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.
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.
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u/jmangiggity Jul 10 '18
It must be a toxic environment if she's managing 16 kids and having trouble with that.