Yellow Bee Day – What Do You Think?

I have a lot of thoughts trying to spew from my head into my hands and onto this keyboard right now.  Therefore, let me add my disclaimers right up front.

Disclaimer:  I am frustrated, aggravated, confused and maybe even angry.  Sometimes when I’m like this, posts seem to disappear without warning after I have calmed down.

When I picked Ditto Boy up from school this afternoon, it was a frenzy of tears.  First because I was picking him up and not my mom, second because he had indeed received another “yellow bee”.  This time there were more sanctions put down though by his teacher.

The note in his folder simply said, “1/2 silent lunch, missed 15 minutes of P.E.”.  I asked questions and learned the following:

• Walker’s initial response was that he did not know it was “silent lunch” – which I know to be untrue because they had 1/2 silent lunch last Friday when I was there and the students were fully aware of it – so I offered to turn around and go chat with his teacher about it – totally pulled that one off because he re-told his story and he wasn’t willing to look his teacher in the face and said, “but I didn’t know”.  Mission Accomplished as the Parent Anyway.
• Walker told me that she moved him to another table so that he would have no one to talk to because he wasn’t complying with “silent lunch”
• He did indeed miss half of his P.E. class as punishment

And, with that, I have these thoughts (these are from another post on another blog my fingers are tired of spewing the same thing over and over.  None of is is cross over except my little thoughts below, so I’ll put them in quotations.

“

This will take bullets for me to dissect:

• Why do they have silent lunch?  They sit in a room, in a chair, paying attention (hopefully) and working quietly (hopefully), so why do they add silent lunch in there as punishment.  Sorry, I don’t see that as a good punishment or even as an idea.
• They only have like thirty minutes for lunch, so that’s plenty of time to eat for 15 minutes while being silent (no talking with food in your mouth at least) and then 15 minutes to at least socialize a little, geeez! (I have a post coming on my own social skills).
• He was moved to a table to sit alone for the remaining 15 minutes.  So, he was punished.  Right?
• He missed half of physical education class.  Wait, he has already been punished, right?  He was made to sit alone for not following the silent lunch rule.   So, why is he now missing half of physical education?  And, why are the physical education teachers (and you know I am a physical education teacher with a B.S.) allowing the teachers to use the child’s physical education time for punishment?  They only have 30 minutes for physical education.  Why take fifteen minutes of it away?  Don’t these kids need to play?  Get rid of some excess energy?  Release the energy bundle so they can go back to class and “sit quietly”?”"

I will save the hoopla on how mad it makes me that P.E. is used as punishment.  But, trust me when I spew that part, it won’t be pretty.