It’s pretty common to see schools banning certain practices from the playground.
I think yo-yos lasted all of two weeks before even the sight of a string earned a recess detention.
Sydney primary school Elanora Heights has gone one better and banned clapping in favour of ‘silent cheers’.
Clapping is out. Pulling “excited faces”, “punching the air” and “wriggling about on the spot” are in.
I just can’t imagine how allowing hundreds of children to excitedly punch the air as they’re wriggling about could cause anything but chaos.
The policies were introduced in a newsletter sent out to parents.
“If you’ve been to a school assembly recently, you may have noticed our students doing silent cheers,” the newsletter reads.
“Instead of clapping, the students are free to punch the air, pull excited faces and wriggle about on the spot."
“The practice has been adopted to respect members of our school community who are sensitive to noise."
Skynews reported the policy was not the first unusual measure to be introduced to the school.
We confess the weirdest things our kids have done. Post continues...
The school has also broadcast the implementation of a 'friendship seat' in a past newsletter.
The 'friendship seat' allowed students to alert others if they were feeling lonely during their breaks.
"By sitting on the seat, the student is alerting others that they may be lonely. Students are then encouraged to include the student in their play," the newsletter read.
Top Comments
It just seems to me that it is against the nature of children to ask them to be quite for that long. I can barely keep two 8 year olds quite for more than 10 minutes!
As for the 'punching the air' and 'wriggling' I think that a better option would be the 'deaf clap' (sorry guys, couldn't think of another way to describe that), which is waving your hands in the air. That also then teaches them another way to be inclusive. But each school to their own. It's not like it hurts the kids in any way.
Also, in reality, there are other places where they can learn to clap and cheer. It's not a hard social skill to pick up.
Jazz hands :)
I think a lot of the comments about this are being a bit dramatic. Yeah, it's a little weird but I really don't think this is going to bring on the apocalypse.
I sometimes feel bad for parents, schools and kids these days.
I mean if we don't teach our kids to be completely accepting and inclusive then we're bastards who are raising selfish pigs. And if we do implement things like this no clapping (to help someone with a disability) then we're PC softies who are ruining our kids by making them precious.
So it seems like we're kind of boned either way.
And some of the people who've commented here that "we can't make exceptions got everyone's issues" etc would be the first to criticise children who are taught to only look out for themselves and never be inclusive and are often very vocal about their expectations for others' children. Bit of a mixed message.
With the criticism of the school, well people might find that there's actually a legal aspect to this. If the teacher has a disability then the workplace has a legal requirment to accommodate that disability. In this case the legal requirement might very well be to reduce the noise for that teacher.
Perhaps the school has decided to phrase it to the parents in a more general way so as to try and turn it into a positive thing and get the children to see it as a good deed rather than them missing out.
And to those who say "the teacher should just turn the hearing aid down"....yeah...that's not how disabilities are treated in the workplace. You wouldn't ask the teacher to get a smaller wheelchair for example, you'd widen the doorway. This would apply in any workplace if that's what the person with the disability wanted/needed. And it would apply whether it was a public or private school.
If you've got a beef with that well then your beef is with the government and law makers, not the school or the parents.
How on Earth do you know that 'some of the people who've commented here that "we can't make exceptions got everyone's issues" etc would be the first to criticise children who are taught to only look out for themselves and never be inclusive and are often very vocal about their expectations for others' children'?
Just going by comments over the last year or two. Obviously I don't know for certain but it's a safe bet from a couple of the regulars.
Way to overlook the other relevant points and pick up the strawman angle though.
I'm not sure you know what a strawman is. I literally quoted what you were saying. Tough to do in a strawman argument.
I didn't argue with the rest of it because I agree with a lot of what you are saying.
I'm not sure you understand what a straw man is either now, as it has less to dowith a point directly raised but rather a person using a particular or imagined point as a marker by which they've "won" an argument while at the same time detracting from the original argument or point raised.
You deliberately picked a sentence in my post that had the least to do with the actual topic and tried to detract from the relevancy of my other points.
Had you included in your original reply that you agreed with my other points we wouldn't even be focusing this issue that has nothing to do with the original argument. Hence, you're going for the straw man.
But I'm not going to engage in a back and forth further to this post, so we'll have to agree to disagree on that point.