Boys Will Be Boys

Norbit was moody, he didn't want to do much and he kept insisting that he was tired. He has now reached the point where he sees me enter the classroom and he makes sure he says hi. We were observing the kids while they did their word wizard section of class... apparently they have modified the thing so that kids have a little more confidence. Norbit had a word on the board when I got there and he added another one once they had gotten started. I decided to try to encourage him to use some of his new words, and the word we chose for him to work on is "wonder"... I told him that I hoped that he would have that word on the board by the next time I came to visit. He spent a lot of time complaining so we did not get much done today, also we started work late because of an incident in the classroom...
Mrs. Taylor said something today that made me think a bit... she told the kids that the classroom "was not a democracy, it was a dictatorship" and explained what each meant... but she used it in reference to the Word Wizard thing, because some kids do not enjoy wearing the hat or the badge when they become Word Wizard. Instead of finding something else to do with the kids to make them comfortable it was basically, you're doing this whether you like it or not... there is a power there that I feel was being slightly misused... Mrs. Taylor is very nice and insightful... but that comment just irked me a bit. I feel that to force a child to do something like that is to degrade the child... and it might even be a humliating experiance for them... if this happened to me as a young child I would probably not be confident with answering questions put towards me because I would be embarrassed in the end.