Home | How It Works | Stats Login | Register         Case: Bad Influence I have two students, both girls, who have started to become friends. One, Amelia, is a genuinely good student, tries her best, and always listens. Or, until recently. The other is Amanda. Amanda is a new student, and has been a constant disruption to the class since her arrival. Shes quite the class clown, is nearly always off tasks, and talks back to me. Amelia became friends with her and since then, the two have been engaging in these off task behaviors together. So I decided to inform them I was going to call home. Amelia starts sobbing and screaming "No! Please don't call home, I don't want my Dad to hear, please!" I can understand the child being upset, but she was.. beside herself. I let her off the first time and told her she would instead lose half of recess (I did the same for Amanda too) and they would both write a reflection on their behavior. Their behavior started to deteriorate again, so again I mentioned calling home and got the same reaction. Obviously I cannot let the behavior continue, but I've never seen a child so terrified of a teacher calling home. How should I handle this? Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) The first thing I would do in this situation is find out why Amelia is so terrified of you calling home. This behavior raises a little bit of a red flag for me. After I was sure that there was nothing going on at home that shouldn't be I would definitely call Amelia's and inform them of the situation. This is obviously something that Amelia responds to and doing it once might be enough for her to stop misbehaving all together. I would also focus my attention on Amanda. She is the ringleader of the group and if I could get her to fall in line, Amelia would follow her.