Gotta Love Student Responsibility!

I have a student who is tardy a lot. When a student is not in the classroom when the late bell rings, I have to mark them absent. If they show up during classtime, it is my responsibility to change their absence to a tardy. Sometimes I forget because I'm doing other things, like teaching, to remember to change it.

On Friday, little Miss Tardy-A-Lot, was either tardy or absent. The reason I don't remember almost a week later if she was here last Friday is because she was suspended the first three days of this week. My strategy when she returned from being absent was to check her language arts notebook for work we did in class on Friday. I called her over to my desk and asked her to bring her notebook. She brought it over very willingly and I proceeded to look through it.

As I'm thumbing through the pages, her standing next to me, she doesn't utter a word. Suddenly, I turn to a page that shocks me to no end. On it she has written profanity about a teacher on campus (something that I'm used to) along with a threat of physical violence (most specifically wanting to slit said teacher's throat). That didn't even shock me as much as her response to all of this. When I showed her what I was looking at, she just shrugged her shoulders. Remember, she gave me the notebook willingly without so much as a second glance as to anything that might cause her any problems.

Many schools have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to situations like this. I have the notebook and had to contact the parent. When I called home, the parent was very upset. Not with her child, but rather with me. First, she questioned what I was doing looking through her notebook, then she complained that she has been down to the school several times to set up a conference and we never did (I know for a fact that she never did this) and finally, she didn't understand what the big deal was over just words on a paper.

A conference will be scheduled for next week. Of course, I won't hold my breath that there will be any change in behavior or for that matter, any willingness to take responsibility by the parent or the child.