade students were taller than he was. But, being 9 or 10 years old, I didn't understand why he singled me out all the time. It really bothered me up until I was in middle school.

He was abusive. It's a shame children don't understand that and report teachers who mentally abuse them. I feel bad for you. I'm sure it didn't help your moral or your grades! Oh, and don't make excuses for him "...I konw that hew was..." What he was supposed to be is a teacher. Instead, he was an abuser. You have a right to be miserable and cry about it. So sorry your parents didn't know or understand what was really going on.

To be honest, I don't think that the parent should have gotten mad at the teacher for giving her daughter a "Catastrophe Award," she should have been asking her daughter why she wasn't doing her homework. That would actually go to solving the problem at hand, whether it was that she didn't understand the work or just didn't care.

While I know that she's only a kid, the fact that she could apparently lie so easily to her teacher so many times that her teacher felt that such an award was appropriate makes me wonder what kind of parents she has.

Could this have been handled differently? Yes. But I don't think that it would have stuck in her mind as well as this will.

I am of the same opinion and you said it so beautifully!

Thank you.

Totally inppropriate for her age. The teacher should contact the parents and let them know that their daughter does not do her homework. An award like this might be appropriate for high schoolers provided all students know they have an opportunity to get one!

Don't you think that the parents might have found out if they came to Parent/Teacher meetings? The child had "the most excuses" for not turning in homework. Where were the parents when they were supposed to see that the homework was done and in the back pack ready for school the next day?

There is no indication in the fact pattern that the teacher could not reach the parents. We may have to disagree on this one.

shes just a kid... sheesh

True, but habits formed in elementary school carry over to high school, college, and life. It's time she learned to stop making excuses and bring the homework to class... or get help if she needs it!

That's just too far!

Thinking like a teacher, I think the teacher was trying to give awards to everyone and this is the one for this child: "the MOST EXCUSES for not turning in homework." Yes, that's a catastrophe in this age group because it sets a pattern for later life. Better to stop the child from making excuses now than have her make excuses for missing work later in life!

OK hitler.

Without knowing the facts, ALL the facts, I will state, This might have been needed to stop a young liar from thinking she can live life without a cause and effect to bad decisions, good decisions. The schools need to do something to get our nations childre to face reality. Maybe not the way I would choose, but! Did it work?

Love your response! Perfect!

Where did it say she lied?

I think thats horrible! Honestly she's eight years old! The homework situation is bad but that could have been talked about at a PTA meeting not in front of the whole entire class. If i was eight, I received this award and everyone started laughing , I wouldn't want to go to school the next day. The 'Catastrophe Award' is MEAN rather than MEANINGFUL.

She also lied in front of the class. They would know anyway.
It also never said if the teacher gave other kids awards as well, as that would change a lot.

What? Where did you read that?

A whole raft of excuses? Unless they were ALL TRUE, (impossible) they were mostly lies. Sorry, thats the way it is. I know a few adults who were never corrected in this. yet today they end up losing losing one job after another and always blaming everyone else for their neglect. then lying again about they reason they were fired. This works to a conclusion, of inability to earn a living. better to nip this behaviour now, then allow a youngster to suffer all their life for this same behaviour.

a socilized teaching tool whivch cannot be be used too often. In this World of foolish youth episodes a l;ittle conformity training comes in for good use.

As long as it's not meant to humiliate the student, it could be a way to show how you could improve...And it isn't really an "award" to not do homework.

Actually, it's a little of both!
Depends on how legitimate & truthful the excuses were. I hate BS excuses & love it when the receiver takes the speaker/ issuer down a peg!
There is an old story (may be true or just a joke) about 4 college students who showed up in their professor's office one Tuesday after missing a Monday exam. They claimed that they had driven into the mountain wilderness 3 hours from campus on Friday to get away from parties & distractions. While returning Sunday evening from the quiet-study weekend, they had a flat tire in the middle of nowhere & were stranded till Monday when the tow truck finally reached them.
The professor agreed to give them a make-up exam on the spot, ordering each student to sit facing a different corner of the room. There was only one question: WHICH TIRE WAS IT?

The Nun's I had in grade school did a lot worse then this.