The school year has ended.
I have emptied out my classroom, and will head back in August, to get ready for a new, fresh bunch of 6 year-olds.
You know what’s funny? My 6/7 year-olds already have a pretty good concept of fairness; or of the difference between right and wrong. My students dealt, all year, with me treating a difficult student different than I treated the rest of them. He got special treatment, a special chair, he didn’t have to do everything as the rest of the class had to. Simply because he had a bad temper.
My students would complain, at the beginning of the year, that this wasn’t fair. Why, simply because this student has a bad temper, should he get special treatment? If we act bad, would we get that special treatment as well?
But you know what? The rest of the class did not start acting up. And I continued to shower special attention on this 1 student. My class simply learned, over time, to accept the unfairness of the situation. The last month of school, I heard not one single complaint about how I was treating this difficult student different than I was treating the others. And I was still treating him differently. We all got used to it.
I am afraid that this might be a bad lesson I have taught my students. If someone acts bad enough, they will get what they want. And everyone, including those in charge, will simply get used to it.
