Punishment

I was a little bemused that one of my very young students wasn’t allowed to attend class this week as a punishment for bad behaviour. I am sure that if you asked most of my students they would say that coming to classes was a punishment. I was bemused and a tad cross, I also got punished because I didn’t get paid for the class. I am a little surprised that current parental thought is that their youngsters enjoy class so much that not coming to class is a punishment. I can’t help thinking that this little 6 year old had the upper hand as she quickly worked out which after school activity she’d like to miss the most and then told her parent’s that missing this would be her biggest punishment…

I had another tricky situation this week, when one of the little 5 year old boys, Hugo, asked me ‘what do you think about God’. I panicked slightly, as he stared at me with beady eyes, a runny nose and a biroed moustache, so I took a sensible course of action which was to become engrossed in a highly interesting piece of paper lurking under my computer. So Hugo turned to Javi, one of my older students who was there.  Javi also panicked and asked me what to say – I said, ‘just say you don’t understand’, which always works for me. Javi was about to give this as a response and then turned to me, pointing out the flaw in my plan, in so much as Javi, being Spanish could not share my response, so I resorted to my divert-attention-from-what-they-shouldn’t-be-doing plan which is to break into Head Shoulders Knees and Toes, which is enthusiastically embraced by all under the age of 10.