Dear school,
I’m glad that you have remediation programs which are designed to help students make up work when they don’t get it done. I like the focus on making sure that no assignment and no kid falls through the cracks. However I do wonder who thought that names like ZAP and CLAW were a good fit for these programs. Surely you could have thought up some non-punitive sounding name? Something where the kid doesn’t feel imminent doom the minute he’s notified that he’s been ZAPped or CLAWed? Something that sounds less like you’re going to tear a kid to shreds or electrocute him? Did no one stop to think, sure that’s a nice short acronym, but it doesn’t sound friendly?
Sincerely,
The mother of a kid who already has an anxiety disorder which your names are not helping.
Oh my gosh. Educators that actually THINK about what they are doing to our kids are very rare. I won’t bore you with too many stories about similar issues raising our kids.
All you can do is try to work with the kids and be patient…its tough when the whole system seems to be populated with people I wouldn’t want doing dog-sitting, much less influencing my children. We got lucky, but my kids still deal with issues caused in their formative years–and ours are all adults, and successful, fortunately….
I know that the thinking behind CLAW was to go along with the Jaguar theme. Don’t know about ZAP. However, I have one better. Has your son taken the Anxiety survey? It is called SCARED. My son was pretty hesitant in taking the test because he didn’t want to feel scared taking it. 🙂 http://psychiatry.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/Documents/assessments/SCARED%20Child.pdf