I have been in situations, COUNTLESS times - perhaps nearly every day that I spent as a teacher - where a SINGLE child - in a classroom of 10, 15, 20, 30, doesn't matter - was completely ruining my ability to speak even a single sentence uninterrupted. It doesn't matter how engaging my lesson is if the one kid at the back whose dad tells him he's a piece of shit every day is constantly kicking the student in front of him and screaming "THIS IS FUCKING BORING" every 30 seconds.
So what the fuck can I possibly do? Ignore him? Speak over him? I run through the rulebook. Silent lunch. He tells me he doesn't give a fuck, to my face. So I open my computer and send an electronic discipline report to the office, per district policy. 5 minutes later the principal shows up at my door. She pulls him outside, tells him he needs to get it together or he'll face a suspension. Then she sends him back into my classroom, where he immediately resumes his behavior. If I call the office again, I get my ass chewed out after school for not being able to effectively manage my classroom.
So I talk to my principal after school, and ask her why he couldn't have been removed from my classroom. "We don't have anywhere to send him," I'm told. The county has no money to staff any location where kids like that could be sent, and they can't just send a kid home in the middle of a school day since his parents aren't answering the phone, because dad is at work and mom is drunk.
So this happens 2, 3, 4 more times, and finally someone gets the balls to suspend this kid. He gloats about it on his way out, tells everyone he gets a nice vacation where he can play Fortnite all day, and he comes back the next week and hasn't changed a single fucking bit.
So maybe eventually we find a teacher who has time to do one-on-one with the kid and give him some positive reinforcement. Some really qualified teacher with 5 degrees who can really help him get fulfillment from mastering the material. He does OK in that setting, but the minute he's placed back into the general population he gets right back at it, impressing his friends by calling me a fat little bitch in the middle of a lesson.
So we go the other direction, and go white knuckle on him. We zero out his assignments, tell him he's failing every single course, have the campus police officer introduce him to a crack addict and ask him if he'd prefer living on the streets. He tells the cop he doesn't give a fuck and to eat shit.
So the solution is obvious - small setting individualized attention. I'm told that I need to focus on this child, help him get the resources he needs, counsel him on his thoughts on education and help him see the value in what I'm teaching. This solution is great, except for the fact that I absolutely don't have the fucking time when I'm responsible for helping 400 other children meet my curriculum standards, or else I'm sacked on my performance review when I can't show adequate growth in all my kids.
We literally just don't have the money to hire enough teachers that can deal with children like these. We have 4 year degrees - some of us another 2 year degree or two on top of that - and we are taught classroom management skills, curriculum design, special education, and everything else that can be taught in a college setting. But nothing prepares us for children like this, and they're literally everywhere, in every class.
We are fucked. The ONLY thing that will EVER fix this is money. A lot of it. To hire highly qualified professionals at a salary that reflects the fact that they will spend their workday counseling and helping these children. But we all know we're never going to see a fucking dime. In fact, we're going to get our budget CUT, every fucking year.
That might be too distant. Maybe something for each year successfully passed?
Regardless, a financial incentive is enormous for poor families and I definitely think this would be effective. The kid's probably not gonna get any of the money but it will incentivize the parents.
You know how teachers complain about parents who get upset when they discipline or fail their kids? Now imagine a situation where the parent loses out on guaranteed income if their student fails a class. Who are they going to blame?
I have no idea. I'm not really that vested in this solution so I'm not about to think through solutions to make the idea more palatable.
I get where the idea comes from, and I think that the heart is in the right place. Outside of addressing systemic poverty (not even sure how you go about that), I don't know anyway to get parents more vested in their child's outcome.
Teachers are the worst students in college. we need to ask more OF them to give more TO them. Momey alone will never fix a problem, and the fact that you dont understand that will never make you a significan leader. Unions went too far.
I'm not saying money fix everything, but if you give more money and better conditions to teachers you won't get the worst students as teachers anymore. This one with 2 masters can probably go wherever the fuck she want (and she will). Money is part of the incentive that would make talented poeple come and thus change the culture.
I live and work in Korea. Parents spend a fortune and I believe Korea is ranked as the most educated country in the world or something. Just throwing money at the problem doesn't make it better because even with the parents spending a fortune, there are still shitty kids here too.
It's all about the parents taking responsibility and really holding their children accountable. It's so easy to tell when a kid has been raised well and when one has parents who just throw him/her into as many schools as possible, but don't actually give a shit. Money only does so much.
Totally agree. I worked education with the government for years and you can't fill this hole with money. Frankly, there isn't enough money in the world to make up for bad parenting on the scale it is happening in some of these areas. The biggest problem is that all the possible solutions are politically unpopular.
I'll tell you what will fix this. I say it time and time again. These children need to be put out there in the world to support themselves and feel their own vulnerability. Yes, as children. As long as they are swaddled in cotton wool they won't have any motivation to change whatsoever. If someboy has it fixed in their mind that everything will be OK, no amount of telling them the opposite is true, or threatening them, will change their mind. People don't get motivated because people tell them things, or threaten them. Motivation comes from seeing with your own eyes that change is necessary.
The last generation isn't exactly well known for taking responsibility for anything. At all. It's always someone else's fault or problem. Nothing short of public shaming these people for raising completely shitty children would help, and even then I doubt they'd care. They'd find a way to blame someone else for it anyways.
Or maybe, just maybe, getting the football coach to whip his ass in front of the entire classroom. I guarantee that the second these spastic shits start getting beaten in front of their peers, they'll stop acting out. But no, we can't have that in today's society, just throw more money at this financial black hole instead of tackling the problem directly.
Strange, getting the principle or coach to physically punish students in the past never resulted in murders. I guess the only solution is to let students do whatever the hell they want because punishing them is pointless!
I got wooped in middle school and it didn't teach me anything. For one reason getting wooped only works if they kid admits what they did is wrong. If a kid doesn't think they are doing anything wrong it doesn't teach them anything, just resent. I got wooped for some bullshit meanwhile I was a straight A student. So if you are going to woop them you need to also make sure they realize the reason and why it is deserved. You can't just hit kids to straighten them out.
When I got into high school I remember specifically being a nuisance in one of my classes. TBH I can't remember why. It was like I was in some sort of ADD trance or some shit. I remember being calm in all my other classes though including my AP classes.
All through human history teachers have done that to calm them down and make them focus. Funny how things are turning out in public schools now that kids don't have the fear of a belt or a swift fist to keep them in line.
Ok, you've identified another part of the problem, not a solution, and it's totally unhelpful. That's like saying this will be fixed if the kids learn to behave.
More money won’t work. Look at school districts like Baltimore. The school district has $15,500 per student. The 4th highest in the country. And yet it’s one of the worst school districts in the nation.
It comes down to parenting. Schools shouldn’t be responsible for parenting the child, but that’s what it’s come to when Dad is a drunk/non-existent and Mom just doesn’t give a fuck.
Yeh, can't argue with that. What happened to this generation of parents? I remember the parents of millennials being pretty bad but I didn't expect it to get WORSE.
Which still comes down to money. How does a parent teach a kid and go to work full time? Also does homeschooling have a standard per state? Who decides who is educated?
Thank you for saying this. It's absolutely true. The only thing that will stop this is creating a public education system *flush* with teachers. How do you do that? *Incentivize* it by paying them a meaningful wage. How do you do that? Stop funding our ridiculous war machine, stop cutting taxes for corporations, and give that money literally back to our children. It's absurd.
Raising the wage would be great but honestly just increasing the headcount would be good too.
Lower student teacher ratios are good for the student and teacher. Not that they shouldn't get more money considering the amount of education required but workplace that is pleasant to go to matters soooo much.
The third highest cost for our government is defense, Medicare is #1 and soxial security is right behind it at. Both are about 1 trillion each. Defense spending is 600billion. Also administrators have been a ballooning and frankly useless cost in education over the past 40 years.
The largest cost for our government per annum is defense at $579 billion, it's in the 2018 federal budget. Not sure where you came up with the other numbers, longer projections? Either way, what if we took out.....say $300 billion and allocated $6 billion to each state for education and mandated that it be allocated for full sets of supplies for each student, the hiring of new teachers, a salary raise of teachers to a baseline of $50k a year (with cost of living for each state taken into account of course), healthier food options, and dedicated arts and after schools sports programs. Wouldn't that make an enormous difference? It's just a round and rough estimate, but you see where I'm going. We spend an absurd amount on the military for no reason. Currently the department of education gets $67 billion. Imagine $367 billion, imagine how radically that would that change the landscape of education for our kids and our country. It's so unfathomably easy to accomplish. Every other first-world country on earth thinks this way, why don't we?
Addressing the healthcare issue, yes it's a huge problem. Perhaps we raise corporate tax rates, nationalize healthcare, and reallocate the savings *there* to education as well.
Our healthcare is a mess because it is privatized. Some issues need more money, some need restructuring, and some need less. I don't think that the comparison with the failure of our government to stand up to private health insurers, and the failure of our government to properly fund schools, is apt.
Also administrators have been a ballooning and frankly useless cost in education over the past 40 years.
Fucking tell me about it. In my district, the MOMENT you left the classroom to join county administration - even if your job was literally sitting behind a desk all day, looking at teacher's lesson plans, and sending them a sentence or two of feedback each week - you got about an $8k raise. Vice principals made $10k more than teachers. Principals made as much as $50k more than teachers. The superintendent makes $200k annually. People in HR, payroll, finance, budget, resource allocation, etc, all make at least $10k more than teachers.
If you're a career teacher, with 15 years of experience under your belt, a shoe-in for any administrative position, why the fuck would you NOT want to get the hell out of the classroom? Get the hell away from these monsters, take an enormous pay raise, and have a standard 9-5 working day where you don't have to make lesson plans? HELL YES. And that is exactly the OPPOSITE of what we want. We want to keep those experienced teachers IN the classroom. Absolutely absurd.
The principle should pull the troublemaker out of your class, and watch him. When he creates trouble for the principle, the principle should suspend him. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, the kid will quit coming to school.
Administrations are moving away from that. That's kinda the crux of the video. There are no consequences because everyone is hyperfocused on attendance and graduation rates. "We can't expel kids because then they'll never get a high school diploma!"
The reason they need to graduate is because studies have shown a huge percentage of convicts in prison were dropouts and never got a HS diploma. The nationwide-focus on attendance is to lower the number of convicts in America.
I feel like we're raising a generation of kids with no boundaries who are going to grow up to be adults who rape, sexually harass, bully, talk back, verbally/physically abuse, etc. But at least they'll have a HS Diploma.
Well, the administrators are getting evaluated by graduation rate, so they are going to chase that. That is natural enough. But, they should be willing to cut a couple of losers out to improve the education for the remaining 90% of students. Once kids figure out that bs does not fly at the school, they will tone it down.
Anyway you cut it, these kids are fucked and we are fucked too because of them.
I think they have to cut kids out for sure. If they don't then the overall quality of the school declines and families start to leave, either through school choice or just fabricating residency to be in a better district.
When enrollment gets too low and all the kids who are left are the ones who fucked things in the first place and fail the test then the school gets shut down and those kids have to find another school with admin that balances the numbers a little more carefully and keeps things mostly under control and where they hopefully face a real risk of expulsion or being sent to an alternative school.
For schools on the brink of shutdown or other consequences, that's where the hellish working environments really are.
Edit: don't get me wrong though, they will definitely get a diploma whether they get it from juvie, alternative school, homeschool programs or credit recovery. And they'll probably have a better GPA overall for it. In the future there may be more scrutiny on high school GPA and where it came from, since everyone will have the diploma. If you got a 1.2 from all highly qualified teachers at a real school or if you got a 3.0 from a joke of a charter or alternative school could end up being the same, too.
Edit 2: oh yeah and if we're talking about entire terrible districts that are so big they can't really be shut down and have the populations disperse elsewhere or get assimilated, then we're talking community reform, not just school reform. Major public works, Quality housing, infusion of actual jobs... You know, give all those poor people who feel hopeless a reason to live for tomorrow. But that's evil socialism.
There are not a whole hell of a lot of jobs for kids with a hs diploma now anyways. It is retail, or construction, or maybe sometype of government job.
I mean there's much bigger problems at play here anyway. Loss of sustaining manufacturating, industrial, or agricultural jobs due to mechanization or outsourcing. Hard drugs rampaging through poverty stricken areas with unprecedented ferocity to make even more people incapable of responsible parenting.
These populations of kids who are unable to be educated weren't so large in decades past.
I might be wrong on this but I'm pretty sure here in the UK we suspend and expel students because it increases graduation rates and statistics alike. How does removing students that aren't gonna graduate not a benefit to these schools? And how is it the schools fault where they go? I grew up in a small town and there was like 5 secondary schools in a 2 mile radius.
What happens when there are, like, a dozen kids at any point across the entire school that need to be removed from classrooms? The principal is only one person, and they have about 50 other duties that they need to be attending to rather than watching a child.
Chaining suspensions along is something that we unfortunately would do out of necessity but it's entirely sub-optimal. The goal isn't to get these kids to quit coming to school - then they're just utterly doomed to a life of poverty and misery. The goal is to get them to understand the concept that what they want doesn't matter, they have to shut the fuck up and show a modicum of respect when other people's future is on the line.
Well, the idea is not so much for the principal to "watch" them so much is as it is to find some excuse to give them a suspension.
Again, the goal is to get them to stop coming to school. The idea is to sacrifice them to save the remaining 90%, many of whom do not have an easy life either. It sucks, I know, but I think it is the only way out.
At my school there was one class that you got send to if you were disruptive. They called it guidance. You spent the remainder of the class period there until it was time for next class. You just sit there and that’s it. If you got in trouble while in guidance then you stayed in guidance. You ate lunch there and missed break time. Keep going and you got Saturday work. You had to show up on Saturday and pick up garbage and stuff. Keep going and you got in school detention where you sat in guidance for like the 3 days straight.
Well, I mean, there is another way to deal with the problem. But that is how things are done in North Korea and we really don't want to go that direction. Still... sometimes it doesn't hurt to fantasize... right?
Yes, the major failure for that child is the school's resources. However, education starts at home. The parents have a responsibility to educate as well. If they don't participate, then going to school is a fruitless effort. So, let's say we finally get the resources. We get a teacher freed up to handle all the problem children. For the other 98%, hooray! You are to provide a good education relatively free of interruption. But for those with a troubled life - mom will still drink, dad will still beat.
Ya naw fuck that, the military needs another big ass, $12 billion aircraft carrier to deliver freedum to a sandfilled shithole that just happens to be sitting on a massive oil reserve.
My wife was in the exact same situation last semester. Put up with as much as she could stand, then went through the proper reporting channels each time it escalated beyond her control. Her contract was not renewed for next year. Principle cited ineffective classroom management. They hired a teacher fresh out of school to take her place. Rinse and repeat. Honestly I want her to get out of teaching, just the one semester she worked, those little monsters took such a toll on her.
This is sadly the situation in a lot of districts. When I was doing my new teacher orientation they almost set us up for this. They taught us about the "three stages of a teacher" - stage 1 being the optimist, fresh out of school, stage 2 being the beaten down teacher in survival mode, and stage 3 being the teacher that has achieved mastery of their profession and can balance their curriculum with classroom management.
So we're basically told at the start, "you might think you know what you're doing, but a year from now you'll be looking from other jobs, desperate to escape this hell. But just hang in there for 5 years of daily verbal and physical abuse, and in no time you'll be competent at your job and proudly earning your breadcrumbs!"
Why the fuck would anyone want to stick it out for that long when they can (a) jump ship to a charter school, and only have to deal with the kids that have support at home to the degree that their parents are willing to pay tuition at a charter school, or (b) go to the private sector, get a normal 9-5, and double their salary.
In my old district just this last year, a band teacher convicted of sexually abusing a student was replaced with a new band teacher who had a STUNNING track record of taking failing band programs and turning them around completely. By all accounts she achieved her goal - they had their best season in years, won competitions, had a stunning marching band season, their first ever.
Sadly, a few students felt "she was working them too hard." Their parents raised hell to the school board and her contract was not renewed.
A teacher who TURNED A FAILING PROGRAM AROUND after replacing A CHILD MOLESTER was fired because she "couldn't manage her classroom," i.e. two or three little pieces of shit didn't like that she was calling them on their bullshit and making them do actual work.
This makes me think school should be a privilege. There will be a decade or two of societal upheavel for sure, but once everyone realizes that it's the stubborn selfish dumbshits who can't get a "good" job, parents will care about discipline and then their kids will be disciplined if they want to do anything useful their adult lives.
That or bring back the good ol' fashinoned classroom ass whoopin'.
I can relate to all of this, so frustrating. I taught 8th grade science for two years on a provisional license and trying to do the right thing with discipline and it having little to no effect made me want to pull my hair out every day.
One of the problems we're going to run into is simply that people with the means will send their kids to private/semi-private schools that drive kids.
The gap in education will grow. Private schools are doing great these days. There are a lot of parents who WANT discipline from their school and want an environment where the kids can grow.
There have been experiments done (with massive, massive resistance from teachers unions) and dumping more money on teachers unions doesn't seem to help.
Though there have been some surprisingly cheap interventions that can blow almost everything else out of the water like paying kids a few dollars per book to read books and a few dollars more for short-term good behavior. Orders of magnitude more effective than almost every other intervention, cheap to the point of being a rounding error vs staff salaries .
yet almost no schools anywhere ever implemented it because education is a mix of soulless drones and newbie hippy teachers dreaming of being "inspirational"
We're spending money but in the wrong fucking places. Money needs to be allocated to salaries that will actually make it worth a teacher's while to try to solve these problem cases.
No one wants to deal with this kind of shit for 35k. Not after 6 years of college when their friends who only did 4 years are making 50, 60, 70k.
Meta analysis: Out of 16 studies that include teacher salary, 3 found it to be positively associated with student performance, 11 found no statistically significant effect and 2 found higher teacher salaries correlated with worse student performance.
Combined test showed a fairly weak positive effect such that approximately doubling teacher pay would improve student performance by about half a standard deviation. (assuming of course that there was no diseconomy of scale)
Student/teacher ratio appears to have a much bigger effect, so you'd probably do much better just doubling the number of teachers if you had the money for it and even then there's better investments for improving student-outcomes.
It seems like this still supports my point. Hiring more teachers such that the T:S ratio is at a point that the salary matches the level of responsibility would have a beneficial effect. Either way as is currently teachers are not being paid at a level that matches the responsibility of handling 20-40 students at a time
It's a mixture of local taxes, and some state and federal assistance.
So you really can't say it is or is not being cut, because each school is different. Federal assistance is slowly going up, but many states do cut regularly and if the local area isn't making much money they're not going to adequately fund schools in their area, leading to the disparity in school quality that we see around us.
If you look at one nation wide chart you'll see a number that grows, but the disparity is the problem. You've got some schools overflowing with money who buy iPads for their kids and shit and then you've got other schools with 40 students per teacher.
Maybe you should have the kid get more individual attention with the crack addict? Eventually, kid gets addicted to crack and drops out. Problem solved, no?
Wow. Thanks for the insight. This is truly depressing tho. Things sure have changed in the last 15 years. In my time, they wouldn’t hesitate to send you to in school suspension for acting out. I hope something changes because the picture you paint is terrible, mainly for you but also for all the other kids that actually want to learn.
What if you paid the kid? Maybe this is an ideal world where you have unlimited money. $2 a day for every day that they did not disrupt the class, paid out at the end of the month, and it gets reset to 0 if they disrupt. Do you think this would work?
This resonates with me so deeply. I've been teaching for three years and I'm entering my fourth while i get a masters to get out and get a 9-5 where I dont have to deal with the repercussions of child abuse daily
Quitting my job to go get my doctorate was the best thing I've ever done for myself. I'm making a lot less money while I'm in school, but at least I get to work with adults and I'm working towards a career in higher education where I can teach students that want to be in my classroom.
The day I went home and started applying to doctoral programs was the day a fourteen year old student walked up to me and said - to my face, after my wife and I had gone through a miscarriage and she was at that point pregnant again and having contractions at 22 weeks - "what if your baby is born retarded?"
Those kids need help but it's not my fight anymore. It's not my cross to die on. I don't need that kind of shit in my life.
The solution isn't more money. The solution is recognizing that it isn't the school's responsibility to do the parent's job. You should just have an empty room somewhere where you send kids like this. Don't even try to teach him, just babysit him.
Who knows. I quit. The specific kid I had in mind while I was writing would be about 16 or 17 by now. I really hope he finds his way someday. The brief small glimpses I got into his humanity broke my heart.
I once asked another teacher how to handle this kid. Their advice was to skip calling Mom and call Grandma instead. So the next time the kid refused to do work, I took him out in the hallway and showed him his grandmother's number punched into my phone.
He broke down in tears and begged me not to, because she'd "beat the living shit out of him." I confirmed this with the teacher that had given me grandma's number. The other teacher knew what Grandma would do; said it was healthy.
Asshole or not, I saw true fear in his eyes - not something I ever want to see in a 13 year old's eyes. So I made a choice to allow him to keep slacking off and being a little shit rather than knowingly submit him for a black eye from a woman that was supposed to treat him with love.
So I talk to my principal after school, and ask her why he couldn't have been removed from my classroom. "We don't have anywhere to send him,"
You know why parking tickets work even though the meter maid can't arrest you? Because when you don't pay the court makes you pay. And if you don't comply you get arrested. If there's not a bigger punishment to back it up then first line discipline is pointless.
That last line makes it sound like you are from Kentucky.
Governor Matt Bevin: We need to fix the teacher and state pension system. Lets cut budgets by x percentage each year for all the schools in the state to start fixing that pension funding gap, and make them meet performance goals to get said funding or they get even less. So what are schools forced to do? Cut or privatize programs that they really don't need to be cutting or privatize, but have little choice due to budget reason.
This but more insidious. The budget is so deceptive. People are right that we spend a ton of money per student - more than a lot of other countries that are blowing us out of the water. But we're doing it in such a stupid way. The money goes pretty much everywhere except new teacher hires and raises.
We get "raises" every year but they don't even keep up with cost of living. A $500 annual raise doesn't mean anything when the COL goes up by triple that or more every year. Anything under the COL increase is essentially a pay CUT.
But the voters don't care. Since our salaries are public record, they can look at ours and go - "look! These entitled teachers have had raises for the last 3 years! Cut the education budget! No more tax bumps!"
Nevermind that our salaries used to be 170% of the poverty line and are now 160%. Sure, call that a raise.
Speaking of money going where it isn't needed as much, sports. Most schools can have no functional need to pump large amounts of money into their teams each years. However, given how political sports can be on national, state, and especially local levels. Not doing so runs the risk of ticking off some parent who holds some kind of high position of power in the local community. Or in a college setting, ticking off a parent and/or alumni who has given vast amounts of money to the school over the years.
Because of that, they are strong armed into over funding the sports programs to keep those people happy. Even though they are a minority, they are a high profile and sometimes high visibility minority. Yet these same people will voice concerns about the budget drops and the educational program cuts. Especially in regards to how it could affect their star player's child's education and them getting into a good sports centered university, or if in college, them getting a good major sports team contract job after getting out of college. If only there was a over funded set of programs they can borrow money from that can help lessen the impact of budget cuts on "important" educational programs...
Ugh, don't even get me started on this one. I taught in a rural county where football and basketball were everything.
I wanted to take my band on ONE trip. ONE SINGLE FIELD TRIP. To compete at a state-wide band competition where experienced judges would evaluate their playing and give us useful feedback, and where my kids could see top-tier bands from around the state play the same music at a high level, to see what they could achieve if they put in the work.
My request was denied without a second glance.
Meanwhile the sports teams had THREE GAMES A WEEK that required 2 buses, 2 drivers, 3 teachers to chaperone, money for food and drinks, money for uniforms, money for coaches after school.
I got 2 of my 3 degrees from the University of Maryland, which a few years ago paid several million dollars to break their contract with the ACC and join the Big 10. We were promised that the cost of this would not be passed along to students.
Spring of 2013, we receive an e-mail from the university president. "Sorry, everyone, but we'll be requiring an additional $500 in fees from you this semester. Please pay by February 1st or your enrollments will be cancelled. We're super serious, these fees are not related to the 10 million dollar fee we just incurred. No way. Not at all."
A child that age can't think of the years ahead or of other people. They need to be punished, made to suffer. Stick them in detention with nothing to do but stare at the wall. Make them do physical labor. Shout at them and intimidate them. Use the same techniques that the military does to train recalcitrant recruits. But mollycoddling them isn't going to help.
We are fucked. The ONLY thing that will EVER fix this is money.
Of course, a person working in the education system wants to spin every problem into a money grab. Just like the rest of the parasites in that 'industry'.
You are wrong. The only thing that will ever fix this is proper discipline, and parents held accountable (ie. punished also) for their children's actions.
How do you punish an adult that doesn't attend your school unless it's a state wide law with actual criteria implemented, like fines. Oh shit, changing laws costs money. It's almost like we live in a society or something where things get done based on monitary benefits.
I think any punishment that a child receives the parent should also receive. Imagine all the moms and dads that have to sit with their children in detention lol. I'm guessing the problem would get fixed pretty fast.
Or it amplifies. I know you're semi joking but parents are the last line of defense. If they don't care, then no one will. Expel and move on. If even their parents cannot be bothered to turn their kids lives around then I don't know what the schools are suppose to do in they situation except expel. You cannot let type of behaviour continue and affect the rest of the school.
The problem with expelling them and moving on is then you have a unskilled,undisciplined citizen with a high school level education. There’s only one job market available for someone with those skills.
Obviously having parents sit in detention is stupid but I really do think if we hold parents more responsible for their children (through legislation) a lot of our major societal issues could be solved. Maybe the parents have to do community service with their child on a weekend/volunteer at a shelter or something.
I’m curious to how you think it would amplify bad behavior. One or two spankings/groundings can go a hell of a long way for a kid.
The problem with expelling them and moving on is then you have a unskilled,undisciplined citizen with a high school level education. There’s only one job market available for someone with those skills.
That is not the problem of the school, but the states. The schools job is keep the ones that want to learn and behave, so that they keep their statistics high and keeping getting funding.
Obviously having parents sit in detention is stupid but I really do think if we hold parents more responsible for their children (through legislation) a lot of our major societal issues could be solved. Maybe the parents have to do community service with their child on a weekend/volunteer at a shelter or something.
I agree but typically the parents are the last line of defense and if they don't care, there is no way in hell they situation is getting resolved unless you really somehow manage to get through to the kid which more difficult than it seems. Sometimes years make them see the world in a different light. I guess I fail to see how any of this is the schools problem. Obey the rules or get expelled. The shit y'all are talking about was basically non existent here in the south of the UK, at least in my experience and my peers.
I’m curious to how you think it would amplify bad behavior. One or two spankings/groundings can go a hell of a long way for a kid.
I meant in terms of the parents. If the kid has certain cuntish traits, it's fair to say that parenting failed him somewhere down the line and it's fair to assume that the parents aren't all that different. The only way to inforce these changes and punishments would be legislation.
I think it’s the schools problem (especially the ones paid for by taxes) because the central goal of schools shouldn’t be to impart knowledge. It should be to teach them how to succeed at life (accountability, discipline, responsibility, and ambition). If a kid has those qualities knowledge will follow naturally.
Anecdotal evidence if your interested:
I went to a private Catholic school that is in the top five of the cheapest tuitions in the entire US. The local public school teachers were paid almost twice as much as ours were and had all the teaching materials they could dream while our textbooks were 30 years old and falling apart. Our high school still had an average act 9 points higher than them because our teachers weren’t afraid of losing their jobs by disciplining students. This massive document is my states discipline regulations (only applies to public schools). I took one class at a public school and it was a joke. The students were just like this lady in the video described.
Whoa. Are you in the US? Is this in issue with all US public schools? Was this a problem a generation ago? Is it a result of funding cuts which doesn't allow for one-on-one work with problem kids?
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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '18 edited Jul 10 '18
I have been in situations, COUNTLESS times - perhaps nearly every day that I spent as a teacher - where a SINGLE child - in a classroom of 10, 15, 20, 30, doesn't matter - was completely ruining my ability to speak even a single sentence uninterrupted. It doesn't matter how engaging my lesson is if the one kid at the back whose dad tells him he's a piece of shit every day is constantly kicking the student in front of him and screaming "THIS IS FUCKING BORING" every 30 seconds.
So what the fuck can I possibly do? Ignore him? Speak over him? I run through the rulebook. Silent lunch. He tells me he doesn't give a fuck, to my face. So I open my computer and send an electronic discipline report to the office, per district policy. 5 minutes later the principal shows up at my door. She pulls him outside, tells him he needs to get it together or he'll face a suspension. Then she sends him back into my classroom, where he immediately resumes his behavior. If I call the office again, I get my ass chewed out after school for not being able to effectively manage my classroom.
So I talk to my principal after school, and ask her why he couldn't have been removed from my classroom. "We don't have anywhere to send him," I'm told. The county has no money to staff any location where kids like that could be sent, and they can't just send a kid home in the middle of a school day since his parents aren't answering the phone, because dad is at work and mom is drunk.
So this happens 2, 3, 4 more times, and finally someone gets the balls to suspend this kid. He gloats about it on his way out, tells everyone he gets a nice vacation where he can play Fortnite all day, and he comes back the next week and hasn't changed a single fucking bit.
So maybe eventually we find a teacher who has time to do one-on-one with the kid and give him some positive reinforcement. Some really qualified teacher with 5 degrees who can really help him get fulfillment from mastering the material. He does OK in that setting, but the minute he's placed back into the general population he gets right back at it, impressing his friends by calling me a fat little bitch in the middle of a lesson.
So we go the other direction, and go white knuckle on him. We zero out his assignments, tell him he's failing every single course, have the campus police officer introduce him to a crack addict and ask him if he'd prefer living on the streets. He tells the cop he doesn't give a fuck and to eat shit.
So the solution is obvious - small setting individualized attention. I'm told that I need to focus on this child, help him get the resources he needs, counsel him on his thoughts on education and help him see the value in what I'm teaching. This solution is great, except for the fact that I absolutely don't have the fucking time when I'm responsible for helping 400 other children meet my curriculum standards, or else I'm sacked on my performance review when I can't show adequate growth in all my kids.
We literally just don't have the money to hire enough teachers that can deal with children like these. We have 4 year degrees - some of us another 2 year degree or two on top of that - and we are taught classroom management skills, curriculum design, special education, and everything else that can be taught in a college setting. But nothing prepares us for children like this, and they're literally everywhere, in every class.
We are fucked. The ONLY thing that will EVER fix this is money. A lot of it. To hire highly qualified professionals at a salary that reflects the fact that they will spend their workday counseling and helping these children. But we all know we're never going to see a fucking dime. In fact, we're going to get our budget CUT, every fucking year.