Caren Krutsinger Poet Free verse

Children and Bears

We are talking about traumatized children and how to hide their trauma, they tend to overreact, get out of control, and disrupt a class.
We also talked about how some stress is important. If you see a bear in the forest, we want you a bit stressed so you can play dead and live, not run and be chased down and eaten.
But in school we do not need any threatening adults a.k.a. bears
As they shut down not only the traumatized child,
But other traumatized children in their rooms.

Why did you do that?
The worst question ever.
It shuts down the child, because it is accusatory, and they do not know
why they did it. 

Why did you do that?
Should be replaced with what happened? And what can we do to help you the next time?

The trick is getting the exasperated school-teaching-bears on board.
Teacher- bears sometimes want punitive things to happen to the out-of-control-children.
They want them dragged out, locked up, and they want the keys to be thrown away.
Not all teachers, but some.

The crazy part is, that currently the bears are the ones
Who get stuck with the out-of-control children because it is
Thought by some that they can control them.
This is the sad reality; a growly angry, shaming, accusatory bear will shut the child down and re-traumatize them over and over,

And the victim’s behaviors
Will get worse and
Worse.  

We have
To do things differently,
Folks.  We have to learn
To listen to the bears and
The victims, so we can help
them learn to get along and become
A working community.  We have to
get rid of the prisons and the jails.
Locking people up and throwing away
the key has not worked anyway, right?

♡Like0

Share Poem

---

Post Comments

Poetrysoup is an environment of encouragement and growth so only provide specific positive comments that indicate what you appreciate about the poem. Negative comments will result your account being banned.

Please Login to post a comment

M. L. Kiser October 29, 2018 at 10:13 AM So true; gosh I had so many of those, "teacher bears"; honestly, there are some people who should never be allowed near schools or kids; it's clear that they don't even like kids. A sad fact of our society...but scary bears...believe me, I've had numerous nun bears". Caren Krutsinger October 29, 2018 at 10:29 AM The bears always picked me out right away. If they could have clawed me and bitten me to death, they would have.

Rhona Mcferran October 26, 2018 at 7:22 AM This is so very.... TRUE. :( I think your incentive package idea is about the best solution for this, as most of those "bears" are unlikely to change. Rhona Mcferran October 26, 2018 at 6:33 PM That is wonderful!! ;) Caren Krutsinger October 26, 2018 at 9:45 AM Yes, Rhona, but believe it or not, I had a long totally honest conversation with a bear once, a very young fresh-out-of-college bear, and she did a complete turn-around.

Kim Rodrigues October 26, 2018 at 4:11 AM A difficult Situation. Informative write! Caren Krutsinger October 26, 2018 at 6:10 AM Thank you Kim. We were asked what we would do if we inherited six billion dollars and we could change education. I said we should give incentive packages to the teacher-bears who would probably take it, so they could do something else. They are not usually enjoying teaching anyway. Then the rest of it we could spend on building restorative practices classrooms. The rest were stunned at my honesty. The benefit of age is that I can do this.