A Slip of the Tongue

I spent four years training as a teacher, but nobody taught me how to cope with children swearing. More to the point, it seems different families have different ideas of what constitutes a swear word. It really can make life quite difficult in the classroom.

Picture the scene….a red faced 6 year old careers across the classroom, risking life and limb as he negotiates his way round a metre high tower made from precariously balanced building blocks. He clearly has A Very Important Thing to tell me. Without pausing for breath (thereby explaining the red face) he blurts out “David just said a swear word!” To the uninitiated, this might seem a straightforward problem to deal with. After all, if David DID say a swear word, then he does, indeed, need to spoken to about it. But remember…we are in a world of 5 and 6 year olds, and nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems at first glance. On this particular day, my Teaching Assistant gave me a look which was crystal clear. It meant ‘You can deal with this one- I’ll just listen in.’ I took the bull by the horns and asked “What did David say?” (cue a sharp intake from my T.A.).

“He said the ‘SH’ word”, he elaborated, with a solemn face.

Leaning towards him, I asked him which ‘SH’ word David has said.

“I can’t say it”, The Red-Faced Boy stammered. I crouched down in front of him and said that I really needed to know what David had said and that I wouldn’t be cross with him.

“Well….he said ‘Shut up’”, he said. Panic over, I told him that whilst ‘Shut up’ wasn’t a very nice thing to say to a friend, it wasn’t actually a swear word. He went back off to play. My Teaching Assistant remarked how she didn’t like to ask what the alleged swearer had said, but obviously the child who’s been ‘grassed up’ will just clam up if you ask them what they’ve said, and I’d rather know what I’m dealing with, as so much of the time nobody has sworn at all.

About an hour later, in the playground, another child came running over to me to say that someone (not David this time- he’d obviously decided to say ‘be quiet’ instead of ‘shut up’, as a result of the previous investigation) had said a swear word.

My Teaching Assistant’s eyes met mine and the message was clear- my call again.

“What did he say?” I enquired.

“He said I was ugly”, came the reply. I said to the child who had run to me that it wasn’t a swear word, but that it wasn’t a very kind thing to say.

I dealt with the next little boy as well, who beetled over to me, cleared his throat and announced that That Boy Over There with the Runny Nose had called him a bad word beginning with ‘Y’. That was a new one on me. I racked my brains and couldn’t for the life of me think of an offensive word beginning with ‘Y’.

“What did he call you?”, I asked.

He puffed out his chest and said “He called me a yanker”. Double whammy. Not only did I have to reprimand the Boy with the Runny Nose, but I also needed to see if either of them needed referring for speech therapy.

This went on for some days, with my Teaching Assistant listening in to these sorts of conversations and in the end she agreed with me. Nearly all the time they’re not actually swearing, as such. They are using unkind words. If telling someone to shut up was the norm in their house, then they wouldn’t know it was an unkind thing to say and we really needed to be clear on what it was that they’d actually said, so that we dealt with the children fairly.

Later on, it happened again. This time my T.A. dealt with it.

“He said a swear word at me.”

My T.A. gave me a knowing smile and said “And what did he say?”

“He told me to F*** off!” came the reply.