minor vent about rewards in school

[LaughingHyena]

This is the side of school I hate!

We are 5 days into school and already I'm fed up with the new rewards system they seem to be using across the school this year.

First we have "stamps", if the children are spotted being good they get a tick (written as far as I can tell on the board for all to see). If they get three ticks in a day they get a stamp. 10 Stamps and you go and see the head.

OK it's nice to involve the head in a good way as well as kids being sent there when they are not behaving. However the three ticks must be earned in a day, the board is wiped clean at the end and of course the kids sitting quietly and getting on with things don't get noticed/get ticks while other children are getting a tick for sitting up straight.

DD (7) is already pretty fed up that sitting quietly and getting  with her work is not being noticed

Then we have the marble jar. If the whole class is good they get a marble in the jar, 20 marbles and they get a treat. I have no idea at this stage what the treats are.

However DD has come home from school quite upset about an incident in the playground where she got pushed over and banged her head on a wall but did not want to tell the teacher as then the class wouldn't get their marble. She felt if she told people would not like her. Argghhh.

I will be having a word about the playground thing on Monday, the incident itself was nothing much but I really want her to be able to tell her teacher when there is an issue. We worked so hard on that last year and I thought we were making progress.

[mattemma04]

Hopefully your dd will adjust to these silly reward rules.

In our kids class everyone gets time off of recess when someone is bad.It is like the military where the bad gets shamed into following rules by the good.Been 3 years and it still doesn't work,but the teaches still do it. Shame they can not just punish bad kids and leave the rest alone!

Unfortunately it is the BS our kids must put up with in order to attend a certain school/class.

Best wishes with the playground issue.I dealt with bullying,so any physical harm to the kids gets me very upset.

[LaughingHyena]

I hoping the whole thing will die down a bit once everyone is settled and understands the systems. The school recently decided to adopt the same systems in all the classes so I think they are being a bit over used while the kids get the hang of it.

She moans about not getting ticks and stuff but I don't think it's bothering her too much. I'm just worried when she doesn't feel able to tell the teachers what's going on as we had a few bullying issues last year. She has the same teacher though so I'm pretty confident she will handle it well once she knows what's going on.

[captain optimism]

My son loves the reward systems teachers have used with his classes. This year there's even a balance sheet and the points are expressed as money! Why does he love it? Because he loves arithmetic. He loves quantification and keeping score and measurement. Even though I think this kind of method of managing children is terrible for a variety of reasons, I respect his love of numbers and understand why it's working well for him, and I'm not trying to get teachers to stop using these methods. 

It never occurred to me that my son might also be worried about classroom-wide behavior points two years ago when he was also dealing with bullying. Gah. This is so frustrating. Just give my kid more math and manage student behavior the old-fashioned way--by supervising the kids. Why didn't an adult see that one kid was pushing another on the playground?