One of my placements during my semesters of student teaching was in the Point Park College Lab School. At the time, it was an Open Classroom, containing students from Kindergarten to Grade 3. The Lab School’s demographics at the time included children of the Point Park faculty, including the Dean of Education granddaughter, as well a children from a nearby neighborhood, called the Hill District, which during the turbulent 60’s and early 70’s was primarily 90% of African American decent. It was a truly inspiring experience in my life, on many levels, and provided me with an array of customs, cultures, and most of all variety of behaviors. Aside from the intent of integrating students of various backgrounds, I also began the process of understanding Group Work, (which, later as an aside I preferred and re-directed my professional career in the area of Communal Service). My Lead Teacher, had lived the Hippie life style, she was a combination of Peter-Paul and Mary, Arlo Guthrie, and a very long Gloria Steinem. I learned quite bit about the stages of development, the nuances of difference, but the beauty of what we had in common (oh yeah, I did take courses in Kiddie Lit/Kiddie Math/but never Kiddie AR-15’s). having worked at the Pittsburgh JCC, I already had some great role models educating me on behavior and development, but this experience in particular helped me fine tune, just how needy some kids become and how needless they're whining about nothing at can beguile and be bothersome. Certain students in the classroom wanted things their way, and only their way, while other children began the process of learning what life in a group can be like (as the song goes “you gotta give a little, take a little…” As open minded and free spirited as my Lead Teacher had been, she also understood that some kids just needed to be told no, and that they're kicking and screaming and shouts of unfair and I hate you, could not and should not be tolerated. During those days (and actually with my own kids, Time Out was a perfect facilitation to DISTEMPER, the TANTRUMS. In my Lab School classroom, no one was above the law and every one found their way to participate in rules not made by the teachers but approved by the students.
Here I am an adult million of years from my student teaching days, and I watch and listen as an immature bully sits in the Oval Office, deciding that today he hates this person, that tomorrow he will despise another person, that yesterday he called people insulting names…and YET nothing is done about his petulant, repugnant, immature manner. There are many teachers, and parents here in America, who certainly have the knowledge, background, and background, to insist that Trump takes a Time Out…yet, this baby, this brat is enabled to rant and rave change the actually rules of behavior and seems to pay no consequences for disrupting the lives of all of us who somehow find ourselves in the same classroom as he. I know my Lab School teacher would have quite a field day working with this chump. But here we all are watching and waiting for nothing but more bad behavior!
