I also saw students go from quietly doing work to lifting a heavy desk off of the ground to bash one of their peers within a matter of seconds. There too I had to physically intervene, or else another kid would have been badly injured. In that year I think I probably had to physically restrain a kid less than a half-dozen times, but it did happen. Nobody liked it. Everyone would have rather done anything else. But sometimes there was just no choice; the idea of verbally de-escalating a kid who’s genuinely trying to kill another kid is not a serious response to an immediate problem. But there’s been a number of arguments in the media that insist that physical restraint is 100% unacceptable at all times. I wrote about this frustrating tendency here.
I got an opportunity to hash this out with a critic of physical restraint late in my grad school experience. There was a symposium or conference or whatever that I attended about special ed, and there was a panel about physical restraint. One of the people on the panel was a crusading type who insisted that there was never a moment when educators had to physically intervene to stop a child from hurting themselves or others. I brought my personal experience to bear, asking her what she would have done when one of my students was already engaged in violence. She said that she would have verbally de-escalated them. I told her that these were moments where harm was already being done, by children with serious documented behavioral issues who were often so exercised that they were incapable of listening at all. She said that she would have verbally de-escalated them. I said that there were legitimately situations where the choice was between physically intervening or allowing a child to endure major injury. She simply said, once again, that she would verbally de-escalate any child.