Sticking it to Him

It wasn’t the first time I picked Max up at school in a foul mood. (Him, not me.) But it was the first time I heard him say that he hated his teacher.

This child was screaming and thrashing around and complaining about school – all because he didn’t receive his rightfully earned reward for good behavior.

Let me explain. His teacher has a somewhat involved behavioral system in place. Each child has four popsicle sticks in pockets that hang at the teacher’s desk. When an infraction is committed, the child gets a stick pulled. If there’s more than one infraction in a day, more sticks are pulled. For each one pulled, the child needs to make up for his behavior: if one stick is pulled, he has to apologize in writing; two sticks and he misses part of recess and so on.

If a child manages to go a whole week without pulling a stick, he earns a sticker. The sticker is placed on a chart. Whoever fills the whole chart is rewarded by having lunch, together, with the teacher.

At first I thought this was a good system. But then it occurred to me it was too rigid. If a child pulls just a single stick in a week, he loses the chance to get a sticker. And if he’s missing just one sticker, he doesn’t get to have lunch with the teacher. Seems to me if a child pulls a stick on Monday, there’s little incentive to behave during the rest of the week.

That said, Max has never had a stick pulled. Despite his difficulties, he is a well-behaved child in the classroom. He has always collected his stickers and the first time around he had lunch with his teacher, Mrs. G.

Today was the second lunch with the teacher and I knew for weeks that a sticker was missing. It wasn’t that Max didn’t earn one – it’s just that one never came home. We had a snow day on a Friday some weeks ago and that’s the day she hands out the stickers. When I didn’t see one the following week, I took note of it but didn’t want to bother the teacher by asking where Max’s sticker was. I have more important issues to discuss with her and this didn’t seem like such a big deal.

Until this week, when we found Max’s chart one sticker short. I emailed his teacher explaining that we were missing a sticker and asked her to check her records just to make sure Max didn’t pull a stick. No response. So today, lunch day, I wrote up another note and stuck it to the chart Max was to bring back to school and didn’t give it much more thought. I figured it was a non-issue.

I figured wrong.

Max didn’t have lunch with Mrs. G. and that was why he was so angry and distraught when I picked him up from school. I pulled the behavior chart from his backpack to find a preprinted note attached from the teacher:

If you had outstanding behavior and have earned all of your stickers, I am sorry that you did not collect all of them in order to have lunch with me. If you were absent for some reason, your sticker was placed on your desk with your name on it. Do not wait until it’s time to turn your sticker chart in to let me know that you are missing a sticker for some reason. Please try to collect all of your stickers for your new Outstanding Behavior chart for this marking period and then I will look forward to having lunch together to celebrate your outstanding behavior choices. Sincerely, Mrs. G.

I was shocked. Max had done the hard part; he showed excellent behavior for ten straight weeks. He fought impulses and compulsions and tics. He did great work in spite of his distractibility, hyperactive mind and retrieval problems. But because he wasn’t in possession of a single sticker he wasn’t entitled to the reward?

I can appreciate that the teacher is trying to teach the kids to be responsible for their work and to be organized. That’s great. But she has to realize that these are things that do not come easily for Max. And as far as I was concerned, that had to be taken into account.

Max was truly devastated that afternoon. And I can’t say I was in much better shape myself.