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Tagged: addressing bad manners, bathroom usage, communication with parents, Duke of Edinburgh award, handling rudeness, lesson disruptions, lesson etiquette, student behavior, student discipline, teaching strategies
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How To Deal With Impolite Students? (All Teachers)
Posted by Beckie Tunnicliffe on July 5, 2024 at 12:15 pmHi everyone. Just got a question for you all really as I’ve not had experience of this before! I have a student who is having singing lessons as part of his Duke of Edinburgh award. His attendance is good and everything but he is consistently rude in the lessons. By rude I mean bad manners really – yawning with his mouth wide open, treating the room like his own house, leaving litter…and every week he uses the bathroom multiple times, and my Mum has complained that after he has been in there it’s not um, clean! 🙁
What should I do? I’ve not been told of any medical issues as I’m a bit concerned about the whole toilet thing as he spends more time in there than singing…. I’m not sure how to approach it with him or should I ring his parents and discuss it with them? It’s making me really dread his lessons every week 🙁Eliza Fyfe replied 7 months ago 4 Members · 15 Replies -
15 Replies
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Ughhh I hate situations like this!! How old his he!!?? If he’s older then 13 he should know better!!! I have a student who’s basically stalking me at the moment and it’s getting concerning!!! Having like 4 lessons a week and I’m not sure it’s for the right reason!!!!!!
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Thank you🙂 He is 21 so should really know better! At first I thought he could perhaps have some form of autism as he can seem quite withdrawn but I just found out he has recently done a lot of difficult exams so I don’t know! It is a horrible situation🙁
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Ugh just be straight with him!! There’s not more you can do! Good luck xx
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Thank you, I’m just really worried I will offend him but I guess there isn’t an easy way around it :/
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He is an adult, tell him straight that he needs to sort his shit out! No parents necessary for this age!!
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Eek, bad luck Beckie in having such a difficult situation land on your plate! It’s always tough when you think that someone might be on the spectrum, but time and again the advice I’ve been given is ‘set them boundaries, so they know what to stick to’. Even if he’s nowhere near the spectrum, my advice would be the same – give him a deadline to improve his behaviour by, and if he doesn’t stick to it (or relapses over three lessons) give him a month off teaching. Good luck – that is a doozie.6
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I would be straight to the point with him and ask him outright about his behaviour. It’s not fair on you at all.
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Oh gosh I completely forgot about this post! I’m out at the moment but when I get to my PC I’ll update you all🙂
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My memory is so poor…lol, I forgot again haha
Anyway, an update on what happened. It took me a few days to actually call after I originally posted this so I could think about what I should say! I ended up calling his Mum’s PA as I wasn’t too sure how easy it would be to talk to his Mum, as I have nearly always spoken to the PA regarding his lessons and she isn’t the most fluent in English.
He had another lesson in the time between posting and calling, and once again he forgot his notebook so I used this to begin my concerns rather than jumping in and going through the worser things! When I rang another receptionist answered the phone and she said she would remind him about the book….so I then brought up the toilet issue, to which she replied “Oh yeah….can I call you later as he is sat next to me”, so I knew there must be something up!
The PA (who is lovely by the way) rang me the next day and told me that he has Asperger’s Syndrome, which is why he is constantly back and forth to the toilet in the lessons as he looses his concentration. Now I try to keep my lessons as practical as possible, but I was struggling to do so with him spending half of the lesson out of the hour in the toilet. This made me question why he was doing an hour if he wasn’t up to it….
The PA thought she had told me about the Asperger’s but she hadn’t, and I also told her his Mum hadn’t told me either when she filled out the student agreement in the very first lesson, which has a specific question along the lines of “Does the student have any medical conditions that I must be made aware of?”. On the form she either wrote No or crossed a line through it, to which I was told she did this because she can’t accept that her son has this condition and so will not admit it. Very frustrating as I could have suited the lessons more around it.
He came to his next lesson with a friend who filmed his lesson as evidence for the DoE, which threw me a bit as I have never been filmed teaching a lesson before! He was on his best behaviour so someone must have spoken to him, and also probably because he was on film!
On Monday I had another phone call from the PA to inform me he would not be continuing with lessons. The main reason was that it was incredibly far for him to travel (and honestly I’m surprised he managed to keep the lessons up for as long as he did with the distance he travelled) and that she felt he wasn’t committed enough and she would rather I spend my time teaching someone who would practice every week and concentrate in the lessons. I’m relieved about it, but frustrated as I had just found out how to deliver his lessons and work them around his condition. As we would all probably say, it’s experience at the end of the day.
So there we go, sorry for the essay! 😛
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Well it all makes sense now! So wrong of the mother to not tell you about the Asperger’s! What sort of mother would do that… it’s unfair on the child…!
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