Teacher told my son to call someone names back.

My son (5M) just started kindergarten. He’s been complaining about this one kid in his class (we’ll call him Jack) who he says is annoying. We listened but hadn’t really address it until yesterday.Yesterday, my kid comes home and tells us his teacher said that if someone calls you dumb, you should call them dumb back. Wtf? That got our attention and after some probing, we learned Jack has been calling our son a potato. He also called my son’s friend a name. They both just told him to stop it. Then he called my son a potato chip.We talked about some things my son could do like ignoring it or continuing to tell him to stop. My husband said he met Jack during pickup once and sometimes sees him alone on the playground. He thinks Jack wants to be included, but has bad social skills.The conversation with our son was light, though we made it clear that we took him seriously. Neither my husband nor I were bullied extensively when we were growing up so we didn’t think the name calling was a big deal, but should we be more concerned?I browsed some articles that basically said to do what we had talked about or to raise it to the teacher, but it seems like the teacher’s method is an eye for an eye. Is that actually an effective method? If that’s her solution (assuming our kids is not misrepresenting what she said), should we engage her at all if things don’t get better?Edit: Looks like the consensus is that ignoring it won’t work and the teacher probably comes from the school of hard knocks. Thanks for the advice and the extra downvotes to rub it in. Looks like we’ll be practicing some “I know you are but what am I?”s in the coming days. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/33Pgf8r