The Haircut

The school district I work for decided to have teacher trainers this year. Basically, that meant there was someone assigned to help all the first grade teachers in four or five different schools. Their purpose was to help teachers wherever needed - curriculum planning, teaching a particular concept, etc. Our trainer that year was a lady named Veronica.

One day Veronica was in my room teaching a math lesson so I could do some testing of individual students. At the end of the day I found a chunk of hair in Kate's desk! Her mom called me immediately after school, before I had time to figure out what had happened. She was furious with me that Kate's hair was cut. I wasn't quite sure what to say because I wasn't sure how it happened. That didn't seem to be much of a problem, though, because I didn't get a chance to say much before she hung up.

The next day I asked Kate what had happened yesterday. She told me that during math the day before they were using scissors to cut out the shapes they were using. She thought it would be fun to cut her hair and see what it would look like shorter. She only cut about two clumps of hair - which no one would even notice if she wore her hair in a ponytail.

Anyway, after a phone call to the principal, Kate's mom came and talked to me. I think this time she was a little embarrassed that she had blown up over the phone the day before. She still wasn't happy and claimed that she felt like I didn't care about her child. (Um, I wasn't even teaching that lesson . . . if I were I'm sure I wouldn't have let that happen . . . plus, it's my fault that her child decided to cut her own hair?) For the next few weeks I tried to be extra nice and send home notes about how well Kate was doing and how much I liked having her in my class.

I think things smoothed out a bit. The day before we got out of school for Christmas vacation Kate gave me a $10.00 gift card to a local store. That let me know things were getting better!