*”She’s always asking me for food and snacks at lunch.” *”(He) was hitting people on the back with a rubber band.” One recent morning, the box was filled with about a half-dozen slips of paper informing Noll of behavior such as: The box allows the student to get rid of a complaint immediately without interrupting instruction for the rest of the class, Noll said. I read them all religiously, then I throw them away.” “Then I throw them all away,” she said, drawing laughs from her colleagues in the lunch room one afternoon last week. Some educators have found ways to deal with tattling, ways that could even be useful for parents who must field complaints from siblings about siblings.Ĭleveland third-grade teacher Lisa Noll decorated a shoe box, labeled it a “tattle box” and told students to write and deposit complaints that can wait inside. “There are some things they don’t teach you in college,” said Cleveland first-grade teacher Michelle Sodl. While teachers at times turn to guidance counselors for support, they often must feel their own way through the ethical byways forever forming in their classrooms. Teachers and parents are left to sort out the truth. ![]() “I tell on my brothers when they watch bad TV shows and they make me go out of the room,” he said. Nick Massari, a fourth-grader, said he tattles for revenge. “I don’t want any other teacher coming in and telling us ‘we’ were being too loud,” the boy said. A first-grader told on two other students who were fighting in the bathroom one morning last week. Other students squeal to make sure teachers don’t blame them for the rule breaking. Matthew O’Brien, a first-grader at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, said telling is tattling only if it’s a lie. That’s stupid,” said fourth-grader Sheree Botz.Ĭall someone’s mother a name though and it’s definite grounds for squealing, she said. “If they’re just calling you a name, don’t tell. “If it ain’t hurting you, if you ain’t bleeding, you shouldn’t tell,” said Cleveland School second-grader Anthony Sherman. The dictionary defines tattling: “to disclose information, as a secret, about another person out of spite or malice.”īut the word clearly means different things to children, who seem to have developed their own unwritten ethical code in answer to the question: To tell or not to tell? ![]() ![]() “If not, I’d spend my whole day trying to figure out who did what when,” she said. She considers each tale on a “blood and death” threshold she reacts when someone is hurt or about to be hurt physically or emotionally and brushes by the rest. Most tattling occurs after recess, bathroom break or some other unsupervised or lightly supervised activity. “I’ve had kids go home with pencil punctures or fingernail gouges and they didn’t tell me because they didn’t want to be a tattletale.”Īt Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic school in Bethlehem Township, the tale is much the same for first-grade teacher Donna Smith, who estimates that she’s confronted with 40 tattling instances a day. “It blows their little minds in first grade,” Hand said. ![]() “So and so said the F word and the B word on the playground.”Įducators acknowledge that such moral guideposts - when to tell and when not to - are hard to distinguish for an adult, not to mention a child still struggling with the A,B,Cs.
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