The Plan B Classroom 261are not; why some students are in a gifted program for
math while others are not. If a student asks why one of
his classmates is being treated differently, you have the
perfect opportunity to do some educating: “Everyone in
our classroom gets what he or she needs. If someone
needs help with something, we all try to help him or her.
And everyone in our class needs something special.” It’s
no different when a child needs help with flexibility and
frustration tolerance. So our response to the student who
asks why an explosive classmate is receiving some sort of
special accommodations and assistance would sound
very similar: “Everyone in our classroom gets what he or
she needs. If someone needs help with something, we all
try to help him or her. Because you’re very good at han-
dling frustration, I bet you could be very helpful to
Johnny the next time he gets frustrated.”
Do you really think that a child who typically behaves
appropriately will decide to behave inappropriately be-
cause accommodations are being made for an explosive
child in the classroom? Sounds pretty far-fetched. It fol-
lows that punishing a child to set an example for or to be
fair to the others—especially when there’s no expecta-
tion that the punishment will be an effective intervention
for the child being punished—makes little sense. In a
community of learners, the academic or behavioral idio-
syncrasies of one student are an opportunity for his or
her classmates to help and learn, not to follow suit. The