Posted on 02/17/2018 11:35:35 AM PST by Albion Wilde
Here's how one schoolteacher takes time each week to look out for the lonely...
Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student who they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.
And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, she takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her, and studies them. She looks for patterns.
Who is not getting requested by anyone else?
Who can’t think of anyone to request?
Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated?
Who had a million friends last week and none this week?
You see, Chase’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children....
(Excerpt) Read more at rd.com ...
Thank you for the ping.
This is a great idea & yet simple to implement. It also requires a teacher who cares. It would be interesting to know how the teacher helped those kids who were “unfriended”. It would also be interesting to hear reflections from the students who were helped.
COACH FEIS
The football assistant coach Aaron Feis who was also a security person at the school and died blocking the kids with his body SHOULD HAVE BEEN ARMED.
According to Feis’ Facebook page, he lived in Coral Springs and was a fan of Ronda Rousey and Tim Tebow, the TV show “Duck Dynasty” and the movie “Faith of Our Fathers.” Among his posts were a quote from Billy Graham, “A coach will impact more young people in a year than the average person does in a lifetime,” and tributes to the U.S. military and an advertisement for a “Concealed Carry Jacket” with a handgun poking out of a pocket.
So Coach Feis Could have saved most of the kids…Coach Feis SHOULD HAVE saved all those people.
But Coach Feis WAS NOT ALLOWED TO CARRY HIS LICENSED PISTOL.
Personally, I’m not that keen on an exercise that asks kids to think and report along these terms every week, though I see what the teacher is getting at. Better IMO to have a word aside with whatever kids there is a concern about. Mostly the kids can be observed interacting with their friends, etc., which generally explains enough.
I am convinced that the CIA/FBI has been preying on kids with issues, who are prescribed meds and then in turn become ticking timebombs that the Deep State itself can set off—whether with cell phone triggers now, or simply with meds and suggestion.
We see this latest guy has that usual, possessed look, with the freaked out eyes. That IMO is the result of our own intelligence evil, setting some sort of hypnosis upon their drug-addled minds.
Plus armed guards at the doors.
Not sure the school would let some religious radical to carry a weapon at school.
God Bless Coach Feis and his family, and all of those affected by that nutjob.
It is rare that an elementary school student shoots up his school.
This is downright silly .
It will just point to most introverts .
Newsflash their are millions of introverts and just because they don’t socialize doesn’t make them lonely.
It certainly doesn’t make school shooters.
She is asking the wrong questions .
You want to look for the angry kid and he may or may not be an introvert . You can lay odds the kid has problems at home and there is a good chance he gets picked on at school too.
Being on medication is big hint too.
It helps to read the entire article.
wait until the diversity police get this, 1 2 3 ruined
Sad article. Usually it is the new kid or the kid lacking the latest fad gadget. Sometimes popular kids buy their friends.
May the Lord give you and your daughter comfort. No person knows what sad feelings lurk inside of another; what losses they have suffered. The mask worn for the public is always there.
More on this issue. This strategy is nice but it misses much of the picture. There is a huge negative influence on kids, adults too. So, “everyone” is clamoring for Gun Control following the Valentine’s Day Massacre. Tube pundits younger than us are reminiscing about how it was when they were growing up and violence wasn’t so prevalent. Well, back in my/our day, more ‘crazy’ people were locked up in institutions, Hollyweird was prohibited from puting the crap it does in theaters today and there weren’t first person shooter video games like there are today. Go figure… society today is a product of Liberalism which allows that Anything Goes. Control the Gun isn’t going to solve the problem. Getting the two legged crazy critters back in straight jackets and putting a lid on all the social media moneymaking violence will in my humble opinion!
This is a reply to many of the concerns expressed above.
This method is one method that works for one teacher and possibly a percentage of others, but is not the end-all and be-all solution to every combination of teacher, class and administration. But if it saves our future society from one killer, it may save 17 or 20 other people down the road, times however many teachers try something like this and succeed.
Some of the above comments appear to regard this as a program of social engineering, when in reality it is one math teacher’s approach to compassionate development of the potentials of all her pupils, not just the stars.
The article was authored by someone else, and possibly an editor created the “sell” headline, making it sound more like a program that would be imposed on every school, when in actuality it was a report on one person’s creative approach—perhaps with the idea of inspiring others to try something new, not compelling them to.
While elementary children generally don’t shoot up schools, they are the logical place to intervene if there are personality issues that can be helped by gentle methods. By the time kids are older teens who might do the shooting, they are often too far down the road to be helped by the ministrations of a teacher.
I used a similar method when I taught older adolescents, and can attest I was able to help two in particular, and possibly more, who were about to go off their rails (not necessarily into shooting up the school; but there are many ways to ruin or end one’s productive life).
And also to answer several posts’ concerns, there is a difference in affect and output between introverts vs at-risk-because-neglected children, and one would certainly hope any teacher who is experienced would recognize this. I am slightly Aspie and was handled brilliantly by a succession of middle-school and high school teachers before the current trend of over regimentation in teaching. They set me up for what would later be a productive career by finding the right activities to bring out my best skills, in ways that were not available at home.
I am a retired teacher. I taught for over 20 years in small towns. My average class size was 18 students. The teachers knew all the student’s parents. The parents knew all the instructors. We were a community.
Most of my students were ranch kids, drove Ford pickups to school and had rifles racked in the rear window. There were never any gun incidents.....a few fist fights, but nothing more.
I guess what I am trying to get at is this. Schools are too big, classes are too large. There is no longer a sense of personal recognition nor community caring for each other.
Therein lies the danger to our children.
I read the article.
Sorry to tread on your sainthood and self-admiration.
You will find a lot of kids who will end up being future leaders, genius's or millionaires as y who greatly outnumber the odd psychopath here or there.
[[Hollyweird was prohibited from puting the crap it does in theaters today and there weren’t first person shooter video games like there are today. ]]
FPS games have been around for a long time. Over 20 years ago I was playing Quake . It was a hardcore FPS where you hunted people . Everyone wanted the BFG but you could wreak some real havoc with a grenade launcher .Team Fortress has to be almost 20 years old now too. The difference between now and 20 years ago is that it was rare to find kids on all this mind bending medication where suicide is listed as a side effect (suicide to murder in an angry person is a hop skip and jump )
Also when kids behaved badly 20 years ago they locked them up.
I was a nerdy geek but Church, Boy Scouts, a large family, a few friends and the greatness of Mother Nature assuaged my innate loneliness.
Now, to this day, my wonderful wife and I are our only friends and we like it that way. I do have 314 "fb friends" but I haven't' seen but a small handful of them face-to-face in years. Come to think of it, about half I haven't seen in at least fifty years.
https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/island.html
I effectively reject this reality and substitute my own.
I have just started hearing about her recently. Enjoyed this TED Talk very much; thanks!
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