The Drama of 2nd Grade

To be an effective teacher, not only do you have to be able to teach reading, writing, math, science, social studies, etc., you also have to be an effective therapist/child psychologist.

A good example of this is what happened in my room this morning. Yesterday, Michael found a note in his box from his "secret admirer". Now we don't allow 8 year olds to "go out" or to even talk about boyfriend-girlfriend stuff in school, so I told Ann (who's still solo student teaching) to try to figure out who did it. She called all the girls together this morning and she got nothing from them. Nobody would fess up.

So I came in swinging my MA in Psychology around...I can get them to tell me the truth! I thought! I talked to all the girls and told them about honesty and how I was going to call all their parents unless someone told the truth because at this point, it was more about all of them lying to me than about the note. All 8 girls stood their looking at me with big eyes and one by one, told me it wasn't them.

Okay, I thought. Time to switch gears. I took each girl aside individually and told them how important honesty and trust is and how sad it would be if I had to call their parents because someone was lying and to just please tell me the truth so you don't get your friends in trouble! Again...each girl looked me right in the face and either told me it wasn't them who wrote the note or they blamed Jenny.

Poor Jenny. Since 7 girls were blaming her, I had two options: either believe them or assume they were all ganging up on her. She is usually pretty honest, but 7 girls all had the same story! I thought she was probably lying, but I didn't want to accuse her outright, so I decided to wait a bit and see what happened.

Turns out, I didn't have to wait long. About 2 hours later, I was in the room getting some work done, and Melissa came up to me and very quietly said,"Mrs Corzine, I did it." Melissa is one of my very top students, very sweet and the LAST person I would have thought would have lied about this! I thanked her for telling the truth and sent her back to her desk. Then I called the other girls out in the hall and talked to them about how they accused poor Jenny and how they owed her an apology. You could tell they all felt bad.

I had Melissa write Jenny a letter telling her she was sorry and I told Melissa she had ruined my trust in her and I was very sad she had lied. Melissa started crying because she's not used to being in trouble and said how sorry she was.

All of this over a note to a boy...and they're only 8 years old. Can't imagine what my life is going to be like when Maelin gets a bit older and starts acting like a typical "girl"...