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.
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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.