Students and parents complained that Garrett forced the students to write previously misspelled words onto sandpaper repeatedly – until the coarse surface caused their fingers to bleed.
“We had to trace letters like ‘I’ and ‘J’,” 11-year-old Josh Sommer told CBS Tampa Bay. “By the end of the time, my whole table was bleeding.”
CityFish on February 1, 2013 at 10:08 PM
Are you sure the teacher’s name wasn’t Dolores Umbridge?
Sekhmet on February 1, 2013 at 10:09 PM
This is NOTHING, I had to walk to school uphill, both ways, in the snow…we’d have given anything to have some sand paper to help us up the slippery slopes.
JFKY on February 1, 2013 at 10:10 PM
Sekhmet on February 1, 2013 at 10:10 PM
I don’t get the mechanics of how writing on sandpaper would make their fingers bleed.
theperfecteconomist on February 1, 2013 at 10:57 PM
“We had to trace letters like ‘I’ and ‘J’,”
That’s not how someone says they’re rewriting misspelled words.
I’d almost guess that the sandpaper was being used to raise awareness of finger and hand position while writing. If the kids were having trouble with, say, holding their pencils too low, then their fingers would rub against the sandpaper if they didn’t correct the position.
theperfecteconomist on February 1, 2013 at 11:02 PM
Not defending, but the reporting is strange.
theperfecteconomist on February 1, 2013 at 11:04 PM
Of course it didn’t occur to the students to simply apply less pressure so that it didn’t hurt their fingers. Dumb kids.
Sharke on February 2, 2013 at 12:18 AM
My mother taught special ed in the Seventies. At that time, it was thought that it helped to give kids information via the most different sensory mechanisms. Visual, verbal, tactile, whatever. Tracing letters with their fingers on sandpaper was something she did with dyslexics.
S. Weasel on February 2, 2013 at 6:44 AM
Did it work? Did the students learn how to spell correctly? If they did then the procedure, however unorthodox, was a success.
This isn’t a recommendation for this procedure, writing on sandpaper. I personally think the teacher was incapable of teaching the students how to spell and seized on this method as a punishment.
Joel_The_Oneth on February 2, 2013 at 7:01 AM
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