A long one

I haven’t posted for a while; Mac and I have been distracted and distraught.

I don’t normally post about private issues but we’ve had some problems with the school the two youngest boys go to. The latest example (and for me the final straw) involves the school, the local hospital, a serious misdiagnosis and two weeks of emotional trauma.

The boys are all fine but I’m feeling litigious.

The local school has got real problems. A number of parents have moved their kids to other schools and we‘ve been thinking about doing the same but good schools are hard to find and the boys don’t want to switch.

I’m not going to go into any more detail about the latest incident but here are a couple of other things that have happened at the school recently. The first is the more serious but the second involves one of my own.

A woman teacher at the school assaulted one of the pupils in her class. She bound a six year-old boy’s hands together with tape because he was being too demonstrative and wouldn’t be quiet.

Naturally the child’s parents complained to the school. The teacher remains in post and the headmaster has told the parents that the school has dealt with the matter. The headmaster won’t tell the parents what action has been taken against the teacher concerned.

To me, the school’s approach is not credible but maybe there’s an educationalist out there somewhere who will explain it all to me. I’d ask the school but they’re refusing to comment on the matter.

Par for the course, really.

Back in March my middle son was involved in an incident during a playground “peace protest”. A group of more than fifty children, most of whom are two years older than Second Son, had made placards in class and at break they marched around the playground chanting anti-American slogans and barging into other kids.

This kind of thing is apt to rile my eight year-old. He didn’t like his playtime being disrupted, he didn’t agree with what they were saying and he thought that if they wanted to protest they should do it outside of school.

So he asked one of the playground assistants to intervene. When she told him to “just ignore them” he went to a teacher who, reluctantly it seems, told the children to stop shouting and put the placards down. When he saw that the teacher’s half-hearted efforts were having little effect, Second Son decided to back her up. So he starts telling this big kid with a placard to stop shouting and then tries to grab his sign. It seems the big kid and his friends didn’t take too kindly to this and my guy figured he was in for a beating until his class teacher turned up and rescued him.

Now hear this: when I got to the school to pick up the boys the class teacher came over to tell me that Second Son had been picking on other children in the playground. When I asked the teacher what happened I got pretty much the story my son gave me when I got him home but with a radically different spin. As far as the teacher was concerned my son’s behaviour was “aggressive and unprovoked”.

My son’s take on it: “Yeah right Dad, like I’d really pick a fight with a bunch of older kids for no reason. It’s not like I’ve got a death wish or something.”

What do you do?