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dangerous practice. The projectile can miss its mark and cause serious injury. Although the teacher may choose something soft like a chalkboard eraser, as the object gains momentum, the impact may sting a little. Whatever the object, the teacher runs the risk of damaging a sensitive area like a student’s eye. When I was teaching fifth grade, a colleague often used rulers to make angry gestures at her students to try and get them to sit down or to stop talking. In one tragic incident, the ruler slipped out of her hand and accidentally hit a student in the eye. One of my elementary school teachers would throw erasers at students in the classroom. He prided himself on the element of surprise. I lived in fear of being the target of one of his erasers. It was a very ineffective technique. The unruly students thrived off the attention and the orderly students withdrew in apprehension.
    In the current classroom environment, astute teachers have to learn to navigate the choppy waters of classroom discipline and avoid lawsuits. Most school districts have a “handsoff students” policy that without question includes hitting students with objects. In this scenario, the teacher should have let the sleeping student continue to sleep until the teacher had a chance to investigate the circumstances of the child’s needto sleep in class. If there are no significant problems at home such as abuse or having to help support the family, the teacher should use conventional ways of waking a sleeping student. If the sleeping continues, a referral to the guidance counselor may be appropriate.
SCENARIO 1.26
Boys Will Be Boys
    When I was in the third grade, a boy raised my dress and I screamed. My teacher got mad and made me go stand in the hall. The boy did not get in trouble, but I sure did. This was, believe it or not, the first time I remember getting in trouble in school.
    A supposedly harmless prank such as a male student raising this little female student’s dress is no longer as widely accepted as it once was. For years, little boys did little naughty things of a slightly sexual nature to girls with few, if any, consequences. As a matter of fact it was widely accepted and often joked about. When I was in grade school, girls had to be careful that boys did not try to put mirrors on the floor to look under their skirts or they had to fight off young boys who tried to touch them on private parts of their bodies. Girls can be very humiliated, hurt, and shamed by such acts. During my senior year in high school, we all autographed each other’s sweatshirts. I was mortified when a boy came up to me and drew two circles with dots in the center around my breasts. He laughed and everybody thought it was funny. I did not think it was funny because I had to walk around like that all day. When teachers dismiss these acts, they are part of the problem. The teacher in this scenario added insult to injury when she punished the young woman for screaming and did not punish the young man.
    Today’s savvy teachers would never punish the victim and ignore the perpetrator. Informed professionals know that sexual harassment is a real issue that is not to be ignored. They also know that there is a delicate balance between child behaviors that are innocent and those that actually fall into the category of sexual harassment. The astute teacher has to be very careful not to compare minor child behavior with mature behavior that has sexual overtones. The explicit sexual content of some TV programs may encourage children to model some of the adult behaviors they see in these programs. The teacher should recognize that a first-grade boy kissing a little girl on the cheek cannot compare to a much older boy looking under a girl’s dress. Some states are taking a very hard stand on children sexually harassing other children. Good teachers would make the class aware that such behaviors cannot be tolerated and that there are serious consequences should they occur. The