Your son's behavior is destroying my son's classroom experience

Shani: I feel terrible about your predicament, but I had to put my son’s needs first.

Tamara: We’re dealing with a major challenge here. couldn’t you have been patient while we tried to work it out?

Shani

MY Yoni is what you’d call a model student.

Hardworking. Conscientious. Loves to learn. The type who’s made to sit in a classroom. You get the idea.

He enjoys camp, he has a bunch of friends, but school is where he’s in his element. So I was surprised when he came home a few days into September, dragging his feet and looking dejected.

“What happened, Yons?” I asked, giving him a hug and a cookie.

He accepted the cookie but pulled away from the hug. Too macho for that at nine years old, I guess.

“Whatever, nothing,” he mumbled.

I tried probing a little. “The rebbi? Your friends? Something happened?”

He shrugged. “Nooo… I mean, yes, but nothing happened to me. Just…” He finished the cookie and looked around for more. I put a few on a plate in front of him; I didn’t want him to stop talking. “Our rebbi this year is Rabbi Schwartz… he’s really nice, but he isn’t so strict, you know? And some of the kids, they mess around and stuff. Today they were all throwing paper airplanes whenever Rebbi turned around. And then Av— one of the boys even threw one at him. He got kicked out of class, but everyone was laughing, because it hit Rebbi’s jacket, and then it was just all noisy, and we didn’t learn a thing.”

“That sounds tough,” I said sympathetically.

The poor rebbi. And what was that about Avi? Yoni’s classmate Avi lived across the street from us. His mother, Tamara, and I were good friends, and Yoni and Avi played together with the other neighbors a lot, although they weren’t really close friends. They were too different for that.

“Yeah. Yesterday also. And in English class. I wish they wouldn’t. It’s so hard to concentrate.”

His brow furrowed in frustration. My poor kid. He loved school, but he was really an average student. He had to work hard to do well. And focusing in a chaotic classroom couldn’t be easy.

“It’s still the first week of school. Hopefully things will settle down,” I said, optimistically. “Let’s give the rebbi some time to get to know everyone.”

“Yeah. Maybe,” Yoni muttered. He didn’t sound convinced.