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I see a lot of people getting education degrees because they have no aptitude or desire to go into business, math, science, medical, or engineering fields, and trade schools don't appeal to them.
Since it's expected that a household nowadays has two working adults with college degrees, this leaves a lot of people pursuing education degrees because they remember being in school and looking up to some teacher when they were a kid. Teaching also looks really easy from a student's point of view. They imagine a group of obedient kids admiring them and hanging on their every word. They never had to deal with the "challenging" students when they were a student and never anticipated having to deal with them as an adult.
Many of these people have no business being in a classroom and it takes a couple of years for them to figure this out. Creating hours of interesting content on a daily basis and getting 30 kids to care about something that is not relevant to them is not a skill most people have. Most young adults have a hard time just managing themselves, so managing 30 unique individuals is not a skill most people have or have any idea how to develop.
Back in the "old days" it was probably very rare for a teacher to send a student down to the office, so when someone was sent, it was a major deal. Now, inept teachers send students down on a daily basis expecting the office to manage their classroom for them. The current victim mentality culture proliferates in inept teachers. Instead of taking responsibility for improving their management skills, it's easier to blame someone else.
I would say the norm is for middle school kids not to want to listen to a job presentation. Who'd want to do that rather than visiting with friends? I've been to big teacher conferences with multiple (typically 15-20) presentations going on at once. Teachers just get up and walk out in the first 5-10 minutes if they think the presentation is not interesting or boring. Sometimes they go to another presentation, sometimes they just hang out in the common areas talking. Adults do it too if they can get away with it.
I'd say it was partly on the teacher to prep these kids for this presentation and to enforce behavior standards. This should have been talked about right before the presentation, so the speaker knew what was expected. The teacher did nothing, so I don't see how this falls on the kids. The other part is on the presenter, who should have set the expectations for what they would like to see in a middle school audience during their presentation.
Instead of saying, maybe we should have some behavioral expectations going into these presentations and sit down with teachers to plan this out in advance, it's much easier to blame the kids, blame the teachers, and just say we are not doing it again.
At first I thought I was going to dislike your post, but as I got into I decided I liked it a lot.
I particularly liked what you said about sending students to the office. In 13 years of teaching, I only remember sending a student to the office once. As a teacher I firmly believed that every time a teacher sends a student to the office, other kids are sitting there thinking, "See, he/she can't handle it", and that's a sure recipe for classroom discipline going down the drain.
Years later as a principal, at an opening-of-the-year faculty meeting I handed out 3X5 index cards to the teachers that had one sentence printed on them: "I teach ______________", and asked them to fill out the card...without a name. I collected the cards and looked them over during the lunch break. Out of about 75 teachers, 74 wrote down their content area (math, science, etc.). One wrote: "I teach kids". I know it was sort of a little trick, but it made a point. I can tell you who my best teachers were going all the way back to kindergarten. But it had nothing to do with any particular content they taught me, whether it was Mrs. Wilson in kindergarten, Mr. Taber in 7th grade NYS history, or even Mr. Eckburg in earth science (which is what I ended up teaching), or onto college and Thomas Grasso in historical geology, or Vince Natale in intro to psychology, or Victor Schmidt in geomorphology. They were great because they taught me how to think, or how to respect others and myself, or how to solve problems, or other "greater" concepts. And when I had kids come back and tell me what a great teacher or administrator I had been, it was always along that line. It was never something like, "You were a great teacher because you taught me Moh's scale of hardness", "You were a great teacher because you taught me the difference between a cold front and a warm front". (And just for the record, I had some that disliked me intensely...and that's okay...that's part of being a teacher, too).
If a teacher goes into public school teaching because they love their content, they're probably going to be disappointed, because if they have (for example) a Master's Degree in geology, in teaching earth science in high school, they're going to barely scratch the surface of that content. A successful teacher almost always revels in teaching kids. And that's not a talent everyone has.
Working in an inner-city school has had me dealing with more than my fair share of this demographic. When I checked the local county jail list this morning, (long story--but now my daily habit), one of the most troubled kids was in for murder. He and most of his siblings had been in and out of the alternative school before dropping out.
We've had a spate of shootings in our zone lately, the worst resulting in a 1-year-old shot in the head in a drive-by. I'm nearly positive the mother (the target) is another of my former students. When teachers complain about problems with parents, these kinds of problems are not what comes to most people's minds. I wish I had problems with chewing gum and lost homework rather than with losing kids to jail, the streets, or murder.
I have to admit that I was lucky. One semester I taught in a really lousy suburban high school. The rest of my career in education I worked in good to excellent schools.
If a teacher goes into public school teaching because they love their content, they're probably going to be disappointed, because if they have (for example) a Master's Degree in geology, in teaching earth science in high school, they're going to barely scratch the surface of that content. A successful teacher almost always revels in teaching kids. And that's not a talent everyone has.
That's why I have to laugh when someone working at a math or science type job and making lots of money decides to give it all up and go into teaching. Nope. Most teachers don't get a chance to really teach. They work at law enforcement.
I used to hear about boot camp for some of these disruptive kids--wish they really had it and teachers could send the problems kids who don't want to learn to one of these boot camps. Teach them some manners, some proper behavior, some ways to cope when you don't get your way. Teach them to act like human beings. Teach them some discipline so they can learn self discipline.
I started out teaching first grade. Even in first grade, you can get a few kids who are very messed up and make it impossible to teach. But I had one kid who wasn't really that bad and he was smart. However, he just could not force himself to sit still and learn to read.
So I had a few little talks with him, told him how smart he was and that if only he could make himself sit still, he would be able to read books about trucks and cars--just like the ones he was always drawing pictures of. He could read about them and know everything there was to know about them! But it was up to him.
He changed. And one day he thanked me and laughingly said, "You know, Mrs. X, at home I act all crazy too, can't sit still but here's what I did. I banged my head against the wall and told myself that I have got to stop that. I said, 'just stop that and sit down and read.'"
I don't think he really banged his head against the wall very hard but whatever he did, it worked and he went on to become one of the best readers in the class. Without pills. Without special ed. Luckily that year he was one of the few kids with problems in the class so I had the time to work with him and there weren't many other kids acting up and distracting him.
The next year I had an 8 year old girl in my class with severe mental problems. The gym teacher couldn't handle her because she'd get all the kids literally climbing the walls to get out the windows of the gym! He refused to teach if he had to have her in the class. In my classroom she would destroy other kids' work, try to stab kids with scissors so we could never use scissors, erase the work I had put on the board, and she even tackled the school secretary and brought her down to the floor in the corridor. Yes, I had "that" in my classroom and it wasn't fair to the other kids.
These are suburban, all white towns in New England. When I recovered from "that" year of teaching and went back to teaching, it was in a middle school--suburban, all white and we had police stationed in the doorway at all times. So it just goes down hill and outsiders don't know what it's like to try to teach in a public school. These kids shouldn't even be in school in the first place. They should be in reform school like they used to be or boot camp learning what their parents didn't or couldn't teach them. And teachers should be allowed to punish (not physically) kids without getting into trouble or losing their jobs.
1. All children should receive a free and appropriate education.
Agree. Until they become a disruption to the learning of others. At some point someone has to say "enough" and put them someplace else. Otherwise the kids who behave, who are there to learn, and who have parents that care about their education are not receiving the education they deserve.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phetaroi
2. No one said parents of those who demand special treatment should be given more consideration than the vast majority of parents. Treatment of children should be determined by parent demands.
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Squeaky wheel gets the grease kind of thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phetaroi
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3. Sounds like you went to a lousy school or lousy classroom. Or, perhaps your talks were inadequate to get a fair hearing.
Yes, it was a lousy run school in a lousy run district. The kicker is, it's a magnet school, supposedly competitive to get in. It was not an inner city school but rather in a fairly affluent side of town. But because of the magnet it did have students from all over the city. The city itself is booming, not a rust belt kind of thing. But there are major problems in that city school system. The SROs in that district asked to be returned to patrol duty because the district administration would not allow them to enforce the rules.
Didn't go into detail in the previous post because the point was, there were kids in those classrooms who were attentive, wanted to learn, and asked excellent questions for their age. But their learning was being disrupted and shutdown by the vast majority who just did whatever they dang well pleased.
You would think the teachers unions would fight for teachers to have the right to maintain discipline in the classroom. That would actually be a very helpful use of union power, but they're missing in action. And people wonder why many of us look down on unions.
You would think the teachers unions would fight for teachers to have the right to maintain discipline in the classroom. That would actually be a very helpful use of union power, but they're missing in action. And people wonder why many of us look down on unions.
I really wish people would pay attention.
Teachers have zero or next to zero input into discipline policy development or decisions, those are the purview of local and state school boards. In fact some states prohibit the discussion of discipline issues by teacher representatives during contract negotiations.
This was what schools had to follow until recently when some of the guidelines were withdrawn:
Short answer was that school governing bodies were encouraged, under threat of Civil Rights violation lawsuits, to revamp their discipline policies. Most were a downgrading of consequences for violations that were found to be disproportionally committed by one or another student demographic and to institute restorative procedures for many other violations.
Originally Posted by phetaroi View Post
1. All children should receive a free and appropriate education.
For some of them that education would be given in a boot camp type environment because their education would consist first of learning how to behave. That education would also serve them well throughout their lives. While they are learning how to behave around other people, they would also be learning their schoolwork, but at a slower pace than they would if they were in a regular school.
We need alternative schools for these kids, staffed by a certain type of person who is trained to deal with these issues. Maybe they don't have to be actual teachers, just people who can enforce the rules and relate to these kids who have never learned how to act. Is that what used to happen at reform schools? Whatever they did, at least reform schools got those kids OUT of the regular school environment so the other kids could actually learn.
Teachers have zero or next to zero input into discipline policy development or decisions, those are the purview of local and state school boards. In fact some states prohibit the discussion of discipline issues by teacher representatives during contract negotiations.
This was what schools had to follow until recently when some of the guidelines were withdrawn:
Short answer was that school governing bodies were encouraged, under threat of Civil Rights violation lawsuits, to revamp their discipline policies. Most were a downgrading of consequences for violations that were found to be disproportionally committed by one or another student demographic and to institute restorative procedures for many other violations.
Teachers have zero or next to zero input into discipline policy development or decisions, those are the purview of local and state school boards. In fact some states prohibit the discussion of discipline issues by teacher representatives during contract negotiations.
This was what schools had to follow until recently when some of the guidelines were withdrawn:
Short answer was that school governing bodies were encouraged, under threat of Civil Rights violation lawsuits, to revamp their discipline policies. Most were a downgrading of consequences for violations that were found to be disproportionally committed by one or another student demographic and to institute restorative procedures for many other violations.
Interesting. You'd think the unions would take this stuff to court. Maybe they have, but I doubt it.
Personally, I think there's been a long term agenda to dumb down America. No discipline in the schools is one of many aspects of that agenda. Of course, my saying that makes me a kook to some.
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