In a teacher’s career as a classroom teacher, there are more or less a few incidents of student theft, and I am no exception. In the past ten years of classroom work, I have encountered this kind of incidents more than once. When I first started working, I often couldn’t hold my breath and tried too hard, but I couldn’t catch the key, and I couldn’t find out the truth of the matter, and I distanced myself from the students in the heat of emotion. I can say that learning to find out the truth about thefts, learning to make friends with students, and dealing with such incidents is also a change in my teaching concept and an improvement in my teaching ability.
There are a few thefts that I am particularly impressed with.
Example 1: One day many years ago, when there was no Internet payment, students brought hundred dollar bills to school, but went out for a gym class and lost the money hidden in their book bags.
I was naturally surprised and angry to hear that someone in my class had stolen it. But I restrained myself from showing too much on my face, but said “I see” lightly and did not alarm the class. The first thing I did was to go home and eat, and then return to school. I sat at the podium and quietly observed the students. I noticed that a boy named Little A. After returning to school that day, he unprecedentedly bought a can of Pepsi to drink at the entrance of the school.
Why do I say this is unprecedented? Because elementary school students do not have much pocket money, he usually drink 50 cents a bottle of drinks.
Why would he suddenly become so generous and buy a three-dollar drink? Where did this money come from?
I seized this unusual information and called Little A alone for questioning. He replied that his grandmother had given him the money for his allowance. I carefully asked him when and where his grandmother had given him the money, how much he had spent, how much was left, and where the rest of the money was kept.
Little A answered all the questions in a very clear manner.
In the afternoon, I called him in again and asked him the same questions again. Because the answer at noon was an impromptu response, the child could not remember clearly after finishing, and when I asked again in the afternoon, there were contradictions and discrepancies in some information. The answer came out when I continued to ask, and it was him who had taken the 100 yuan from his classmate.
Example 2: That time, the student still lost a hundred dollars. The incident took place in the context of a student’s money that was missing from his stationery box after gym class.
The students were talking about it. I did not notice anything through careful observation. I moved and reasoned in front of the class, but it didn’t work, and no student came to admit it to me.
So, I had another serious talk with the students and told them how anxious I was. I said I was anxious because I was afraid that this child would continue to make such mistakes in the future and go farther and farther down the road of no return under the celebration of muddling through.
After this speech, I gave each student a blank sheet of paper. If they had not taken money from their classmates, they were to write it down truthfully; if they had, they were to admit their mistake to the teacher in this note. All the slips of paper were to be signed and then thrown into a cardboard box on the podium.
Sure enough, a student wrote in it, “Teacher, I was wrong, please forgive me.”
Example 3: I have organized students to do personal essays, which is to clip up their usual excellent essays in folders with illustrations and hang them on the back wall of the class for the whole class to look through and appreciate.
This time, it was a personal anthology that was lost.
Some students picked up these stolen anthologies in various corners of the school. But they had all been damaged to varying degrees.
I carefully observed and studied the signs and deduced that the perpetrator would be a girl with good grades, since all the stolen anthologies were behind academic excellence. It is very unlikely that a boy would do such vandalism, because boys are naughty and disruptive, and vandalism is often random; so targeted that there is a high probability that a girl did it out of jealousy.
I told the class this analysis, meaning to beat the bull across the mountain, and then made the gesture of going out to check the surveillance, singing an empty city to the students. As a matter of fact, some students were nervous and scared, and the case was solved.
The above theft cases have happened one after another in the past decade or so, from the post-90’s students to the post-10’s students, every generation of students. What is the experience and insight I got from it? It is to control anger and be calm. People will get angry in the heat of the moment, but these negative emotions cannot bring any solution. To deal with student problems, you must learn to observe and analyze. The suspect in Example 1 was locked in by observation and analysis, and the suspect in Example 3 was narrowed down by these two things. To calm down, quietly, to find out the signs of student anomalies, you can often get twice the result with half the effort.
The second thing I have learned is that you can’t just scratch the surface of understanding student theft, but you have to go deeper into it to find the root cause of why students do what they do. For example; in the theft case in Example 2, the student who was eventually caught was a girl who behaved well on a daily basis and never let adults worry about her.
Why did she steal the money? Because she wanted to eat.
Why did she want to eat? Because her family controlled her diet, especially snacks, hoping she would lose weight, but the more she was banned the more it intensified her desire to eat.
Why can’t she control the desire to eat? Because she relies on things to reduce stress.
Her stress comes from her studies – which she is not learning well – and from her family, where her parents have academic demands; she is also asked to help with her younger siblings, which keeps her busy and miserable, so she restrains her desire to eat as a way to reduce her mental stress.
You see, behind this stealing behavior is the mental burden placed on her by her family of origin. To solve the stealing problem once and for all, her parents must first make changes.
The same reason behind the theft of the anthology in Example 3 is that the child’s psychological problems were not channeled in a timely and effective manner and were ignored by the adults, and the child’s anxiety and jealousy made her do such a silly thing.
Furthermore, it is necessary to pay attention to the strategic and humane way to deal with such theft cases. First of all, it is not appropriate to openly interrogate and announce the results of such cases. Children often have no bad intentions and are just confused, but if they are branded as “thieves”, I am afraid they will not be able to hold their heads up in the classroom.
Therefore, I dealt with all three of these incidents privately. In example 1, I talked to the child’s father alone to tell him the story of the incident and to get the cooperation of the family education; in example 2, I asked the child to return the 100 yuan stolen, but not face to face, but through me as a third party. The parents are the first ones responsible for their children’s education. As for the child in Example 3, I gave a non-named explanation of the case to the class and asked the victim of the anthology to send me an electronic copy, which I then sent to the perpetrator to help her classmate recreate the anthology with illustrations.
This way of handling the situation, not only does not condone the evil in the student’s heart, but also preserves a child’s self-esteem, so that they can still have room to correct and seek good and positive.
Behind the educational crisis is actually an educational opportunity. As teachers, we need to have a heart of wisdom, compassion and tolerance. Strict education is certainly a kind of love, but also in the strict and then add some soft, rigid and soft, is the best way to education. This is the best way to educate. And this kind of education is about “human” education.
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