How do punishments meted out in schools work?
Elementary schools tread very lightly in the punishment department these days, I’m afraid, due to parents who raise holy hell at the slightest perceived injustice towards their precious darlings. At my kids’ schools there has been a system of colors (green/yellow/red) that help modify behavior. If you pull a yellow card, you generally lose a school privilege. If you pull a red, a note goes home to the parents. Principals get involved when the behavior is deemed disruptive to the class overall. I don’t think anyone stands in the corner any more, or stands outside. My daughter was kept late in a class with a group of talkers, but I think they can only do that during the last class of the day, otherwise they’d be late for their next class. No essays or extra homework that I can remember, but maybe my kids are just good… at school.
I have worked with first graders, and found that there is usually intense competition for the coveted jobs of “classroom work” such as cleaning the boards, cleaning the desks, or even emptying the trash. These jobs make them feel like adults and take them away from the monotony of regular work. Two approaches that I particularly admired: one teacher would walk around as she lectured, and if a child continued to misbehave after a warning, she would discretely place a 1″x1″ sticky note on the child’s desk. That was a notice that the child would have a point loss. The child would nervously fold the sticky and contemplate the events. The sticky would be folded into a microscopic object as the teacher continued to talk, and the event would loom large. There was also the green-orange-red stoplight, with everyone having a clip with their clips on green at the beginning of each day on green, and the child would have to walk to the front of the class and move the clip to orange and then to red
