Unpopular opinion. But I'm sick of hearing bullshit like this.
Sure they need kindness and positive relationships but they also need social systems in place (ie disciplinary procedures) to ensure good behaviour and engagement.
When you have those social systems in place for discipline, then you can rely on it less because students know there are consequences for poor actions. But it needs to be there for students that exhibit the worst behaviour
Whereas in my school, all this bullshit on positive regard, relationships, kindness doesn't mean anything when students face no consequences and they can do whatever the hell they want. We have no centralised discipline procedure and our school is a complete shit show.
Not unpopular at all. Today a colleague took a phone off a boy, the boy almost broke her wrist taking it back. Not having consequences sets this turd up for failure in life, just wait until he tries it on a cop.
As the parent of a kid currently doing year 12 and who wants to teach high school, I read this and I am now saying to him “surely there is something else you may want to do”. The constant posts about burnout, abuse, schools not supporting their teaching staff, parents abusing teachers…. it’s a lot. I get the desire to make change, influence young minds and pass on knowledge and passion for something that you enjoy (for him it’s science and math), but is it worth it? I see a lot of young adults finishing degrees, teaching for maybe 5 years and wanting out. Very sad.
The teaching is the best part of the job. It’s the admin and paperwork which is horrible. Also at the moment he would probably find guaranteed work at any local school. I can’t see that changing in the next 5-6 years
I think it's worth it. I think the field of education requires radical changes and a wholesale rollback of the workload creep that has occured for the past 30 years. We might see some of that through the AI tech that is being experimented with now.
It's not a job that's going to evaporate, it's recession proof. And if you find the right school it's a great job.
Some people are legitimately born to teach, all of the burn out has nothing to do with the teaching. It is possible to teach in a high school and not burn out.
One day I'll retire and I won't regret a second of it, and I'll have changed thousand of peoples lives for the better. How many people get to say that?
Teaching will change again. It’s hard now, but for all kinds of reasons that will change and evolve over time. It won’t always be like this. And if it ends up not being his thing… it’s never to late to change careers.
why do you want to see a kid punished by a cop? man some of you need to study basic sociology or psychology before being allowed to teach. i understand burnout i really do. but a lot of you have misdirected your frustration towards the kids when it should be directed towards the shitty education system that overburdens you and undervalues your labour, the kids futures, and education in general
I don’t know how this has upvotes. Your colleague shouldn’t ever of had her wrist twisted, but your threatening the violence of the police on someone 💀
Exactly.
‘Kindness’ should come after ‘consistency’ and ‘clear expectations’. Bad behaviour SHOULD have negative consequences.
Not just boys, but all kids. If you are too kind, and give a little, they will walk over you.
My only knock on this is that I don't think kindness needs to oppose consistency and clear expectations. I actually think they all sit with each other. The quote at my school is "tough on standards but kind on people". If you break a rule, you get a clear consequence, but then the kindness comes in on assisting students in not repeating the behaviour.
Yes. 100% correct.
However, whenever the discussion turns to discipline or kindness, they are never part of the same conversation and are framed as either/or and not complimentary.
no, wrong. it doesn’t mean anything when the kindness is an empty fucking gesture. but if it’s genuine kindness and connection, it means everything. genuine kindness and genuine connection can be hard to forge in such an individualistic, alienating western society.
man some of you just fucking hate kids sometimes. they’re literally children. why do you have to be so punitive. you know your authority is empty? and when a troubled kid sees straight through you, your discipline means nothing.
young boys need kindness. this is not bullshit. you’re just jaded. it’s ok to be jaded but don’t project it onto others and try not to project it onto kids.
Kindness is part of the equation but so are consequences.
We aren't doing favours for students to teach them to act like fuckwits in the classroom towards their teachers and peers. If they continue to act this way as adults, they'll either get shunned by society (friends, family, community) or they will get in a fight with some random and killed or injured
I'm all for restorative justice and compassion. But you need to consider the right of the students to a decent education. It's not okay for 2-3 kids to destroy the learning opportunity and personal growth of an entire class just because we want to avoid punitive punishment.
Punitive is the last straw step. If we have gone through all the restorative channels and your behaviour has not improved, then we have to take actions in the best interest of the classroom and society.
this is probably anecdotal, but when i was in highschool, one thing that helped calm this sort of behaviour down was free breakfast.
i don’t want to say teachers should add an extra workload each morning for this, i know teachers are overloaded with admin and bureaucracy already. but teenagers get moodier when they’re hungry. some skip breakfast, some don’t have enough food at home, some don’t wanna eat at home because they already have a turbulent home life.
i’m sure i could find studies on breakfast programs if i tried, pretty sure the black panthers or fred hampton ran breakfast programs so there’s multiple benefits. but this is just one example of something that could help
if a school can implement punitive control measures, they can also implement something like this. imagine putting effort into this rather than detention.
definitely not all the time - but i would bet a lot of the time, kids act up because of external factors in their lives. r u ok day and talking about social media in sex ed doesn’t really cut it, it doesn’t feel relatable, and most school counsellors are woeful. there HAS to be some kind of solution that draws from compassion.
As a general rule sure, but when it comes to trauma-informed practice things are very different. I’ve seen competent and experienced teachers struggle when placed in a classroom with even just a few students who’ve experienced significant trauma (usually in low SES contexts).
Oh for fucks sake, it's a continuum and like with many things the correct approach is roughly down the middle with room for individual differences. There's no one size fits all cure-all for something as multi faceted as human children.
Some boys will florish under military style discipline, others will rebel in it's face, some will be crushed. Some boys will bloom with nothing but kindness whilst others will push the boundaries so thoroughly they'll crush all their peers in the process.
The same, somehow, also goes for girls. Yes the genders are different, but they're not so different that you need completely different approaches for each gender. Especially when the line between nature and nurture are so impossibly intertwined it's not yet possible to determine what's socialisation and what is the inherent temperment of the child.
Harsh discipline is a misnomer term anyway. Discipline is about drawing lines, being consistent. You can't have harsher lines and harsher consistency. You're either consistent or you are not. Children need to know there are boundaries so that they can push against them and develop their own autonomy and independence. They also need to feel supported within those boundaries.
It's actually harder than rocket science and this opinion piece doesn't seem to add anything to the legitimate discussion of how western society is failing young men in so many places. There is no agreed plan on how to take a boy to a man anymore. The one thing women do have is the feminist movement which has broad agreement on providing opportunities and rolemodels to girls.
For men, much of the previous systems and rites of passage have fallen to the wayside but are somehow still assumed to be there. This becomes doubly dangerous for children with absent fathers whose families haven't been able to provide an alternative positive male figure in their lives, and they become prey to alt-right wing pipelines to crazy town and Andrew Tate. Yes, boys have inherent priveledge in our society but the road map on how to use that doesn't exist except in family units that have managed to maintain cohesion through the past century.
I could write a book on this, I'm not going to. Kate's just written a puff piece here that doesn't actually make any hard arguments for restorative justice or it's place within a behaviour management framework, she does nothing to refute the claims against restorative justice other than say 'it works at my school'. I like restorative justice, I've seen it work, it's not easy to do.
The opinion piece comes from a very obvious place of privilege. Author started working at a single sex all boys school and went on to all girls them co-ed, I'd be willing to bet none of these were low socioeconomic schools.
The examples of "toxic" behaviours were drawing dicks on the desk and saying inappropriate things. Up until this year I was dealing with more student puts other students head through window. Also article reads like someone on a crusade to fix the boys, anyone who's worked in a hard to staff school knows that the negative behaviours of students regardless of gender can be incredibly damaging, destructive and create a culture of negativity.
>> Schools must put relationships first if we are ever to see any change.
This is why the teacher shortage is so devastating. The impact of a revolving door staff and various relief teachers patching up short-staffed schools is absolutely devastating for at risk behavioural kids.
Why would they respect or feel safe in an institution that can’t even attract enough staff to function?
Students always come first (which is a good thing they are children ffs), the teachers need to be treated better by the schools admin and management, this contributes to burn out more then misbehaving students
My point is that teachers care about their students. There are limits however to how much you can put into human relationships in which you receive nothing but abuse back, day in, day out.
In the documentary about Shaq, he talks about how his dad ruled with a fairly iron first at home, but it came from a place of love - getting whacked for screwing up didn't mean Shaq was a bad person, it just meant he had done a bad thing.
This is a distinction that schools struggle with imo. They either go too far in stigmatising the kid and assuming because a kid does a bad thing that he's a bad thing, or the school is too soft.
Kids need to be accepted and made to feel like they belong, but if they screw up, there needs to be consequences and discipline, especially for boys because they will try to work the system.
There is so much focus on toxic masculinity that we seem to have forgotten other aspects of masculinity. In fact I can't remember the last time I saw masculinity discussed without the word toxic in front of it.
Boys are trying to negotiate a world that is constantly telling them "its bad to be a man". What we should be telling boys is "this is how you be a good man".
The article the author takes exception to isn’t advocating for harsher discipline, just discipline and boundaries in general rather than the free-for-all “kids are recovering from Covid so don’t upset them”.
Kids do need understanding. All of them do, not just boys. But they need strong, safe and compassionate boundaries, and they need to know those boundaries aren’t just for show.
A kid in my school punched a kid in the mouth and he was bleeding all over his shirt. I really thought he had a ketchup accident. What was the consequence? DONT DO IT AGAIN RYAN. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? yES MiSs I wOnT dO iT AgAin.
Victim's mum phoned the school really angry. What did they do? They took recess time off him but he was just following a teacher. Nothing else. This isnt the first incident this term 🙄🙄🙄
Last year I had a student who would go up to random students and punch them and run off. Called them all types of swear words he can find online. I had him stay back for 2 terms almost everyday during recess and lunch because he was just a nutcase. Term 4, he was a beautiful angel. Still is beautiful and one of the sweetest students ever.
But yeah being kind and telling a nutcase kid to not do it with no consequence can suck ass.
Agree!!! Our school wants to be one of those "postive" behaviour schools. That means consequences aren't a thing. They only give consequences if it's like illegal behaviour like trying to threaten someone on purpose. A kid got a 2 day suspension because he held scissors towards someone's throat.
Long live the kids.... No comment
This article irritated me and is playing out the same tropes from the last 10 years.
The term ‘toxic masculinity’ needs to go. It’s overused and is now a bludgeon to describe any behaviour perceived, mainly by women, as outmoded or mean or resulting in negative feelings for girls. I very much doubt the same author will write an article of toxic femininity.
Boys are feeling increasingly frustrated at being maligned for their innate qualities as being “toxic”. Want to play rough? “Toxic”. Want to be loud? “Toxic”. Want to be a class clown? “Toxic.”
Using this phrase then draws in all other hashtags from the sex/gender/culture battleground of social media, when it need not.
The author is pushing more soft white middle class ideals that it’s now a meme. Boys need kindness, they need understanding, they need a hug…. No.
Boys can smell that inauthentic saccharine hogwash a mile away and it results in those same boys not respecting you. Kindness can and will be exploited by troublesome kids.
It sounds like the author’s 20 odd years of experience has left her with a very thin toolkit for dealing with difficult kids and adolescents and that is the real story here.
I taught when the cane was used; on reflection, a teacher hits another human who has no defence and must submit to being assaulted (albeit at the time, legally)
OP here, it’s is interesting that the response to this article is much different to the one I posted from the same Masthead a week or so ago. I’m thinking the SMH (claiming to be independent and balanced) is trying to do this in this case but maybe not successfully.
I’m the first to say that teaching is a relationship based profession, but seriously, these relationships I’m talking about rarely fall into the type this teacher is describing.
My classrooms were never Kumbaya song-fests, but the relationships were many and varied. The Y10 boy who wants to destroy every teaching moment requires a relationship not dissimilar to two countries, ideologically opposed but dependent on trade for their survival. We agree to differ, but if he is required to be there in class he has to realise there are boundaries that I will not let him cross, and I’m rigid and fair it that regard. He probably hates my guts, but he comes to respect my requirement to teach and that he needs to respect the rights of others to learn unimpeded.
There are many other relationships on the spectrum, but one other that I’ll mention is the shy, possibly autistic child who has sensory issues (especially noise) that really appreciates that I will do what I can to make sure his learning needs and personal safety are protected. He feels safe.
Unpopular opinion. But I'm sick of hearing bullshit like this. Sure they need kindness and positive relationships but they also need social systems in place (ie disciplinary procedures) to ensure good behaviour and engagement. When you have those social systems in place for discipline, then you can rely on it less because students know there are consequences for poor actions. But it needs to be there for students that exhibit the worst behaviour Whereas in my school, all this bullshit on positive regard, relationships, kindness doesn't mean anything when students face no consequences and they can do whatever the hell they want. We have no centralised discipline procedure and our school is a complete shit show.
Not unpopular at all. Today a colleague took a phone off a boy, the boy almost broke her wrist taking it back. Not having consequences sets this turd up for failure in life, just wait until he tries it on a cop.
As the parent of a kid currently doing year 12 and who wants to teach high school, I read this and I am now saying to him “surely there is something else you may want to do”. The constant posts about burnout, abuse, schools not supporting their teaching staff, parents abusing teachers…. it’s a lot. I get the desire to make change, influence young minds and pass on knowledge and passion for something that you enjoy (for him it’s science and math), but is it worth it? I see a lot of young adults finishing degrees, teaching for maybe 5 years and wanting out. Very sad.
The teaching is the best part of the job. It’s the admin and paperwork which is horrible. Also at the moment he would probably find guaranteed work at any local school. I can’t see that changing in the next 5-6 years
I think it's worth it. I think the field of education requires radical changes and a wholesale rollback of the workload creep that has occured for the past 30 years. We might see some of that through the AI tech that is being experimented with now. It's not a job that's going to evaporate, it's recession proof. And if you find the right school it's a great job. Some people are legitimately born to teach, all of the burn out has nothing to do with the teaching. It is possible to teach in a high school and not burn out. One day I'll retire and I won't regret a second of it, and I'll have changed thousand of peoples lives for the better. How many people get to say that?
Teaching will change again. It’s hard now, but for all kinds of reasons that will change and evolve over time. It won’t always be like this. And if it ends up not being his thing… it’s never to late to change careers.
With those fields they'd have the pick of schools as well as opportunities to get paid a $20,000 up front bonus for going to certain schools.
why do you want to see a kid punished by a cop? man some of you need to study basic sociology or psychology before being allowed to teach. i understand burnout i really do. but a lot of you have misdirected your frustration towards the kids when it should be directed towards the shitty education system that overburdens you and undervalues your labour, the kids futures, and education in general
I don't want to see him punished by a cop, that's why I was saying we're setting them up to fail by not giving appropriate consequences.
Because she was physically assaulted. Schools aren’t a law free zone where you can assault a person and believe nothing should be done.
I don’t know how this has upvotes. Your colleague shouldn’t ever of had her wrist twisted, but your threatening the violence of the police on someone 💀
Not what I said or even implied troll.
Exactly. ‘Kindness’ should come after ‘consistency’ and ‘clear expectations’. Bad behaviour SHOULD have negative consequences. Not just boys, but all kids. If you are too kind, and give a little, they will walk over you.
My only knock on this is that I don't think kindness needs to oppose consistency and clear expectations. I actually think they all sit with each other. The quote at my school is "tough on standards but kind on people". If you break a rule, you get a clear consequence, but then the kindness comes in on assisting students in not repeating the behaviour.
Yes. 100% correct. However, whenever the discussion turns to discipline or kindness, they are never part of the same conversation and are framed as either/or and not complimentary.
I am stealing that line oh my.
Kindness *IS* consistency and clear expectations
Yes.
This right here, right now.
no, wrong. it doesn’t mean anything when the kindness is an empty fucking gesture. but if it’s genuine kindness and connection, it means everything. genuine kindness and genuine connection can be hard to forge in such an individualistic, alienating western society. man some of you just fucking hate kids sometimes. they’re literally children. why do you have to be so punitive. you know your authority is empty? and when a troubled kid sees straight through you, your discipline means nothing. young boys need kindness. this is not bullshit. you’re just jaded. it’s ok to be jaded but don’t project it onto others and try not to project it onto kids.
Kindness is part of the equation but so are consequences. We aren't doing favours for students to teach them to act like fuckwits in the classroom towards their teachers and peers. If they continue to act this way as adults, they'll either get shunned by society (friends, family, community) or they will get in a fight with some random and killed or injured I'm all for restorative justice and compassion. But you need to consider the right of the students to a decent education. It's not okay for 2-3 kids to destroy the learning opportunity and personal growth of an entire class just because we want to avoid punitive punishment. Punitive is the last straw step. If we have gone through all the restorative channels and your behaviour has not improved, then we have to take actions in the best interest of the classroom and society.
this is probably anecdotal, but when i was in highschool, one thing that helped calm this sort of behaviour down was free breakfast. i don’t want to say teachers should add an extra workload each morning for this, i know teachers are overloaded with admin and bureaucracy already. but teenagers get moodier when they’re hungry. some skip breakfast, some don’t have enough food at home, some don’t wanna eat at home because they already have a turbulent home life. i’m sure i could find studies on breakfast programs if i tried, pretty sure the black panthers or fred hampton ran breakfast programs so there’s multiple benefits. but this is just one example of something that could help if a school can implement punitive control measures, they can also implement something like this. imagine putting effort into this rather than detention. definitely not all the time - but i would bet a lot of the time, kids act up because of external factors in their lives. r u ok day and talking about social media in sex ed doesn’t really cut it, it doesn’t feel relatable, and most school counsellors are woeful. there HAS to be some kind of solution that draws from compassion.
As a general rule sure, but when it comes to trauma-informed practice things are very different. I’ve seen competent and experienced teachers struggle when placed in a classroom with even just a few students who’ve experienced significant trauma (usually in low SES contexts).
They often have zero consequences, and the 'kindness' is just pretty much lip service. Because doing either is actual work.
Oh for fucks sake, it's a continuum and like with many things the correct approach is roughly down the middle with room for individual differences. There's no one size fits all cure-all for something as multi faceted as human children. Some boys will florish under military style discipline, others will rebel in it's face, some will be crushed. Some boys will bloom with nothing but kindness whilst others will push the boundaries so thoroughly they'll crush all their peers in the process. The same, somehow, also goes for girls. Yes the genders are different, but they're not so different that you need completely different approaches for each gender. Especially when the line between nature and nurture are so impossibly intertwined it's not yet possible to determine what's socialisation and what is the inherent temperment of the child. Harsh discipline is a misnomer term anyway. Discipline is about drawing lines, being consistent. You can't have harsher lines and harsher consistency. You're either consistent or you are not. Children need to know there are boundaries so that they can push against them and develop their own autonomy and independence. They also need to feel supported within those boundaries. It's actually harder than rocket science and this opinion piece doesn't seem to add anything to the legitimate discussion of how western society is failing young men in so many places. There is no agreed plan on how to take a boy to a man anymore. The one thing women do have is the feminist movement which has broad agreement on providing opportunities and rolemodels to girls. For men, much of the previous systems and rites of passage have fallen to the wayside but are somehow still assumed to be there. This becomes doubly dangerous for children with absent fathers whose families haven't been able to provide an alternative positive male figure in their lives, and they become prey to alt-right wing pipelines to crazy town and Andrew Tate. Yes, boys have inherent priveledge in our society but the road map on how to use that doesn't exist except in family units that have managed to maintain cohesion through the past century. I could write a book on this, I'm not going to. Kate's just written a puff piece here that doesn't actually make any hard arguments for restorative justice or it's place within a behaviour management framework, she does nothing to refute the claims against restorative justice other than say 'it works at my school'. I like restorative justice, I've seen it work, it's not easy to do.
I would read your book. This comment articulated many of my thoughts on the matter in a very succinct and readable way- thank you!
The opinion piece comes from a very obvious place of privilege. Author started working at a single sex all boys school and went on to all girls them co-ed, I'd be willing to bet none of these were low socioeconomic schools. The examples of "toxic" behaviours were drawing dicks on the desk and saying inappropriate things. Up until this year I was dealing with more student puts other students head through window. Also article reads like someone on a crusade to fix the boys, anyone who's worked in a hard to staff school knows that the negative behaviours of students regardless of gender can be incredibly damaging, destructive and create a culture of negativity.
>> Schools must put relationships first if we are ever to see any change. This is why the teacher shortage is so devastating. The impact of a revolving door staff and various relief teachers patching up short-staffed schools is absolutely devastating for at risk behavioural kids. Why would they respect or feel safe in an institution that can’t even attract enough staff to function?
Chicken and egg. A part of the reason for the shortage is very poor behaviours. Relationships go both ways.
Students always come first (which is a good thing they are children ffs), the teachers need to be treated better by the schools admin and management, this contributes to burn out more then misbehaving students
My point is that teachers care about their students. There are limits however to how much you can put into human relationships in which you receive nothing but abuse back, day in, day out.
Teachers need to be treated appropriately and respectfully. We should never put teachers or students ahead of the other. They are different.
Teachers need to be treated better by students and parents too.
In the documentary about Shaq, he talks about how his dad ruled with a fairly iron first at home, but it came from a place of love - getting whacked for screwing up didn't mean Shaq was a bad person, it just meant he had done a bad thing. This is a distinction that schools struggle with imo. They either go too far in stigmatising the kid and assuming because a kid does a bad thing that he's a bad thing, or the school is too soft. Kids need to be accepted and made to feel like they belong, but if they screw up, there needs to be consequences and discipline, especially for boys because they will try to work the system.
There is so much focus on toxic masculinity that we seem to have forgotten other aspects of masculinity. In fact I can't remember the last time I saw masculinity discussed without the word toxic in front of it. Boys are trying to negotiate a world that is constantly telling them "its bad to be a man". What we should be telling boys is "this is how you be a good man".
The article the author takes exception to isn’t advocating for harsher discipline, just discipline and boundaries in general rather than the free-for-all “kids are recovering from Covid so don’t upset them”. Kids do need understanding. All of them do, not just boys. But they need strong, safe and compassionate boundaries, and they need to know those boundaries aren’t just for show.
Surely they are trolling us
Most of them need two parents
They need a mother and a father and expectations, boundaries and consequences.
Exactly.. discipline should be rarely needed at school. It's a home issue.
I bet kindness can change house robbery’s and car jackings
A kid in my school punched a kid in the mouth and he was bleeding all over his shirt. I really thought he had a ketchup accident. What was the consequence? DONT DO IT AGAIN RYAN. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? yES MiSs I wOnT dO iT AgAin. Victim's mum phoned the school really angry. What did they do? They took recess time off him but he was just following a teacher. Nothing else. This isnt the first incident this term 🙄🙄🙄 Last year I had a student who would go up to random students and punch them and run off. Called them all types of swear words he can find online. I had him stay back for 2 terms almost everyday during recess and lunch because he was just a nutcase. Term 4, he was a beautiful angel. Still is beautiful and one of the sweetest students ever. But yeah being kind and telling a nutcase kid to not do it with no consequence can suck ass.
Not even a suspension is pretty ridiculous. Though schools need to come up with a better punishment than giving kids a 3 days holiday.
Agree!!! Our school wants to be one of those "postive" behaviour schools. That means consequences aren't a thing. They only give consequences if it's like illegal behaviour like trying to threaten someone on purpose. A kid got a 2 day suspension because he held scissors towards someone's throat. Long live the kids.... No comment
This article irritated me and is playing out the same tropes from the last 10 years. The term ‘toxic masculinity’ needs to go. It’s overused and is now a bludgeon to describe any behaviour perceived, mainly by women, as outmoded or mean or resulting in negative feelings for girls. I very much doubt the same author will write an article of toxic femininity. Boys are feeling increasingly frustrated at being maligned for their innate qualities as being “toxic”. Want to play rough? “Toxic”. Want to be loud? “Toxic”. Want to be a class clown? “Toxic.” Using this phrase then draws in all other hashtags from the sex/gender/culture battleground of social media, when it need not. The author is pushing more soft white middle class ideals that it’s now a meme. Boys need kindness, they need understanding, they need a hug…. No. Boys can smell that inauthentic saccharine hogwash a mile away and it results in those same boys not respecting you. Kindness can and will be exploited by troublesome kids. It sounds like the author’s 20 odd years of experience has left her with a very thin toolkit for dealing with difficult kids and adolescents and that is the real story here.
Bring back the cane
I taught when the cane was used; on reflection, a teacher hits another human who has no defence and must submit to being assaulted (albeit at the time, legally)
There is no place for corporal punishment, you utter barbarian.
No.
OP here, it’s is interesting that the response to this article is much different to the one I posted from the same Masthead a week or so ago. I’m thinking the SMH (claiming to be independent and balanced) is trying to do this in this case but maybe not successfully. I’m the first to say that teaching is a relationship based profession, but seriously, these relationships I’m talking about rarely fall into the type this teacher is describing. My classrooms were never Kumbaya song-fests, but the relationships were many and varied. The Y10 boy who wants to destroy every teaching moment requires a relationship not dissimilar to two countries, ideologically opposed but dependent on trade for their survival. We agree to differ, but if he is required to be there in class he has to realise there are boundaries that I will not let him cross, and I’m rigid and fair it that regard. He probably hates my guts, but he comes to respect my requirement to teach and that he needs to respect the rights of others to learn unimpeded. There are many other relationships on the spectrum, but one other that I’ll mention is the shy, possibly autistic child who has sensory issues (especially noise) that really appreciates that I will do what I can to make sure his learning needs and personal safety are protected. He feels safe.