Teacher Explains: How to Handle a Special Ed Student Being Teased Over a Drawing
The giggles started as a low ripple from the back table, the kind that precedes a storm. I looked up from the reading circle just in time to see Liam poking his head over Maya’s shoulder at her paper. His eyes widened, and he whispered something to Chloe, who snorted, trying to stifle it. Maya’s face went from focused concentration to a tight, pale blankness. She slowly placed her pencil down and pulled the drawing of a horse—if you could call it that—against her chest, hugging it like a shield.
It was a Thursday, during our weekly free-draw period. The classroom was mostly quiet, markers scratching, crayons skidding across the table. Maya is in my third-grade class. She has an IEP for fine motor delays and pragmatic speech issues, and she joins us from her self-contained special ed unit for art and music. She is fiercely proud of her work, even though her lines are wobbly and her proportions are famously stretched. To her, a horse is an elongated dog with a stiff tail and spiky mane. But she knows exactly what she drew, and she loves it.
The laughter wasn’t loud. That was the worst part. It was the small, snickering kind that adults usually miss because it sounds like chatter. But I saw Maya’s shoulders fold inward, and I knew I had to act quickly. Not to scold Liam into shame, but to interrupt the moment before it hardened into a memory.
I walked to the back table and didn’t address the laughter at all. I simply said, “Liam, I need you to bring me the blue marker from the front bin.” He blinked, caught off guard by the mundane request. Chloe looked down at her own paper. The moment broke. The ripple stopped. I didn’t let my voice carry any sharpness, because the goal wasn’t to humiliate Liam in front of everyone. That would only have doubled the spotlight on Maya.
I crouched down next to Maya. I didn’t ask to see the horse, because she wasn’t ready to show it. I asked, “Can you tell me about it?” She wouldn’t speak at first. She just pressed the paper into the table. I waited. Finally, she whispered, “It’s a horse.” I said, “I saw you working on that tail. You put a lot of effort into it. Want to finish it and show me when you’re done?” She gave a small nod. She didn’t immediately start drawing again, but she didn’t crumple the paper either. That felt like a win.
After class, I pulled Liam and Chloe aside during the transition to recess. I didn’t frame it as a discipline talk. I wanted to understand what they saw. I asked Liam, “What did you see that made you laugh?” He shuffled his feet. “It looked weird,” he said.
Weird. That’s the crux of it. Most kids don’t laugh because they intend to hurt. They laugh because they see something outside their frame of reference and it triggers an unexpected response. It’s a social processing gap, not a character flaw. That doesn’t excuse it, but it changes how you address it. If I had just said “that was mean” and walked away, Liam would have apologized defensively and learned nothing about how to navigate difference.
So I asked him, “Has anyone ever seen you make something and thought it was weird? Did you like how that felt?” He took a minute, then shook his head. I told him, “We don’t have to like everything we see, but we don’t get to laugh at it. You don’t have to be friends with Maya, but you do have to be respectful. Laughing at someone’s effort isn’t respectful.”
For parents who hear about this happening to their child at school, the instinct is to rush in and fix it. My advice is to pause before you over-validate. Don’t say, “They’re just jealous of your art,” because that’s not true, and kids know when you’re lying to comfort them. Instead, validate the specific feeling. Say, “It hurts when someone laughs at your work. That was unkind of them, and you didn’t deserve that.” Then, ask a grounding question: “What did you like most about what you made?” This helps the child separate the quality of their effort from the rejection of a peer.
If your child is the one who laughed, the conversation looks different. Punishment alone doesn’t teach empathy. At home, you can replay the scene without placing blame. Ask, “What did you see that made you laugh? How do you think it made them feel? What could you have done instead?” It’s uncomfortable, but that’s where the learning happens. Your child won’t intuitively know how to handle seeing something different. You have to show them.
In the classroom, this incident prompted me to make a few small environmental changes. I started a gallery wall where absolutely everyone’s work gets hung up, not just the most polished pieces. It normalizes different skill levels. I also brought in a stack of picture books about artists with unconventional styles—drawings that are surreal, abstract, or childlike. We talked about how art isn’t about being “good” at drawing lines; it’s about communicating an idea. It gave Maya’s horse a context. It gave Liam a way to see that a stretched-out horse can still be a horse.
She did finish the drawing. We hung it on the gallery wall. A few days later, Liam drew a dinosaur and walked over to show it to her. He didn’t say sorry, but he said, “This is my dino. He’s got a long tail.” Maya looked at it, nodded, and went back to her paper. It was a small gesture, an offering of normalcy rather than an apology. It wasn’t dramatic, but I’ll take it.
Maya still holds her pictures tight against her chest when someone walks by. I don’t know if that wariness will fade anytime soon. Trust is a delicate thing to rebuild, and it takes more than one Thursday to repair. But there is less whispering now. The art table is louder, more collaborative. Kids are comparing their drawings, pointing out details. It’s not a movie-perfect ending, and the situation is still evolving.
What remains certain is that this wasn’t a one-time lesson. It’s an ongoing practice of teaching kids to pause before they react to something unfamiliar, and to remember that behind every wobbly line is a person who put effort into it. We’re all still learning that, together.
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