Today is Tuesday, September 27th.

The most popular mantra spewed at behavior management training is “Reward the Positive Behavior and Ignore the Negative”. That’s CRAP! You know who likes to spew that line of crap….people who do not deal with extreme negative behaviors.

Yes, teacher unbelievably annoyed by the student who taps their pencil, needs a drink of water every time it’s math time, or walks too slowly in from recess every day. Ignore that behavior.

You know what behaviors you can’t ignore? Hitting, kicking, biting, aggressively screaming. These types of behaviors escalate into worse, scarier behaviors until you just can’t ignore the student any more.

And the king of all negative, attention getting behaviors…the one that once the student realizes the power it holds means the entire school is SCREWED is POOP!!!

One of the other special day classes on campus has a student who has learned the power that playing with her poop holds and today over the radio I heard a 911 coverage request for just this behavior.

This student has two behavior tech aides assigned to just her to keep behaviors from escalating to this point…it’s not working. So what crime scene did I run in on today, this student wiping her own poop over the walls, the books, the desks and herself. WHY??!! Because her aides were chanting the horribly ill-advised mantra “Ignore the negative behavior!” Apparently they thought if they just ignored her she would stop and get back on track? The thoughts of the safety of the other students not crossing their minds.

These ‘professionals’ were actually upset when we intervened, stopped the student, (evacuated the other students) and cleaned her up. We gave her ‘too much attention for her off track behavior’. If we follow their line of thinking, she would eventually bore of not getting attention and independently decide to sit back down and get back to work. YEAH! That will happen as her aides are cowering in the corner grimacing!!

As we are cleaning up the mess, joking about why the district doesn’t provide us with Hazmat suits and how much we think a case on Amazon would actually cost us if we all chipped in, I began thinking this is exactly why I started this blog.

This is my life as a teacher. Before I had this blog, I would have come home, poured a glass of wine and taken a long, hot shower! Than later that even (over another glass of wine) shared this story with my husband. Although things like this don’t happen every day (thank goodness) this is my normal! And how un-normal this is in the life of an average teacher is terms I am coming to understand as I blog my life as a Special Ed Teacher!

So I’ve showered, I’ve prepped for tomorrow, I’ve now blogged…it’s time for my next glass of wine! Good Night and Cheers to a Poop Free tomorrow!!