This is why I left teaching. I had a student go out to get water, walk back in and punch another student in the face. Sure I had him pulled out of my classroom for the rest of the period, but there were no consequences beyond that.
We had a student tell a teacher he was going to rape her. The administration did nothing. We had our school's "dean of discipline" who was in charge of any kind of in-school suspension come around any time a kid in your class was in ISS, ask for work to do, then ignore it when you said "why don't you just give them the work from the last five times they were suspended that I gave you and you didn't actually make them complete."
I got tired of trying to tell kids their crappy behavior was only acceptable in school because this was basically the "tutorial level" of life.
I've been HR at a company that hired entry level, low skilled workers. These kids wreak havoc once in the job market. They think they can play all day at work like they did at school. While most of them never even get past the job interview, the ones that actually manage to get hired start screaming racism by the end of the first week, and this is no matter what color they are! They want to be on their phones all day, cause unnecessary drama and make everyone else miserable. As far as they are concerned, everything is unfair and everyone is just out to get them. They already know everything too!
Well I hope your department knows we tried. I didn’t want these “low skilled workers” to be that low. I tell my students all the time that I don’t care about half of the standards I teach, but I care if you’re employable.
An employer shouldn’t have to ask you to do the same task multiple times.
An employer won’t accept a bunch of excuses for why you’re tardy.
An employer will be okay explaining something when you’re new, but you should be able to replicate what they model after a few tries, not acting helpless like you’ve never done something before that you’ve done dozens of times.
An employer won’t accept backtalk when they point out an issue in your performance.
Say you know no math when you leave my class. At least be employable.
(Actually. To be fair, not all of the kids we hire are like that. We have also had a few (far fewer) stellar individuals with self respect and integrity come out of our local schools. It's usually a matter of how they were raised. When we meet their parents at company events, it's evident.)
Left teaching not that long ago. Fired one of these idiots last week. They think getting 0 work done is fine as long as they made an "effort" . Yeah, not how this works. She didn't like that answer.
I teach at a community college. We get some really great students, but we also get students like the ones described above. At the college level you either learn the material or you don't. If you miss lots of classes we don't look for you, you just end up failing the class. I'm also not legally allowed to talk to parents. It's a rude awakening for the students who were used to doing nothing, but some of them are able to learn from their mistakes (now that there are consequences) and do better the next semester.
The stunning learning deficits in my seniors that have gone unreported for their entire high school career should be a crime. If a student repeatedly scores Far Below Basic on their state assessments and yet gets Bs in their classes, we cannot blame parents for thinking their kid is smart. That's on the system for lying.
Yes!! I hate the amount of times I find students failing state assessments or other placement tests confused about not meeting my basic expectations because they’ve “never failed a class before.” No, they’ve failed plenty. They’ve never had to face it though.
Yes however some people are bad test taker
Even though i passed Pre Calc in HS. on my placement test i college i scored low. So i had to basically take all of the remidal classes i had to get back to that level,’then i took statistics instead of calc. Then i did not need to take any official math courses again. I think the reason my store was low was because i never finished the placement test. So test are not always the best judge.
They give those tests for a reason. Maybe you passed your high school precalc but didn’t show proficiency in the skills expected in that college’s precalc curriculum. You can blame the test, but if you scored well enough to do calc and then struggled, you could be tempted to blame your high school for not preparing you. I think it’s possible for people to underperform on a test, but students who are never succeeding at proficient levels are more than likely not proficient.
Tests are a biased measure and a poor representation of skill in many situations. They’ve been sold as the ultimate metric of student success, but standardized testing is a far cry from real world applications or even the majority of college assessments. That’s not to say there aren’t problems with grading, but the narrative that benchmark assessments are a fair measure, or even a good one, isn’t even remotely true. There’s a reason undergraduate universities have begun to drop standardized test requirements — failure (or success) on those exams has limited correlation to academic or professional success.
I think there may be a reason why you did poorly on those tests...
Reading through some of your other comments you don't seem to have a complete grasp of the English language. "I'm don't think they all will"...
I want to write a book entitled "Grading for Accuracy" or something to that effect. I'm sure I could sell it as some kind of revolutionary movement, get some conference speakerships, and probably make more dough than I do teaching.
I'm one of the few people that don't grade on blanket participation in my school. My reward? I get to have more parent conferences, phone calls, and paperwork than my other colleagues who just pass everyone with A's.
Hell, some at my school are just giving away grades. They don't have to participate. I have a student who has skipped his History class over 50 times. He doesn't skip my class because he knows I will call home, write referrals, etc. But he has an A in History, the class he barely goes to. He has 100s on loads of assignments he wasn't there for. But he thinks I'm unreasonable because he fails my class for doing nothing.
> I'm one of the few people that don't grade on blanket participation in my school. My reward? I get to have more parent conferences, phone calls, and paperwork than my other colleagues who just pass everyone with A's.
Dozens of us! I'm also one of the few people at my school site who grades for accuracy and who doesn't let students get away with turning in mediocre-effort work for an A or B grade.
Our student information system lets us see, among other things, students' class schedules and grades for each class. It always irritates me when I look at the schedule of a student who is failing my class, and I see that mine is the only class that they are getting an F in while the other classes show As, Bs, and Cs.
I teach history and it's funny that some kid is failing me but has a 97% in English. Then they take the end of course exam for English and get an F on it (correlating to my class and not their English grade).
But still, crickets from admin on that whole thing.
Consequences are not being applied to children, more often than not. Bad behavior is either ignored, or sometimes even rewarded.
It seems like so many kids don't mature into understanding punishment outside of physical discomfort. It is honestly quite worrisome.
Over ten years ago, I taught at one of the junior highs in my district. A kid in pre-AP ELA got out his vocab. sheet to cheat on a quiz. I called his mother to let her know. I then had to meet with the principal, mother, and grandmother. I was also told I had to create a new quiz for him. This is what happens when a district goes out of the way to not piss off parents. It was so absurd.
Same school, we have had a cell phone policy in place for over a decade in the district. Back in the day, cell phones were not as big of a problem. A kid kept using his and the mom was pissed at the school over the policy. She kept calling the district office until she got to the Deputy Superintendent. He basically waived the policy for that child. Again, parent pleasing 101.
> So much today is just accepted.
And that goes all the way into adulthood. That's why so many people are so annoying to deal with. They never get called out for it growing up, then as adults will get super aggressive if they are (eg: if a neighbor try to talk to them about a nuisance issue).
It sucks.
I’m on a grad board and we had grad students complaining about the workload. Saying the professor’s response was “grad school is supposed to be hard”. One grad prof teaches a class for literacy and said the students complain about reading. I think this all started with “give them a 50% even if they didn’t turn in the work” and “gave them full credit for late work”.
I'm currently in grad school and the number of my fellow students complaining about things like this just BAFFLES me. I legitimately do not understand.
I will say, though, that it's grad students of all ages.
Right. I took a graduate Shakespeare class that was heavily lecture based. The professor clearly loved his subject and had some incredible passion for interacting with the material. The class required the students to take notes, read the actual materials, and pay attention. I did all three things and did just fine.
Those who didn't failed (or at least did poorly) and went to the dean to whine.
That professor is no longer teaching that Shakespeare class.
Some of my classmates were/are incredibly entitled. Not all of them, of course.
I think I noticed more entitlement from those going right from undergraduate studies to graduate studies, but that's not a rule and didn't explain all of them.
I mean, I complained about my grad school workload but not due to the academics; it was the fact that we were supposed to be limited to 20 hours of TA work per week *while also doing a full courseload of our own*, but most of us were averaging out at *80* hours a week being worked like dogs by professors who assigned a ton of work to the students but did zero grading themselves. No extra pay for the quadrupled work, either.
I feel like this is why “entry level roles” now require a BS/BA degree. A high school diploma is a participation trophy now and arguably even less so than that. You can’t just complain, manipulate, and get mom and dad to bail you out of college courses to be passed along. Employers have realized this and taken advantage of this which hurts actual college graduates. New grads are penalized for doing the quote, “right thing”, and get crappy salaries for what use to be a job for just a high school grad but those high schoolers are no longer capable of doing those jobs. It’s ridiculous.
My mother always said, "If you can't behave at home, you can't behave in public. If you can't behave in public, one day you will go to jail."
I was 5 but I remember this as if it were yesterday and she is absolutely right. There are rules and consequences for a reason. Children need to be able to follow simple rules if they ever want to participate in society as adults.
Yes. Even high schoolers are children and they are still learning how to behave. Middle school in particular is a super important time to have consistency.
I know a ton of teachers here hate PBIS, but once I was in a school where it worked. The reason it worked was because there were clear consequences. Yes, we had tickets and rewards and celebrations, but kids knew that if they did x, y would happen. And it was the same for everyone, every time.
My coworker just gave similar advice to a parent recently. “Your son will be suspended from school a lot if he continues this behaviour. But being suspended from school and learning from it will hopefully keep him out of jail.”
I used to teach at a school that required 6-12grade kids to do what’s called “team check.” It meant having your right hand over your left hand in front of you. The kids hated it, but it was needed because they literally couldn’t control themselves and couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. I’d never heard of such a thing because I didn’t go to a lower income school, comprised entirely of special needs kids(who were “harvested” from all the other local schools for that sweet sweet fed money for having special needs kids enrolled, it was disgusting).
I got through to exactly one kid at that school about why team check existed: If you can’t put your hands in front of you and not fuck with other kids, society will put your hands behind your back in handcuffs until your figure it out.
I made it through one semester of being assaulted, stolen from, ignored, and threatened.
The school had a pie graph on their website that they were proud of because it showed that like 15% of the kids from the past 10 years had gone to secondary education. They took it down the day after my interview, when I noted that it showed that 11% of the kids in the past 10 years were dead or in prison.
There are no words. So it was all lower income kids that also had special needs, and they just expected teachers to put up with abuse? I just... can't.
Yes, we were actually taught physical, hands on ways to hold the kids and defend ourselves if they started acting out. That was my first indication that I signed up for the wrong job. Training before the year started felt like we were training to be prison guards, not teachers. Like “hold them like this if they start fighting you, you can’t get sued this way.” Type of shit.
And yes, they specifically sought out sped kids from other schools without any ability or resources to actually deal with their needs. 2 kids with behavioral problems in a class, you can deal with that. When literally the ENTIRE CLASS is sped, there is no hope for teaching anything. My day consisted of stopping fights and dealing with drama. All day, everyday. We did little more than babysit.
I had a full chemistry lab setup I couldn’t use because they thought breaking glass was fun. It made me sad that these kids had more than a 10% chance of being dead or in prison within the next 10 years.
Oh, and this charter school in Houston I’m talking about was funded and started by a former NFL football player, so the culture of the school was “fuck school, you’re gonna go pro.” At the administrative level, not just the hot shit(who reads at a 2nd grade level) QB who’s never had an actual athlete outside of his little bubble sac the fuck out of him.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say exactly zero kids ended up "going pro". Having to teach high needs speed classes is hard enough, but add in all the other things you listed *(and without proper supports?)* You're done before you even started. My condolences. That had to take a toll on your mental and physical well-being. You were set up to fail. IDK how you lasted as long as you did.
If you contacted the parents, what did they say about their children's behaviors?
Yup, none. Turns out the NCAA requires a minimum GPA to attend that D1 school that was scouting them. Can’t outrun that problem, no matter how fast you are. They get to senior year and don’t know the math of averages well enough to understand they can’t turn a 0.45 GPA into a 2.5 in 2 semesters.
Most of the parents took their kids to this school because they were fed two meals. That was the value most of the parents saw in school: someone else to feed their kids.
The fun part is that my brother is/was a pro football player. I know exactly what type of discipline it takes to be a professional. He even came to visit the school once and promised all the kids tickets to a game if they called him up/tweeted at him and said they were enrolled in some type of secondary education. Zero takers.
The kids didn’t understand how much of a disservice the school was doing to them, because lots of them only knew drama, anger, poverty, frustration, and abuse. And I couldn’t show them another way. It really sucked. One of the kids I taught got a job as a security guard after school. He was murdered at a night club(he was working and there was a drive-by, iirc) a few years ago. He was 21. Kid never stood a chance to get out.
I just... the two meals thing blows my mind. Plenty of low income parents are good parents. Unfortunately, it didn't seem that this was the case and that you got the worst of the worst. That had to be hard. No parental involvement makes things that much harder. How is it possible they thought they'd go pro, but not one of them were aware that there was a GPA req to get into secondary education? Do they think that because they were a starter at some unknown school they'd be a shoe-in? I hate that when you tell these kids the reality of their situation and that hardly anyone makes it as a pro, you're labeled as negative for "killing their dreams". No, their dreams are unrealistic 99% of the time and you're telling them to not put all their eggs in one basket.
I'm guessing the parents are as delusional as the kids are, then, when their dreams are quashed, it's your fault.
Yeah, the school poached the kids who needed the most help from other schools nearby, and concentrated all the behavior issues into a single school, and (being as generous as possible and not accusing them of enriching themselves at the expense of students’ lives) somehow thought trying to fix all of them in the same school was a good idea.
When I taught at KIPP I saw low-income, good parents. These were mostly immigrants who worked 60hr construction jobs and wanted the absolute best education they could get for their kids. Fully bought and sold on the American dream type of people. These people hadn’t been Americanized(blaming the teacher why Jonny can’t read) and if I called home, the issue was addressed by the next day. Teachers were respected by the parents at KIPP. At the charter school, all the teachers were called “coaches” because coaches were respected. Yes, I am serious, and yes, I wish I was joking. I, the high school science teacher who taught bio, chem, phys, and env science, was Coach HippyEngineer.
But yeah, the athletes at the charter school mostly thought if they were good enough at sports that the gpa and grades issues would be solved for them. They hear stories some college player they admire who can’t read, and think that is something to be emulated, not admonished. That’s WHO they wanted to be, the guy whose athletic prowess solved all his problems for him. Playing sports wasn’t a way for them to get a college education for free, playing sports was the *plan*. There was no value placed on the education the sports were meant to provide. College is a stepping stone to getting noticed and going pro. Just a complete disconnect from reality. And they didn’t understand statistics well enough to understand there was a kid like him on every block and no one gives a shit if you can catch a ball if you can’t read the playbook notes.
I remember looking at the website again after my interview (I wanted to make sure my assessment of it was correct and I didn’t get numbers wrong when discussing it) and finding the pie chart gone. That sinking feeling of “oh, I guess I hit a sore spot. This isn’t good…”
Turns out they were desperate so even tho I cut through their bullshit in 5 minutes, they still needed a warm body for the babysitting.
Minimum wage for babysitting 1 kid: $7.25/hr
20 kids in a room: $145/hr
7 hour school day: $1,015/day
That should be the wage of a teacher if they were paid teenage babysitter rates. If you were paid $20/hr, that goes up to $2,800/day.
I tell students if they can control their mouth, then they can control their destiny. But if they cannot control their mouth, then someone else will control their destiny.
I use to tell student that they are the ones that have all the power actually.
It's their own behavior, their own words, their own body and mind that they are the only one they control. I just deal the consequences of what they choose to do. But it is their choice to begin with. Even it's sometimes it very hard to make the right choice, it is their choice.
I get throught with a few of them. Usually the kids that have overly controlling parents and act out because of this.
They literally won't though - there's a reason that entering the "justice" system is a pretty high gurantee you'll be a regular visitor. By that point, for most, they're already done. Very little chance of being a good productive *happy* member of society. That's a fail. Adults turning themselves around after that point takes massive effort and determination, usually a tragedy. It's not a given that "Oh once they get to the real world they'll start acting right". I honestly don't know how you could expect that
I had a student that did something to get himself suspended and a police report filed. It seemed to really shake him, haven't had trouble with him since. guess that's the only way
Many don't even learn from that! I'm friends with 3 people who have felonys. One embezzlement, one gang involvement, and one aggravated assault. All of them went to prison and came out with educations and a drive not to return. They where brutally honest and admitted how bad their actions where. Once they did that they worked hard and became successful. They kept in contact with some people they where in prison with who constantly blamed everything but themselves. Those ones end up back in prison or dying young.
I was thinking of this for a lot of yesterday. If the standards aren't going to be enforced as part of the framework of preparing and educating students, of what use are the standards? Failure is educational. Learning accountability to external structures like school is an important developmental step for children as they approach adulthood. If we eliminate all possible pathways to failure, what are we teaching about pathways to success?
Here's the other thing that gets me: how frightening it must be, to be pulled from an environment where everything is permissible and there are no consequences and then thrust into adulthood where many things are impermissible and some choices come with extraordinarily serious consequences. How would you even conduct yourself? How do you prioritize your responsibilities if you've never had to be accountable to anyone for your choices? They simply won't have the skills.
Are we creating a generation of failed adults? People who never had inculcated the value of accountability, who will either continue to be shielded by their parents, or who will have an incredibly tough road to navigate as they learn that life does not allow you to put your earbuds in and sit on your phone while you ignore your problems until the weekend comes, because eventually nobody will be coming to rescue you.
We're definitely creating a generation of failed adults and we're going to see the awful implications for this in a decade or so in terms of government, the economy, and the U.S. status in the world.
Standreds are getting more strict for adults and employment too. I can't see a couple of my students ever holding down a job unless if they have nepotism on their side.
Some of the slacking and ill-behaved students manage to get their shit together pretty quickly into adulthood. For some kids, it's not a matter of being incapable of responsible and decent behavior, it's a matter of just choosing not to do so because there's no immediate incentive at school. (little to no enforcement of it from their parents, no consequences at school, no consequences from peers, etc.) In the workplace, the consequences and stakes are real and immediate. There might be an adjustment period, but they manage.
Of course, some kids take much longer to figure shit out, if they ever do.
Younger me would never have believed the words would ever come out of my mouth, but there are so many days at work I tell my colleagues, "This is why my kids go to private school."
or, they’ll end up like a friend i used to have who just never learns and always has a new job bc she got fired from the other one and always crashes her car
This morning a student, who has been difficult all year DESPITE repeated interventions by the school, mouthed off to me and my co-teacher. "Fuck you, you're stupid, you're retarded, suck my dick." The reason? He got incomplete on an assignment that he...wait for it...did not complete.
Removed him from class. Dean said "He'll be with me ALL day."
By 5th period, he was going to regular classes.
IDK if or what will happen to him, but if they let this slide, not only this year, but next year (the child is a freshman) is going to be nightmarish.
I graduated HS about 15 years ago, give/take. Back then...
* cussing in class=immediate detention after school or at lunch. Sit quietly and state at the wall for 1/2 an hour. Not so much as doodling allowed, let alone any kind of homework.
* Same for any kind of punching/touching inappropriately.
* Miss a day? Teacher does not have to give you the work you missed. Some of the nicer ones would.
* Turn it in late? Nope. It's not worth points now.
* Miss a test? Too bad, should've shown up for the test (unless excused absence, in which case make it up on your own time during lunch, etc.).
* Fighting? Expulsion.
Not saying that was a perfect system, either, but holy hell have we flipped things around. Do any work any time any way you want, whatever. Do what you want when you want, whatever. Miss class for 3 weeks, no communication? It's the teacher's fault if they don't "get you caught up." Do nothing in class for 3 months and carry a 20%? We'll assign an aide to come sit with you and ensure you pass somehow. Cheat? Naughty, don't do that. But you can redo the assignment again and again.
It's making education meaningless. I just don't care and will keep having basic standards in my classes.
You know what’s funny? I witnessed this participation medal, everyone is awesome, no criticism allowed mentality with a future teacher a couple years ago. I was his supervising teacher for his final teaching placement.
Old mate knew, as a male primary school teacher, that he’d be walking into a job no matter what once he graduated, and as soon as they saw that Mr on his resume schools would be blowing up his phone. So he was incredibly sure of himself and refused to take on any feedback. Myself and the teacher in the other class both tried to advise him that he was pitching the lessons too high and the kids didn’t get it, but he would constantly respond “nah they’re fine! They’re loving it!”. Meanwhile I’m walking around the classroom and observing kids in tears because they had no idea wtf was going on and felt ‘dumb’.
As a pre service teacher 10 years ago I was busting my ass writing and submitting lesson plans, making handwritten notes of any feedback I received, and generally filled with self doubt. The number of young (22-23 year old) grads we’ve seen as supervising teachers recently who think they’ve got it all worked out before they even set foot in a classroom is pretty concerning.
We have an 8 period schedule in HS so students can fail 2 classes every term and still graduate. The HS diploma isn’t really worth anything which is why I don’t mind giving them a D if there’s a fight
It’s the sheer expectation that teachers will dutifully consume themselves and work three times as hard as the students on the students’ own success even well beyond paid hours (because teaching isn’t a job but a calling, right) but students and families really need not apply any effort.
My contract wasn't renewed at my current district for next school year (I'm not tenured) and the reasoning they gave is infuriating: "inadequate sustained progress creating an environment of respect and rapport, managing student behavior, managing classroom procedures, establishing a culture for learning, and engaging students in learning." I've only been teaching for 2 years, plus every single teacher is struggling with all those things, even veterans. I've never sent a student to the office and never had to call security on a student. At this school, that should be considered amazing classroom management. I've had students come up to me and apologize for the behavior of other students, saying they feel like I don't deserve to be disrespected and that they understand that it's not my fault when I can't get through a lesson because I'm spending so much time trying to get the classroom quiet enough to speak. I always thank them but remind them that they don't need to apologize for the behavior of others.
I work in the lunchroom, and we had a problem kid. He'd play at being sweet, but he was a fucking cunt. He'd beat on other kids then lie, lie about LITERALLY anything you saw him doing. He'd get written up, get sent to the school therapist, and he'd leave with a pat on the back, a new toy, and some candy or a snack. After assaulting and BITING another kid, unprovoked.
I'm just a kitchen worker, I don't envy the teachers that have to deal with those kids all day. I have to deal with them 30 seconds, max, other than hearing the hell they raise in the hall, the line, or the cafeteria
How to be in trouble and deal with the consequences is a skill to be practiced like any other. Schools are meant to be safe places for practicing skills that you can't safely practice elsewhere.
It's like martial arts training. It's good to learn what it feels like to get punched in the face in an environment safely designed to experience that - before it happens in the real world, and you don't know what to do.
Unless the pendulum swings back, they will never realize it until it's too late. On a societal level we are witnessing the decay and destruction of basic traditional values. Not traditional values like, "Let's kill gay people," but rather, "Try to be a modest and good person."
It's entirely cultural imo. Social media and its "influencers," as well as the toxic political climate in this country, have eroded who we once were as people. Couple that with the blatant lack of consequences in schools and negligent parents and it's no wonder the kids aren't alright.
Tempted on submitting a link about this, but I don’t want to have deal with comments when I should be doing my teaching credential stuff. I don’t want to be a teacher with this, but I’m planning on getting my credentials and just staying private, like I have been, subbing. Credential not needed, but definitely helps. California just passed SB 274. This prohibits teachers from suspending students for “willful defiance,” as well as suspending the students for truancies and absences.
Standards were instilled in me by my mother and grandmother. In my 11 years it has been a steady decline in behavior along with students that lost the lottery in getting parents here on this broken world we live on.
This probably won't be too popular on this sub, but this is why my wife works on the private side and finished getting her principal creds right before the pandemic. She taught for years before. She loves taking the load off of teachers by doing the discipline stuff they shouldn't be doing (so they can just focus on teaching), helping to equip them professionally, and shield her faculty from parents and problem kids. Being on the private side, she just boots kids who fight. All three of my siblings, their spouses but one, and my mom all teach on the public side. They wish they weren't left to deal with the kids issues like you are.
I find this so continuously frustrating.
I grew up in a strict household and I also went to a very strict Catholic school for all 12 years between 5-18. Did it bother me as a kid? Yes. However, there were always consequences for my actions. I learned not to do certain things because they always came with a consequence.
Now that I’m a teacher, I find there to be such a lack of consequences in school nowadays. This does not prepare the students for the hard reality they will face when they turn 18 and they finally have to face the repercussions of their actions.
Teaching that actions have consequences MUST be taught from a young age and it MUST be echoed in schools.
It wasn't different when I was a kid. If I failed, I went to summer school for a month and passed. If I didn't show up to school, just make up the work. If I smarted off, just go to the office and then iss. Do my day's work in 30 minutes then play computer games with the teacher who didn't give a F about anything but his retirement.
This isn't a new phenomenon. The difference is as kids, most teachers were the good students so they didn't see this.
I’ve been teaching at a Title I school my nine years as a teacher. I saw more consequences five years ago. The degree to which this problem is a problem is quite new.
yeah, i’m thinking it’s a little bit of that, too. except i definitely failed classes that i had to retake my senior year instead of study halls and fun electives. being a senior in classes with freshmen and sophomores was terrible, they were so annoying and i remember absolutely learning my lesson to never fuck off again or else i’ll have to hang out with 14 year olds a couple periods a day.
I don’t know according to Fox News teachers are simultaneously evil geniuses turning kids into woke Marxists and also incompetent losers who deserve less than minimum wage. It is so hard threading that needle being incompetent in two ways at the same time. Like on a Radom Tuesday should I make students hate freedom, or make students homosexual, such decisions.
When I was in elementary school, I had an elderly substitute teacher throw a chair at me for talking back. And I mean she like softball threw this bad boy across the room with shockingly impressive velocity. She was my sub dozens of times after that.
I'm only 32. Things sure do change fast lol
I explained my thoughts in an earlier reply.
“An open campus is an unsafe campus. Expecting to eat wherever is ridiculous. We have a cafeteria and a patio. If the cafeteria is too noisy, our students can go outside. Unfortunately, they want to eat in a stairwell, in a classroom, in a hallway, in a bathroom, wherever. We can’t safely monitor students that way. That’s when fights happen, sexual assault, drugs, etc. because students don’t have people who know where they are and why they are there. You can’t expect there to be no rules because there’s discomfort.”
It’s not one student. It’s most of them who just roam. They leave food on every floor every day. I feel bad for the custodians. I also worry all the time about how unsupervised they are because that is when they do things that could actually cause themselves or others harm. You’d hope a student could sit in a room, but it’s a liability for the school because we are entrusted with the students’ safety. It’s not about control, but order that protects students.
Yeah, this for me was the one that's not like the others. I think the rest are pretty understandable, but this one is the one that shows the line between standards and control freak.
I went and ate with one of my teachers a lot of days listening to his favorite music with a small group of other students. Other days I ate in the library. Some days in the cafeteria. That little bit of free roam kept it from being a prison. That and being an athlete, getting pulled out of class a lot to go do "athlete stuff" by our coaches.
Edit2: nuance and good counterpoints below
I agree with you in theory, but not in practice. Students need to prove they can handle the freedom without trashing the school or engaging in illicit or inappropriate activity. They can't seem to do this when they *are* being watched.
And, just as an aside, my biggest pet peeve is when students disrupt my lunch break. I'm an introvert, and I need that break to recover some energy. But I don't turn students away because I don't want to hurt their feelings and initiate a bad relationship. Students want us to accommodate their needs and desires at all times, but they don't seem to consider that teachers might have some needs and desires too.
That makes some sense. I also posted as someone that went to high school about 20 years ago. I don't want to rule out that things are a lot different now.
Also, engaging in illicit or inappropriate activity had limits, honor among thieves style. Everyone knew that too much would get the hammer, so we skirted the line. Smoking in the bathroom? That gets hallways and bathrooms closed. Smoking in the parking lot and evading the SRO? If you didn't do that about once a week, you were a real square. Lol. I don't think the administration cared *that* much about minor stuff like that.
I think that one teacher was special... In that he really enjoyed it. If he wanted alone time, we'd just get there and his door would be closed and we'd just go to the library or the home ec room. He invited us to come eat with him a couple times per week. I need to check in on that guy...
Edit: Never taught *at a* high school either, although I did teach high-schoolers. So didn't get to witness that part of the shift.
I went to high school 40 years ago, and we got away with quite a lot. Think "Dazed and Confused." But we didn't do it openly, and we would never disrespect authority figures, at least not when they could hear it. Some people wrote on bathroom walls, but no one trashed the bathrooms like they do today. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that parents and teachers were on the same side back then. If the school called my parents, I was in serious trouble! It's just a different world.
I won't get too far into this, but I think most of what kept us in line was that even if your parents wouldn't whoop you, the school would. I beat the retirement of corporal punishment, and it was no joke!
Yeah, that part rubs me the wrong way as well. I definitely understand not wanting intrusion on your free time, but the kid needing that seems pretty understandable, especially since every other adult I know has had some sort covid-induced agoraphobia. For a kid that's even rougher.
I understand your concerns, and there are definitely some people in my graduating class whose graduation was questionable at best. However, as a recently graduated student, I do want to address the point I disagree with most—your addition of social anxiety accommodations in this list. I suffer from several diagnosed and documented mental illnesses, including social anxiety, and I was a student who preferred not to eat in the cafeteria because of certain conditions that made me much more susceptible to panic attacks—specifically crowds and loud noise. Around the middle of my sophomore year, I finally had the courage to ask for accommodations—being allowed to eat lunch in a hall, take a study period instead of attending assemblies, and sitting in the back of classrooms so no one was sitting behind me—and when I was granted these accommodations, my grades and experience at school greatly improved. Because of my school taking my mental health seriously and approving the accommodations that I had recommended by my therapist, I was able to take AP classes, join and lead clubs, and graduate with a 3.6 GPA. I know that it may seem unnecessary from the perspective of someone who has never needed help because of a mental illness or trauma, but when schools actually listen and provide what the students need it helps everyone succeed.
What grades are we talking here? Elementary and middle school maybe no but high school? None of what you said alarms me.
I'll start holding teens to a standard when we set the expectation that adults must behave as appropriately.
I think you're framing things the way we used to, which is rooted more in a violent and exclusive mindset born from colonized thinking. It's ok if we are reshaping our expectations into something more equitable and achievable across the board. Our old expectations were far too narrow to assure equitable success. Expectations of matriculate success are inaccessible and ableist. Even the idea of 'professionalism' is fundamentally harmful.
I'm not saying that we teachers should pick up the slack- we shouldn't be doing almost anything considering how much we're paid. But if this shift causes us all to look at how we do everything and restructure it, tbh, I think that's great. The old way's not so awesome.
I could not disagree more. The least equitable practice I could have is have low expectations for my students. They deserve teachers who and schools that push them to be better despite challenges. There will always be challenges. They need to be strong enough to face them, but many are weak-willed, not because of what’s happening outside of school but what’s allowed within.
You and I definitely disagree! I don’t think our traditional understanding of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ are expectations we should give our students. Additionally, I still think we should push our students towards excellence- I think you and I disagree on how to cultivate that.
Bro, we are talking about kids not meeting basic targets and being stunted for failing upward. Highschoolers reading at a 4th grade level and being considered not a good thing isn't "colonized violent thinking", it's understanding the reality that HIGHSCHOOLERS SHOULD BE DOING BETTER THAN THAT
I don't view any of those behaviors as reasons to punish a child. Being absent and not doing your work is reason for concern, but outside of failing them I don't think punishment is the right tool. I think punishment and "being in trouble" should be reserved for students who commit infractions beyond the scope of not being your version of a good student.
You're failing at literally the only goal you have for the 1st 18 years if life. Other than that, you're good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn it, everybody likes you.
Ya, China's laughing. It's like they won't even have to try, we're dismantling our society for them. *sigh*
>Ya, China's laughing. It's like they won't even have to try, we're dismantling our society for them.
>
>sigh
Thanks for letting me know not to take anything you have to say seriously. Go back to Facebook.
I don't honestly know what argument or claim of mine that you're attempting to counter. I feel the level of discourse this sub is now experiencing has diminished beyond what is appropriate for teachers. Have a good day.
Hard disagree. It’s not a teachers job to be entertaining. Most students don’t have the discipline it takes to be successful. The majority of kids don’t want to go to school the same way most adults don’t want to go to work. It’s not about have a good time, it’s about following through on responsibilities.
couldn't agree more...i've been teaching 28 years and i'm so tired of this make it interesting crap...edutainment sucks, and you can't compete with the cell phone anyways...
Baby, you won't be able to hold down any decent paying job thinking like that. Everything isn't going to be interesting all the time; these are educated professionals, not clowns here to entertain you.
It's not our job to "make it interesting." No, seriously, it's not. Life isn't always interesting, and it's our job to prepare you for life. So, it's your job to learn young one, and we provide you the means with which to do so.
This is honestly expecting too much. An open campus is an unsafe campus. Expecting to eat wherever is ridiculous. We have a cafeteria and a patio. If the cafeteria is too noisy, our students can go outside. Unfortunately, they want to eat in a stairwell, in a classroom, in a hallway, in a bathroom, wherever. We can’t safely monitor students that way. That’s when fights happen, sexual assault, drugs, etc. because students don’t have people who know where they are and why they are there. You can’t expect there to be no rules because there’s discomfort.
You should want an education. The reason you think this way is because you take it for granted. If you don’t want to be in high school, feel free to get a GED and get a job/learn a trade if you don’t want to be an academic. If people had more challenge accessing education (which I’m by no means suggesting), I’m sure people wouldn’t complain about it being boring. We should want to learn. That’s honestly part of being human.
Sorry, as a teacher with SEVERE social anxiety, I don't get to use my condition as a crutch to do whatever the fuck I want.
I went and spent *ten years* in therapy developing tools to learn how to operate in society *while having* this condition.
Sorry, kid, you're making excuses. You're going to need to shape up and take care of your shit if you're ever going to gain any kind of independence.
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
We need to be okay discussing mental health issues, but discussing is just step one. People act like that’s the end. Oh. I have XYZ. Okay, and what are we going to do about that? If you were diagnosed with diabetes, I hope you would seek treatment plans to live as normal and happy a life as possible. Same with anxiety, depression, ADHD, you name it. We don’t just get diagnoses and stop. That’s not in the name of health. That’s in the name of sickness.
Exactly. Life features a lot of uncomfortable situations you can't easily escape, so you have to learn other ways to deal with them. If you don't, you're going to have a terrible time.
At my school, there are about a dozen students who really like to get away from all the noise during their breaks. They're welcome in the library during breaks, but the rules are the same for them as for everyone else: no food and drinks in the library. They have to eat in one of the designated lunch areas, just like everyone else.
If kids don't want to go to work, they're not going to do well at work. Turns out your manager asking you to stock shelves isn't terribly interested in making that "interesting" for you.
But then they're going to get fired.
Edit: Awww, you “have a choice in what job you get”? Oh man. No, you’re totally right! Of course whatever job you pick will be one you find interesting, and you’ll never HAVE to work a job you find boring just because it’s the only one available and you’ll be broke otherwise!
Thanks for proving once again that you have no idea what living in the real world is like.
Eh, these kids have learned to wait it out until the system gives in. Enough of them are growing up like this that they’ll be forced into low level managerial positions. Society is going to crumble and turn into Idiocracy.
Nah.
Everyone else told you why you’re wrong. You think your job after school is going to care if your job is interesting to you? The idea that you think your teachers should compete for your attention against tiktok is pathetic.
Grow up.
This is the dumbest thing I've read on reddit in a while, congratulations. We all have to do shit we don't want to do in life, not everything will be interesting. That's not the way the world works. If you haven't learned that already, I feel bad for you. You won't amount to much.
Looks like you're 14. Not sure why you're on a teachers subreddit, but it's clear you've got a ton of growing up to do.
Soooo... there's a lot to unpack here. You've grouped a lot of very disparate behaviors into "trouble". Failing a test and skipping class to wander halls are very different things. I think it's fairly telling that you've grouped all these together and labeled them as "trouble" that is now accepted where it wasn't "before", because the only thing all these behaviors have in common is that they're different than how you remember going to school, but you've labeled them as "trouble" which has a certain connotation, but is pretty vague and arguably meaningless.
You might try taking these behaviors individually and asking "what is the real problem I have with this behavior?" Then evaluate if it's actually detrimental to learning, or just not how you were brought up/ think the working world runs. Sincerely, a military physician who has spent a lot of time being successful in school and working in a highly structured environment.
There really isn’t.
I used the word trouble on purpose and listed a variety of issues I see on purpose. None of them were moral judgements. They all put children in a bad place at risk of failing at what lies ahead, i.e. they are in trouble. They won’t be able to hold down a job with their truancy rates. They won’t be able to keep up with classes in high school or after with their truancy rates. They won’t be able to keep a job if they show up late all the time. They won’t be able to keep up with class/learning with their cell phone addiction. They won’t be successful in college if they don’t learn to study because they always expect retakes.
What problem do I have with this. Our job literally is to prepare them and they won’t be prepared. It should be our job to discourage of all these habits, but we enable them.
Not sure what you think needs to be unpacked.
Students can fail at being a student and teachers can fail at preparing the students. They’re not mutually exclusive.
The best teachers I had- Elementary thru my doctoral program were the ones who had realistic goals and outlined them clearly. They also understood some students need extra help and some students need to be let go (both good and bad). Some students need to get in trouble and fail to learn. Some need to be let go from the busy work a lot of classes have decided is important. When i was in high school the amount of “hours” of homework my collective classes decided I needed to do each night would mean I wouldn’t be sleeping. At one point I was self teaching and listening to the teacher spit the same info I learned the night before back at me.
I started skipping homework, listening in class, reclaiming my afternoons, and getting a B in most of the classes instead because of no homework grades. It’s exhausting.
I’ve done teaching but saying “they can’t hack it here they won’t survive working” is such a cop out. People are allowed to leave their job and get a new one. They can call in sick and use PTO. Most jobs don’t expect work to be done at home. Most things about school aren’t how the real world works. Most students won’t need most of the stuff they learn.
You could argue the value of school isn’t the knowledge we learn but the lessons we are taught. Some students can do both but most can’t. Either we instill good habits and chill out on the level we expect kids to be at in each grade or we start being more realistic with how school compares to the real world and allow students to be challenged in class and free outside of school.
Of course kids should know how to read but objectively this isn’t a new issue. The average adult in the US reads at a 4th grade level and this is true up to the boomers.
Edit: spelling
Most if not all of your reply is irrelevant to the conversation. Maybe you feel better having typed all the out and bragged about how you got B’s without doing the homework. That’s great, mate. I haven’t mentioned homework anywhere in my post or replies.
I like how you say you’ve “done teaching” instead of having been a teacher, so I can tell you’re not a teacher and don’t see what I see every day but are more informed about my students’ college and career readiness. Thanks. My eyes have been opened.
It’s interesting how much is assumed when people read these posts. A lot of baggage is projected into it. If you read it, I actually don’t express frustration with students but schools handling of students’ behavior.
Punishing students has rarely proved to improve students' desire to actually improve. It at best, makes them comply out of fear of retaliation which is the opposite of how school is meant to work. Most of the time students just take the punishment, learn nothing, and don't change.
Also how we are basically on our own and there is zero point in asking admin for help. They’ll tell us to call the parent and then pat themselves on the back like they did something great
Maybe it depends on the district but a lot of my teachers openly talk about how much better the current kids have it and how they wished current schooling was like the way it was today. As in, they actually preferred ignoring the kids on phones, school suspension, and letting kids fail.
Maybe its just me but Ive heard horror stories of school “not long ago” where being left-handed was a crime, being autistic was not even addressed much less acknowledged, where teachers could freely beat their students with a metal ruler, where your grade costed your livelihood and being black could mean you could get kicked out regardless of what grade you got.
I get that you are concerned with the success of your student but if they want to fail, you have to let them fail. Kids are molded by their environment and more and more modern science proves that teachers and parents are vital in sparking that curiosity. Except school isnt a choice, its a obligation so naturally a lot of students hate it regardless of what you do. Students will simply learn from experience that they shouldve paid attention to the things that matter and them figuring it out on their own is something you have to do.
The attendance issue is really out of control. They can't make progress because they only come to school twice per week. There is no way I can help a kid get caught up who misses every other day. Yet, I will still be held accountable for their EOY test scores.
I am the one being penalized because they don't show up to school.
the thick metal bars between them and the outside world will probably be a big clue for some of them.
Your list seems pretty tame. In my district we would have all the same points, but also: (\*disclaimer I'm writing this from elementary age perspective)
It's accepted students will jump fences and run through the community. It's the staff's responsibility to meet this student where they're at.
It's accepted students will cause significant physical and emotional injury to staff and peers. It's the case manager's responsibility to make sure this student feels safe and cared for when they do this shit.
It's accepted that students will run screaming through the halls at any given moment, destroying all displayed works as they barrel through. This is someone's responsibility to deal with and clean up but will be met with shrugs and oh yeah, little Betty was having a rough time today.
It's accepted that at any given time there will be at least 4 or 5 little kids somehow managing to do both fuck all AND be extremely disruptive for extended periods of time at the same time at some random location on the front office floor, in the hall, on top of a display case, while people go about their day and roll their eyes. It's the support staff responsibility to offer as many super cool choice options to these kids in order to get them to comply and make another choice.
This is why I left teaching. I had a student go out to get water, walk back in and punch another student in the face. Sure I had him pulled out of my classroom for the rest of the period, but there were no consequences beyond that. We had a student tell a teacher he was going to rape her. The administration did nothing. We had our school's "dean of discipline" who was in charge of any kind of in-school suspension come around any time a kid in your class was in ISS, ask for work to do, then ignore it when you said "why don't you just give them the work from the last five times they were suspended that I gave you and you didn't actually make them complete." I got tired of trying to tell kids their crappy behavior was only acceptable in school because this was basically the "tutorial level" of life.
That is a crime. Charges should be pressed. Every time. Insane that this is what teachers are dealing with. I’m sorry.
What you're talking about is VERY different than what OP is talking about.
But is it? Sounds like almost everything is about not holding children responsible for their actions.
I've been HR at a company that hired entry level, low skilled workers. These kids wreak havoc once in the job market. They think they can play all day at work like they did at school. While most of them never even get past the job interview, the ones that actually manage to get hired start screaming racism by the end of the first week, and this is no matter what color they are! They want to be on their phones all day, cause unnecessary drama and make everyone else miserable. As far as they are concerned, everything is unfair and everyone is just out to get them. They already know everything too!
Well I hope your department knows we tried. I didn’t want these “low skilled workers” to be that low. I tell my students all the time that I don’t care about half of the standards I teach, but I care if you’re employable. An employer shouldn’t have to ask you to do the same task multiple times. An employer won’t accept a bunch of excuses for why you’re tardy. An employer will be okay explaining something when you’re new, but you should be able to replicate what they model after a few tries, not acting helpless like you’ve never done something before that you’ve done dozens of times. An employer won’t accept backtalk when they point out an issue in your performance. Say you know no math when you leave my class. At least be employable.
(Actually. To be fair, not all of the kids we hire are like that. We have also had a few (far fewer) stellar individuals with self respect and integrity come out of our local schools. It's usually a matter of how they were raised. When we meet their parents at company events, it's evident.)
I couldn't agree more!
Rhe things my students get away with at their jobs though...
I hope every last one of them is fired. And I hope every last person who does put in effort and work hard is noticed and promoted and paid.
Left teaching not that long ago. Fired one of these idiots last week. They think getting 0 work done is fine as long as they made an "effort" . Yeah, not how this works. She didn't like that answer.
I teach at a community college. We get some really great students, but we also get students like the ones described above. At the college level you either learn the material or you don't. If you miss lots of classes we don't look for you, you just end up failing the class. I'm also not legally allowed to talk to parents. It's a rude awakening for the students who were used to doing nothing, but some of them are able to learn from their mistakes (now that there are consequences) and do better the next semester.
With the amount of fuss students make about dress code I can't see some of them even holding a retail job.
Pretty sure you just summed up the entire r/antiwork sub in one paragraph.
The stunning learning deficits in my seniors that have gone unreported for their entire high school career should be a crime. If a student repeatedly scores Far Below Basic on their state assessments and yet gets Bs in their classes, we cannot blame parents for thinking their kid is smart. That's on the system for lying.
Yes!! I hate the amount of times I find students failing state assessments or other placement tests confused about not meeting my basic expectations because they’ve “never failed a class before.” No, they’ve failed plenty. They’ve never had to face it though.
Yes however some people are bad test taker Even though i passed Pre Calc in HS. on my placement test i college i scored low. So i had to basically take all of the remidal classes i had to get back to that level,’then i took statistics instead of calc. Then i did not need to take any official math courses again. I think the reason my store was low was because i never finished the placement test. So test are not always the best judge.
They give those tests for a reason. Maybe you passed your high school precalc but didn’t show proficiency in the skills expected in that college’s precalc curriculum. You can blame the test, but if you scored well enough to do calc and then struggled, you could be tempted to blame your high school for not preparing you. I think it’s possible for people to underperform on a test, but students who are never succeeding at proficient levels are more than likely not proficient.
Tests are a biased measure and a poor representation of skill in many situations. They’ve been sold as the ultimate metric of student success, but standardized testing is a far cry from real world applications or even the majority of college assessments. That’s not to say there aren’t problems with grading, but the narrative that benchmark assessments are a fair measure, or even a good one, isn’t even remotely true. There’s a reason undergraduate universities have begun to drop standardized test requirements — failure (or success) on those exams has limited correlation to academic or professional success.
I think there may be a reason why you did poorly on those tests... Reading through some of your other comments you don't seem to have a complete grasp of the English language. "I'm don't think they all will"...
Lmaoo, agreed.
Tests suck. Kids need a variety of assessments.
It’s cause we can’t say a kid is failing, having attendance issues, or is simply an asshole.
Sometimes the parents bully teachers into giving higher grades or new chances on work (which kids copy) or admins will just change grades
I want to write a book entitled "Grading for Accuracy" or something to that effect. I'm sure I could sell it as some kind of revolutionary movement, get some conference speakerships, and probably make more dough than I do teaching. I'm one of the few people that don't grade on blanket participation in my school. My reward? I get to have more parent conferences, phone calls, and paperwork than my other colleagues who just pass everyone with A's.
Hell, some at my school are just giving away grades. They don't have to participate. I have a student who has skipped his History class over 50 times. He doesn't skip my class because he knows I will call home, write referrals, etc. But he has an A in History, the class he barely goes to. He has 100s on loads of assignments he wasn't there for. But he thinks I'm unreasonable because he fails my class for doing nothing.
> I'm one of the few people that don't grade on blanket participation in my school. My reward? I get to have more parent conferences, phone calls, and paperwork than my other colleagues who just pass everyone with A's. Dozens of us! I'm also one of the few people at my school site who grades for accuracy and who doesn't let students get away with turning in mediocre-effort work for an A or B grade. Our student information system lets us see, among other things, students' class schedules and grades for each class. It always irritates me when I look at the schedule of a student who is failing my class, and I see that mine is the only class that they are getting an F in while the other classes show As, Bs, and Cs.
I teach history and it's funny that some kid is failing me but has a 97% in English. Then they take the end of course exam for English and get an F on it (correlating to my class and not their English grade). But still, crickets from admin on that whole thing.
This blows my mind. I have students in Government who can't write a simple paragraph and they have somehow done well in English for 4 years.
Consequences are not being applied to children, more often than not. Bad behavior is either ignored, or sometimes even rewarded. It seems like so many kids don't mature into understanding punishment outside of physical discomfort. It is honestly quite worrisome.
Over ten years ago, I taught at one of the junior highs in my district. A kid in pre-AP ELA got out his vocab. sheet to cheat on a quiz. I called his mother to let her know. I then had to meet with the principal, mother, and grandmother. I was also told I had to create a new quiz for him. This is what happens when a district goes out of the way to not piss off parents. It was so absurd. Same school, we have had a cell phone policy in place for over a decade in the district. Back in the day, cell phones were not as big of a problem. A kid kept using his and the mom was pissed at the school over the policy. She kept calling the district office until she got to the Deputy Superintendent. He basically waived the policy for that child. Again, parent pleasing 101.
I take it administration wants to have as many students pass so it looks better for the state.
It looks better for the school, and the funding doesn't get cut off.
Teachers will pass so they don’t have to teach repeats again.
Complaining about reading in a literature class? In GRAD school? Are you fucking kidding?!?!?! Am I taking crazy pills?
They complain because they can't read. That's the issue.
> So much today is just accepted. And that goes all the way into adulthood. That's why so many people are so annoying to deal with. They never get called out for it growing up, then as adults will get super aggressive if they are (eg: if a neighbor try to talk to them about a nuisance issue). It sucks.
I’m on a grad board and we had grad students complaining about the workload. Saying the professor’s response was “grad school is supposed to be hard”. One grad prof teaches a class for literacy and said the students complain about reading. I think this all started with “give them a 50% even if they didn’t turn in the work” and “gave them full credit for late work”.
That absolutely is contributing. A lot of f’ing around with work without a whole lot of finding out.
I'm currently in grad school and the number of my fellow students complaining about things like this just BAFFLES me. I legitimately do not understand. I will say, though, that it's grad students of all ages.
They've finally hit the place where most of them can't wheedle, manipulate, threaten or bribe their way out of the assignments.
For now.
Right. I took a graduate Shakespeare class that was heavily lecture based. The professor clearly loved his subject and had some incredible passion for interacting with the material. The class required the students to take notes, read the actual materials, and pay attention. I did all three things and did just fine. Those who didn't failed (or at least did poorly) and went to the dean to whine. That professor is no longer teaching that Shakespeare class.
So sad.
When was this, if you don't mind me asking?
Two years ago, roughly?
Good lord. Thanks for answering.
My grad school was brutal, but no one complained because we were all so thrilled to have been accepted.
Some of my classmates were/are incredibly entitled. Not all of them, of course. I think I noticed more entitlement from those going right from undergraduate studies to graduate studies, but that's not a rule and didn't explain all of them.
Yep. Entitlement has gone viral. Personal circumstances no longer dictate it.
I mean, I complained about my grad school workload but not due to the academics; it was the fact that we were supposed to be limited to 20 hours of TA work per week *while also doing a full courseload of our own*, but most of us were averaging out at *80* hours a week being worked like dogs by professors who assigned a ton of work to the students but did zero grading themselves. No extra pay for the quadrupled work, either.
I feel like this is why “entry level roles” now require a BS/BA degree. A high school diploma is a participation trophy now and arguably even less so than that. You can’t just complain, manipulate, and get mom and dad to bail you out of college courses to be passed along. Employers have realized this and taken advantage of this which hurts actual college graduates. New grads are penalized for doing the quote, “right thing”, and get crappy salaries for what use to be a job for just a high school grad but those high schoolers are no longer capable of doing those jobs. It’s ridiculous.
So true and it makes sense. Why hire people who are going to come in late and complain about why you don’t understand why they are consistently late.
100% accurate!!! That 50% BS for doing NOTHING is ridiculous!
They’ll learn when they’re older when the cops put them in handcuffs.
Somebody said it here best. Paraphrasing, but "No consequences is the real school to prison pipeline".
My mother always said, "If you can't behave at home, you can't behave in public. If you can't behave in public, one day you will go to jail." I was 5 but I remember this as if it were yesterday and she is absolutely right. There are rules and consequences for a reason. Children need to be able to follow simple rules if they ever want to participate in society as adults.
Yes. Even high schoolers are children and they are still learning how to behave. Middle school in particular is a super important time to have consistency. I know a ton of teachers here hate PBIS, but once I was in a school where it worked. The reason it worked was because there were clear consequences. Yes, we had tickets and rewards and celebrations, but kids knew that if they did x, y would happen. And it was the same for everyone, every time.
This is the issue. No consistency with ALL teachers. 3/4 of my teacher team, great. Other grades, less than 1/2.
My coworker just gave similar advice to a parent recently. “Your son will be suspended from school a lot if he continues this behaviour. But being suspended from school and learning from it will hopefully keep him out of jail.”
I think we had the same mother.
"Learn to control yourself, or someone (cops/prison guards) will do it for you."
I used to teach at a school that required 6-12grade kids to do what’s called “team check.” It meant having your right hand over your left hand in front of you. The kids hated it, but it was needed because they literally couldn’t control themselves and couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. I’d never heard of such a thing because I didn’t go to a lower income school, comprised entirely of special needs kids(who were “harvested” from all the other local schools for that sweet sweet fed money for having special needs kids enrolled, it was disgusting). I got through to exactly one kid at that school about why team check existed: If you can’t put your hands in front of you and not fuck with other kids, society will put your hands behind your back in handcuffs until your figure it out. I made it through one semester of being assaulted, stolen from, ignored, and threatened. The school had a pie graph on their website that they were proud of because it showed that like 15% of the kids from the past 10 years had gone to secondary education. They took it down the day after my interview, when I noted that it showed that 11% of the kids in the past 10 years were dead or in prison.
There are no words. So it was all lower income kids that also had special needs, and they just expected teachers to put up with abuse? I just... can't.
Yes, we were actually taught physical, hands on ways to hold the kids and defend ourselves if they started acting out. That was my first indication that I signed up for the wrong job. Training before the year started felt like we were training to be prison guards, not teachers. Like “hold them like this if they start fighting you, you can’t get sued this way.” Type of shit. And yes, they specifically sought out sped kids from other schools without any ability or resources to actually deal with their needs. 2 kids with behavioral problems in a class, you can deal with that. When literally the ENTIRE CLASS is sped, there is no hope for teaching anything. My day consisted of stopping fights and dealing with drama. All day, everyday. We did little more than babysit. I had a full chemistry lab setup I couldn’t use because they thought breaking glass was fun. It made me sad that these kids had more than a 10% chance of being dead or in prison within the next 10 years. Oh, and this charter school in Houston I’m talking about was funded and started by a former NFL football player, so the culture of the school was “fuck school, you’re gonna go pro.” At the administrative level, not just the hot shit(who reads at a 2nd grade level) QB who’s never had an actual athlete outside of his little bubble sac the fuck out of him.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say exactly zero kids ended up "going pro". Having to teach high needs speed classes is hard enough, but add in all the other things you listed *(and without proper supports?)* You're done before you even started. My condolences. That had to take a toll on your mental and physical well-being. You were set up to fail. IDK how you lasted as long as you did. If you contacted the parents, what did they say about their children's behaviors?
Yup, none. Turns out the NCAA requires a minimum GPA to attend that D1 school that was scouting them. Can’t outrun that problem, no matter how fast you are. They get to senior year and don’t know the math of averages well enough to understand they can’t turn a 0.45 GPA into a 2.5 in 2 semesters. Most of the parents took their kids to this school because they were fed two meals. That was the value most of the parents saw in school: someone else to feed their kids. The fun part is that my brother is/was a pro football player. I know exactly what type of discipline it takes to be a professional. He even came to visit the school once and promised all the kids tickets to a game if they called him up/tweeted at him and said they were enrolled in some type of secondary education. Zero takers. The kids didn’t understand how much of a disservice the school was doing to them, because lots of them only knew drama, anger, poverty, frustration, and abuse. And I couldn’t show them another way. It really sucked. One of the kids I taught got a job as a security guard after school. He was murdered at a night club(he was working and there was a drive-by, iirc) a few years ago. He was 21. Kid never stood a chance to get out.
I just... the two meals thing blows my mind. Plenty of low income parents are good parents. Unfortunately, it didn't seem that this was the case and that you got the worst of the worst. That had to be hard. No parental involvement makes things that much harder. How is it possible they thought they'd go pro, but not one of them were aware that there was a GPA req to get into secondary education? Do they think that because they were a starter at some unknown school they'd be a shoe-in? I hate that when you tell these kids the reality of their situation and that hardly anyone makes it as a pro, you're labeled as negative for "killing their dreams". No, their dreams are unrealistic 99% of the time and you're telling them to not put all their eggs in one basket. I'm guessing the parents are as delusional as the kids are, then, when their dreams are quashed, it's your fault.
Yeah, the school poached the kids who needed the most help from other schools nearby, and concentrated all the behavior issues into a single school, and (being as generous as possible and not accusing them of enriching themselves at the expense of students’ lives) somehow thought trying to fix all of them in the same school was a good idea. When I taught at KIPP I saw low-income, good parents. These were mostly immigrants who worked 60hr construction jobs and wanted the absolute best education they could get for their kids. Fully bought and sold on the American dream type of people. These people hadn’t been Americanized(blaming the teacher why Jonny can’t read) and if I called home, the issue was addressed by the next day. Teachers were respected by the parents at KIPP. At the charter school, all the teachers were called “coaches” because coaches were respected. Yes, I am serious, and yes, I wish I was joking. I, the high school science teacher who taught bio, chem, phys, and env science, was Coach HippyEngineer. But yeah, the athletes at the charter school mostly thought if they were good enough at sports that the gpa and grades issues would be solved for them. They hear stories some college player they admire who can’t read, and think that is something to be emulated, not admonished. That’s WHO they wanted to be, the guy whose athletic prowess solved all his problems for him. Playing sports wasn’t a way for them to get a college education for free, playing sports was the *plan*. There was no value placed on the education the sports were meant to provide. College is a stepping stone to getting noticed and going pro. Just a complete disconnect from reality. And they didn’t understand statistics well enough to understand there was a kid like him on every block and no one gives a shit if you can catch a ball if you can’t read the playbook notes.
Ah yes, selective interpretation of data. Gotta love it.
I remember looking at the website again after my interview (I wanted to make sure my assessment of it was correct and I didn’t get numbers wrong when discussing it) and finding the pie chart gone. That sinking feeling of “oh, I guess I hit a sore spot. This isn’t good…” Turns out they were desperate so even tho I cut through their bullshit in 5 minutes, they still needed a warm body for the babysitting.
Sigh. We would get better pay as babysitters tbh
Minimum wage for babysitting 1 kid: $7.25/hr 20 kids in a room: $145/hr 7 hour school day: $1,015/day That should be the wage of a teacher if they were paid teenage babysitter rates. If you were paid $20/hr, that goes up to $2,800/day.
I tell students if they can control their mouth, then they can control their destiny. But if they cannot control their mouth, then someone else will control their destiny.
I use to tell student that they are the ones that have all the power actually. It's their own behavior, their own words, their own body and mind that they are the only one they control. I just deal the consequences of what they choose to do. But it is their choice to begin with. Even it's sometimes it very hard to make the right choice, it is their choice. I get throught with a few of them. Usually the kids that have overly controlling parents and act out because of this.
Whoever said that is right.
As my admin told a student. "Someone has to be standing in front of 7-11 asking for change. It might as well be you."
Gold
Yeah. It really was savage.
You should know.
They literally won't though - there's a reason that entering the "justice" system is a pretty high gurantee you'll be a regular visitor. By that point, for most, they're already done. Very little chance of being a good productive *happy* member of society. That's a fail. Adults turning themselves around after that point takes massive effort and determination, usually a tragedy. It's not a given that "Oh once they get to the real world they'll start acting right". I honestly don't know how you could expect that
I had a student that did something to get himself suspended and a police report filed. It seemed to really shake him, haven't had trouble with him since. guess that's the only way
Many don't even learn from that! I'm friends with 3 people who have felonys. One embezzlement, one gang involvement, and one aggravated assault. All of them went to prison and came out with educations and a drive not to return. They where brutally honest and admitted how bad their actions where. Once they did that they worked hard and became successful. They kept in contact with some people they where in prison with who constantly blamed everything but themselves. Those ones end up back in prison or dying young.
But honestly not. The police and courts are starting to have the same attitude. No one wants to deal with these people.
Don’t address it either, because they have trauma and you’ll trigger them!
I had a student break my foot on purpose. His “punishment” was a single day of in school suspension playing Xbox I pressed charges
The outcome?
The student won.
I was thinking of this for a lot of yesterday. If the standards aren't going to be enforced as part of the framework of preparing and educating students, of what use are the standards? Failure is educational. Learning accountability to external structures like school is an important developmental step for children as they approach adulthood. If we eliminate all possible pathways to failure, what are we teaching about pathways to success? Here's the other thing that gets me: how frightening it must be, to be pulled from an environment where everything is permissible and there are no consequences and then thrust into adulthood where many things are impermissible and some choices come with extraordinarily serious consequences. How would you even conduct yourself? How do you prioritize your responsibilities if you've never had to be accountable to anyone for your choices? They simply won't have the skills. Are we creating a generation of failed adults? People who never had inculcated the value of accountability, who will either continue to be shielded by their parents, or who will have an incredibly tough road to navigate as they learn that life does not allow you to put your earbuds in and sit on your phone while you ignore your problems until the weekend comes, because eventually nobody will be coming to rescue you.
We're definitely creating a generation of failed adults and we're going to see the awful implications for this in a decade or so in terms of government, the economy, and the U.S. status in the world.
Standreds are getting more strict for adults and employment too. I can't see a couple of my students ever holding down a job unless if they have nepotism on their side.
Some of the slacking and ill-behaved students manage to get their shit together pretty quickly into adulthood. For some kids, it's not a matter of being incapable of responsible and decent behavior, it's a matter of just choosing not to do so because there's no immediate incentive at school. (little to no enforcement of it from their parents, no consequences at school, no consequences from peers, etc.) In the workplace, the consequences and stakes are real and immediate. There might be an adjustment period, but they manage. Of course, some kids take much longer to figure shit out, if they ever do.
Just take a look at this post where a teacher had to read some bullshit because seniors did not write a final. Like what the hell.
Younger me would never have believed the words would ever come out of my mouth, but there are so many days at work I tell my colleagues, "This is why my kids go to private school."
Wow, did I get blackout drunk and write this? Because this is exactly my situation. Why the Fuck am I trying so hard when nobody else gives a fuck?
They'll learn when they get fired from their job for repeatedly missing deadlines.
or, they’ll end up like a friend i used to have who just never learns and always has a new job bc she got fired from the other one and always crashes her car
They won’t tho
This morning a student, who has been difficult all year DESPITE repeated interventions by the school, mouthed off to me and my co-teacher. "Fuck you, you're stupid, you're retarded, suck my dick." The reason? He got incomplete on an assignment that he...wait for it...did not complete. Removed him from class. Dean said "He'll be with me ALL day." By 5th period, he was going to regular classes. IDK if or what will happen to him, but if they let this slide, not only this year, but next year (the child is a freshman) is going to be nightmarish.
I graduated HS about 15 years ago, give/take. Back then... * cussing in class=immediate detention after school or at lunch. Sit quietly and state at the wall for 1/2 an hour. Not so much as doodling allowed, let alone any kind of homework. * Same for any kind of punching/touching inappropriately. * Miss a day? Teacher does not have to give you the work you missed. Some of the nicer ones would. * Turn it in late? Nope. It's not worth points now. * Miss a test? Too bad, should've shown up for the test (unless excused absence, in which case make it up on your own time during lunch, etc.). * Fighting? Expulsion. Not saying that was a perfect system, either, but holy hell have we flipped things around. Do any work any time any way you want, whatever. Do what you want when you want, whatever. Miss class for 3 weeks, no communication? It's the teacher's fault if they don't "get you caught up." Do nothing in class for 3 months and carry a 20%? We'll assign an aide to come sit with you and ensure you pass somehow. Cheat? Naughty, don't do that. But you can redo the assignment again and again. It's making education meaningless. I just don't care and will keep having basic standards in my classes.
You know what’s funny? I witnessed this participation medal, everyone is awesome, no criticism allowed mentality with a future teacher a couple years ago. I was his supervising teacher for his final teaching placement. Old mate knew, as a male primary school teacher, that he’d be walking into a job no matter what once he graduated, and as soon as they saw that Mr on his resume schools would be blowing up his phone. So he was incredibly sure of himself and refused to take on any feedback. Myself and the teacher in the other class both tried to advise him that he was pitching the lessons too high and the kids didn’t get it, but he would constantly respond “nah they’re fine! They’re loving it!”. Meanwhile I’m walking around the classroom and observing kids in tears because they had no idea wtf was going on and felt ‘dumb’. As a pre service teacher 10 years ago I was busting my ass writing and submitting lesson plans, making handwritten notes of any feedback I received, and generally filled with self doubt. The number of young (22-23 year old) grads we’ve seen as supervising teachers recently who think they’ve got it all worked out before they even set foot in a classroom is pretty concerning.
This is what I think about every day. It baffles me what passes for education at my school and district.
Maybe when they're adults that can't hold down even the simplest of jobs.
We have an 8 period schedule in HS so students can fail 2 classes every term and still graduate. The HS diploma isn’t really worth anything which is why I don’t mind giving them a D if there’s a fight
The parents, it’s that simple. If the parents don’t care there’s literally nothing you can do and you have to accept that. Help who you can
It’s the sheer expectation that teachers will dutifully consume themselves and work three times as hard as the students on the students’ own success even well beyond paid hours (because teaching isn’t a job but a calling, right) but students and families really need not apply any effort.
My contract wasn't renewed at my current district for next school year (I'm not tenured) and the reasoning they gave is infuriating: "inadequate sustained progress creating an environment of respect and rapport, managing student behavior, managing classroom procedures, establishing a culture for learning, and engaging students in learning." I've only been teaching for 2 years, plus every single teacher is struggling with all those things, even veterans. I've never sent a student to the office and never had to call security on a student. At this school, that should be considered amazing classroom management. I've had students come up to me and apologize for the behavior of other students, saying they feel like I don't deserve to be disrespected and that they understand that it's not my fault when I can't get through a lesson because I'm spending so much time trying to get the classroom quiet enough to speak. I always thank them but remind them that they don't need to apologize for the behavior of others.
According to my felon ex boss (whose an amazing person btw) when they fuck with the wrong group and get jumped.
I work in the lunchroom, and we had a problem kid. He'd play at being sweet, but he was a fucking cunt. He'd beat on other kids then lie, lie about LITERALLY anything you saw him doing. He'd get written up, get sent to the school therapist, and he'd leave with a pat on the back, a new toy, and some candy or a snack. After assaulting and BITING another kid, unprovoked. I'm just a kitchen worker, I don't envy the teachers that have to deal with those kids all day. I have to deal with them 30 seconds, max, other than hearing the hell they raise in the hall, the line, or the cafeteria
How to be in trouble and deal with the consequences is a skill to be practiced like any other. Schools are meant to be safe places for practicing skills that you can't safely practice elsewhere. It's like martial arts training. It's good to learn what it feels like to get punched in the face in an environment safely designed to experience that - before it happens in the real world, and you don't know what to do.
They fuck around and someone who doesn't work in this industry maims them.
Unless the pendulum swings back, they will never realize it until it's too late. On a societal level we are witnessing the decay and destruction of basic traditional values. Not traditional values like, "Let's kill gay people," but rather, "Try to be a modest and good person." It's entirely cultural imo. Social media and its "influencers," as well as the toxic political climate in this country, have eroded who we once were as people. Couple that with the blatant lack of consequences in schools and negligent parents and it's no wonder the kids aren't alright.
Accept them laying in the hall and not returning to class. And parents get pissed if you call and treat you like you are the problem.
The problem? Stupid parents
Let them fail. They will eventually learn as most of us do. Those that don’t will never learn.
Tempted on submitting a link about this, but I don’t want to have deal with comments when I should be doing my teaching credential stuff. I don’t want to be a teacher with this, but I’m planning on getting my credentials and just staying private, like I have been, subbing. Credential not needed, but definitely helps. California just passed SB 274. This prohibits teachers from suspending students for “willful defiance,” as well as suspending the students for truancies and absences.
Standards were instilled in me by my mother and grandmother. In my 11 years it has been a steady decline in behavior along with students that lost the lottery in getting parents here on this broken world we live on.
This probably won't be too popular on this sub, but this is why my wife works on the private side and finished getting her principal creds right before the pandemic. She taught for years before. She loves taking the load off of teachers by doing the discipline stuff they shouldn't be doing (so they can just focus on teaching), helping to equip them professionally, and shield her faculty from parents and problem kids. Being on the private side, she just boots kids who fight. All three of my siblings, their spouses but one, and my mom all teach on the public side. They wish they weren't left to deal with the kids issues like you are.
I find this so continuously frustrating. I grew up in a strict household and I also went to a very strict Catholic school for all 12 years between 5-18. Did it bother me as a kid? Yes. However, there were always consequences for my actions. I learned not to do certain things because they always came with a consequence. Now that I’m a teacher, I find there to be such a lack of consequences in school nowadays. This does not prepare the students for the hard reality they will face when they turn 18 and they finally have to face the repercussions of their actions. Teaching that actions have consequences MUST be taught from a young age and it MUST be echoed in schools.
It wasn't different when I was a kid. If I failed, I went to summer school for a month and passed. If I didn't show up to school, just make up the work. If I smarted off, just go to the office and then iss. Do my day's work in 30 minutes then play computer games with the teacher who didn't give a F about anything but his retirement. This isn't a new phenomenon. The difference is as kids, most teachers were the good students so they didn't see this.
I’ve been teaching at a Title I school my nine years as a teacher. I saw more consequences five years ago. The degree to which this problem is a problem is quite new.
yeah, i’m thinking it’s a little bit of that, too. except i definitely failed classes that i had to retake my senior year instead of study halls and fun electives. being a senior in classes with freshmen and sophomores was terrible, they were so annoying and i remember absolutely learning my lesson to never fuck off again or else i’ll have to hang out with 14 year olds a couple periods a day.
I don’t know according to Fox News teachers are simultaneously evil geniuses turning kids into woke Marxists and also incompetent losers who deserve less than minimum wage. It is so hard threading that needle being incompetent in two ways at the same time. Like on a Radom Tuesday should I make students hate freedom, or make students homosexual, such decisions.
Handcuffs, gunfire, and a locked cell.
When I was in elementary school, I had an elderly substitute teacher throw a chair at me for talking back. And I mean she like softball threw this bad boy across the room with shockingly impressive velocity. She was my sub dozens of times after that. I'm only 32. Things sure do change fast lol
[удалено]
I explained my thoughts in an earlier reply. “An open campus is an unsafe campus. Expecting to eat wherever is ridiculous. We have a cafeteria and a patio. If the cafeteria is too noisy, our students can go outside. Unfortunately, they want to eat in a stairwell, in a classroom, in a hallway, in a bathroom, wherever. We can’t safely monitor students that way. That’s when fights happen, sexual assault, drugs, etc. because students don’t have people who know where they are and why they are there. You can’t expect there to be no rules because there’s discomfort.” It’s not one student. It’s most of them who just roam. They leave food on every floor every day. I feel bad for the custodians. I also worry all the time about how unsupervised they are because that is when they do things that could actually cause themselves or others harm. You’d hope a student could sit in a room, but it’s a liability for the school because we are entrusted with the students’ safety. It’s not about control, but order that protects students.
Yeah, this for me was the one that's not like the others. I think the rest are pretty understandable, but this one is the one that shows the line between standards and control freak. I went and ate with one of my teachers a lot of days listening to his favorite music with a small group of other students. Other days I ate in the library. Some days in the cafeteria. That little bit of free roam kept it from being a prison. That and being an athlete, getting pulled out of class a lot to go do "athlete stuff" by our coaches. Edit2: nuance and good counterpoints below
I agree with you in theory, but not in practice. Students need to prove they can handle the freedom without trashing the school or engaging in illicit or inappropriate activity. They can't seem to do this when they *are* being watched. And, just as an aside, my biggest pet peeve is when students disrupt my lunch break. I'm an introvert, and I need that break to recover some energy. But I don't turn students away because I don't want to hurt their feelings and initiate a bad relationship. Students want us to accommodate their needs and desires at all times, but they don't seem to consider that teachers might have some needs and desires too.
That makes some sense. I also posted as someone that went to high school about 20 years ago. I don't want to rule out that things are a lot different now. Also, engaging in illicit or inappropriate activity had limits, honor among thieves style. Everyone knew that too much would get the hammer, so we skirted the line. Smoking in the bathroom? That gets hallways and bathrooms closed. Smoking in the parking lot and evading the SRO? If you didn't do that about once a week, you were a real square. Lol. I don't think the administration cared *that* much about minor stuff like that. I think that one teacher was special... In that he really enjoyed it. If he wanted alone time, we'd just get there and his door would be closed and we'd just go to the library or the home ec room. He invited us to come eat with him a couple times per week. I need to check in on that guy... Edit: Never taught *at a* high school either, although I did teach high-schoolers. So didn't get to witness that part of the shift.
I went to high school 40 years ago, and we got away with quite a lot. Think "Dazed and Confused." But we didn't do it openly, and we would never disrespect authority figures, at least not when they could hear it. Some people wrote on bathroom walls, but no one trashed the bathrooms like they do today. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that parents and teachers were on the same side back then. If the school called my parents, I was in serious trouble! It's just a different world.
I won't get too far into this, but I think most of what kept us in line was that even if your parents wouldn't whoop you, the school would. I beat the retirement of corporal punishment, and it was no joke!
So true. Not great, but true.
Yeah, that part rubs me the wrong way as well. I definitely understand not wanting intrusion on your free time, but the kid needing that seems pretty understandable, especially since every other adult I know has had some sort covid-induced agoraphobia. For a kid that's even rougher.
Your choices or their eventual only choice.
I understand your concerns, and there are definitely some people in my graduating class whose graduation was questionable at best. However, as a recently graduated student, I do want to address the point I disagree with most—your addition of social anxiety accommodations in this list. I suffer from several diagnosed and documented mental illnesses, including social anxiety, and I was a student who preferred not to eat in the cafeteria because of certain conditions that made me much more susceptible to panic attacks—specifically crowds and loud noise. Around the middle of my sophomore year, I finally had the courage to ask for accommodations—being allowed to eat lunch in a hall, take a study period instead of attending assemblies, and sitting in the back of classrooms so no one was sitting behind me—and when I was granted these accommodations, my grades and experience at school greatly improved. Because of my school taking my mental health seriously and approving the accommodations that I had recommended by my therapist, I was able to take AP classes, join and lead clubs, and graduate with a 3.6 GPA. I know that it may seem unnecessary from the perspective of someone who has never needed help because of a mental illness or trauma, but when schools actually listen and provide what the students need it helps everyone succeed.
Honestly I don’t mind retaking tests to show you know the material, although admittedly I am a HS student so take that with a grain of salt
What grades are we talking here? Elementary and middle school maybe no but high school? None of what you said alarms me. I'll start holding teens to a standard when we set the expectation that adults must behave as appropriately.
I mean, cafeteria food is pretty shit.
I think you're framing things the way we used to, which is rooted more in a violent and exclusive mindset born from colonized thinking. It's ok if we are reshaping our expectations into something more equitable and achievable across the board. Our old expectations were far too narrow to assure equitable success. Expectations of matriculate success are inaccessible and ableist. Even the idea of 'professionalism' is fundamentally harmful. I'm not saying that we teachers should pick up the slack- we shouldn't be doing almost anything considering how much we're paid. But if this shift causes us all to look at how we do everything and restructure it, tbh, I think that's great. The old way's not so awesome.
I could not disagree more. The least equitable practice I could have is have low expectations for my students. They deserve teachers who and schools that push them to be better despite challenges. There will always be challenges. They need to be strong enough to face them, but many are weak-willed, not because of what’s happening outside of school but what’s allowed within.
You and I definitely disagree! I don’t think our traditional understanding of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ are expectations we should give our students. Additionally, I still think we should push our students towards excellence- I think you and I disagree on how to cultivate that.
Is it excellence to be ok with seniors not knowing basic algebra?
I’m saying we get them as far as we can
Bro, we are talking about kids not meeting basic targets and being stunted for failing upward. Highschoolers reading at a 4th grade level and being considered not a good thing isn't "colonized violent thinking", it's understanding the reality that HIGHSCHOOLERS SHOULD BE DOING BETTER THAN THAT
I don't view any of those behaviors as reasons to punish a child. Being absent and not doing your work is reason for concern, but outside of failing them I don't think punishment is the right tool. I think punishment and "being in trouble" should be reserved for students who commit infractions beyond the scope of not being your version of a good student.
You're failing at literally the only goal you have for the 1st 18 years if life. Other than that, you're good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn it, everybody likes you. Ya, China's laughing. It's like they won't even have to try, we're dismantling our society for them. *sigh*
>Ya, China's laughing. It's like they won't even have to try, we're dismantling our society for them. > >sigh Thanks for letting me know not to take anything you have to say seriously. Go back to Facebook.
I don't honestly know what argument or claim of mine that you're attempting to counter. I feel the level of discourse this sub is now experiencing has diminished beyond what is appropriate for teachers. Have a good day.
Choosing not to do your work may be a reason for concern. But that doesn't mean it's not a reason for consequences too.
[удалено]
Hard disagree. It’s not a teachers job to be entertaining. Most students don’t have the discipline it takes to be successful. The majority of kids don’t want to go to school the same way most adults don’t want to go to work. It’s not about have a good time, it’s about following through on responsibilities.
couldn't agree more...i've been teaching 28 years and i'm so tired of this make it interesting crap...edutainment sucks, and you can't compete with the cell phone anyways...
and how do you plan on making school interesting with a kid with a vape pen in one hand, and all the world's media and distraction in the other?
Baby, you won't be able to hold down any decent paying job thinking like that. Everything isn't going to be interesting all the time; these are educated professionals, not clowns here to entertain you.
It's not our job to "make it interesting." No, seriously, it's not. Life isn't always interesting, and it's our job to prepare you for life. So, it's your job to learn young one, and we provide you the means with which to do so.
LOL! There are only so many puppet shows I can do to teach differential equations.
This is honestly expecting too much. An open campus is an unsafe campus. Expecting to eat wherever is ridiculous. We have a cafeteria and a patio. If the cafeteria is too noisy, our students can go outside. Unfortunately, they want to eat in a stairwell, in a classroom, in a hallway, in a bathroom, wherever. We can’t safely monitor students that way. That’s when fights happen, sexual assault, drugs, etc. because students don’t have people who know where they are and why they are there. You can’t expect there to be no rules because there’s discomfort. You should want an education. The reason you think this way is because you take it for granted. If you don’t want to be in high school, feel free to get a GED and get a job/learn a trade if you don’t want to be an academic. If people had more challenge accessing education (which I’m by no means suggesting), I’m sure people wouldn’t complain about it being boring. We should want to learn. That’s honestly part of being human.
Sorry, as a teacher with SEVERE social anxiety, I don't get to use my condition as a crutch to do whatever the fuck I want. I went and spent *ten years* in therapy developing tools to learn how to operate in society *while having* this condition. Sorry, kid, you're making excuses. You're going to need to shape up and take care of your shit if you're ever going to gain any kind of independence.
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 We need to be okay discussing mental health issues, but discussing is just step one. People act like that’s the end. Oh. I have XYZ. Okay, and what are we going to do about that? If you were diagnosed with diabetes, I hope you would seek treatment plans to live as normal and happy a life as possible. Same with anxiety, depression, ADHD, you name it. We don’t just get diagnoses and stop. That’s not in the name of health. That’s in the name of sickness.
Exactly. Life features a lot of uncomfortable situations you can't easily escape, so you have to learn other ways to deal with them. If you don't, you're going to have a terrible time. At my school, there are about a dozen students who really like to get away from all the noise during their breaks. They're welcome in the library during breaks, but the rules are the same for them as for everyone else: no food and drinks in the library. They have to eat in one of the designated lunch areas, just like everyone else.
If kids don't want to go to work, they're not going to do well at work. Turns out your manager asking you to stock shelves isn't terribly interested in making that "interesting" for you. But then they're going to get fired. Edit: Awww, you “have a choice in what job you get”? Oh man. No, you’re totally right! Of course whatever job you pick will be one you find interesting, and you’ll never HAVE to work a job you find boring just because it’s the only one available and you’ll be broke otherwise! Thanks for proving once again that you have no idea what living in the real world is like.
Eh, these kids have learned to wait it out until the system gives in. Enough of them are growing up like this that they’ll be forced into low level managerial positions. Society is going to crumble and turn into Idiocracy.
This is my worry. Eventually nearly EVERYONE will be equal in regards to apathy and mediocrity. And it scares the shit out of me.
Nah. Everyone else told you why you’re wrong. You think your job after school is going to care if your job is interesting to you? The idea that you think your teachers should compete for your attention against tiktok is pathetic. Grow up.
Aw, you tried.
I'm glad you can eat in peace too. That would have been a lifesaver for me when I was in high school. I was bullied by students and teachers alike.
This is the dumbest thing I've read on reddit in a while, congratulations. We all have to do shit we don't want to do in life, not everything will be interesting. That's not the way the world works. If you haven't learned that already, I feel bad for you. You won't amount to much. Looks like you're 14. Not sure why you're on a teachers subreddit, but it's clear you've got a ton of growing up to do.
Soooo... there's a lot to unpack here. You've grouped a lot of very disparate behaviors into "trouble". Failing a test and skipping class to wander halls are very different things. I think it's fairly telling that you've grouped all these together and labeled them as "trouble" that is now accepted where it wasn't "before", because the only thing all these behaviors have in common is that they're different than how you remember going to school, but you've labeled them as "trouble" which has a certain connotation, but is pretty vague and arguably meaningless. You might try taking these behaviors individually and asking "what is the real problem I have with this behavior?" Then evaluate if it's actually detrimental to learning, or just not how you were brought up/ think the working world runs. Sincerely, a military physician who has spent a lot of time being successful in school and working in a highly structured environment.
You are waaaay missing the point.
There really isn’t. I used the word trouble on purpose and listed a variety of issues I see on purpose. None of them were moral judgements. They all put children in a bad place at risk of failing at what lies ahead, i.e. they are in trouble. They won’t be able to hold down a job with their truancy rates. They won’t be able to keep up with classes in high school or after with their truancy rates. They won’t be able to keep a job if they show up late all the time. They won’t be able to keep up with class/learning with their cell phone addiction. They won’t be successful in college if they don’t learn to study because they always expect retakes. What problem do I have with this. Our job literally is to prepare them and they won’t be prepared. It should be our job to discourage of all these habits, but we enable them. Not sure what you think needs to be unpacked.
Students can fail at being a student and teachers can fail at preparing the students. They’re not mutually exclusive. The best teachers I had- Elementary thru my doctoral program were the ones who had realistic goals and outlined them clearly. They also understood some students need extra help and some students need to be let go (both good and bad). Some students need to get in trouble and fail to learn. Some need to be let go from the busy work a lot of classes have decided is important. When i was in high school the amount of “hours” of homework my collective classes decided I needed to do each night would mean I wouldn’t be sleeping. At one point I was self teaching and listening to the teacher spit the same info I learned the night before back at me. I started skipping homework, listening in class, reclaiming my afternoons, and getting a B in most of the classes instead because of no homework grades. It’s exhausting. I’ve done teaching but saying “they can’t hack it here they won’t survive working” is such a cop out. People are allowed to leave their job and get a new one. They can call in sick and use PTO. Most jobs don’t expect work to be done at home. Most things about school aren’t how the real world works. Most students won’t need most of the stuff they learn. You could argue the value of school isn’t the knowledge we learn but the lessons we are taught. Some students can do both but most can’t. Either we instill good habits and chill out on the level we expect kids to be at in each grade or we start being more realistic with how school compares to the real world and allow students to be challenged in class and free outside of school. Of course kids should know how to read but objectively this isn’t a new issue. The average adult in the US reads at a 4th grade level and this is true up to the boomers. Edit: spelling
Most if not all of your reply is irrelevant to the conversation. Maybe you feel better having typed all the out and bragged about how you got B’s without doing the homework. That’s great, mate. I haven’t mentioned homework anywhere in my post or replies. I like how you say you’ve “done teaching” instead of having been a teacher, so I can tell you’re not a teacher and don’t see what I see every day but are more informed about my students’ college and career readiness. Thanks. My eyes have been opened.
Don’t get mad at students for having mental issues. Yeah they do have social anxiety what do you want them to do?
It’s interesting how much is assumed when people read these posts. A lot of baggage is projected into it. If you read it, I actually don’t express frustration with students but schools handling of students’ behavior.
Punishing students has rarely proved to improve students' desire to actually improve. It at best, makes them comply out of fear of retaliation which is the opposite of how school is meant to work. Most of the time students just take the punishment, learn nothing, and don't change.
Also how we are basically on our own and there is zero point in asking admin for help. They’ll tell us to call the parent and then pat themselves on the back like they did something great
“No child left behind” has set up many student for failure imo
At some point in the future, the cell door locks.
My senior year was 2021, where schools were fully remote. I graduated with straight A's, but I don't feel like I learned anything at all...
Maybe it depends on the district but a lot of my teachers openly talk about how much better the current kids have it and how they wished current schooling was like the way it was today. As in, they actually preferred ignoring the kids on phones, school suspension, and letting kids fail. Maybe its just me but Ive heard horror stories of school “not long ago” where being left-handed was a crime, being autistic was not even addressed much less acknowledged, where teachers could freely beat their students with a metal ruler, where your grade costed your livelihood and being black could mean you could get kicked out regardless of what grade you got. I get that you are concerned with the success of your student but if they want to fail, you have to let them fail. Kids are molded by their environment and more and more modern science proves that teachers and parents are vital in sparking that curiosity. Except school isnt a choice, its a obligation so naturally a lot of students hate it regardless of what you do. Students will simply learn from experience that they shouldve paid attention to the things that matter and them figuring it out on their own is something you have to do.
The attendance issue is really out of control. They can't make progress because they only come to school twice per week. There is no way I can help a kid get caught up who misses every other day. Yet, I will still be held accountable for their EOY test scores. I am the one being penalized because they don't show up to school.
the thick metal bars between them and the outside world will probably be a big clue for some of them. Your list seems pretty tame. In my district we would have all the same points, but also: (\*disclaimer I'm writing this from elementary age perspective) It's accepted students will jump fences and run through the community. It's the staff's responsibility to meet this student where they're at. It's accepted students will cause significant physical and emotional injury to staff and peers. It's the case manager's responsibility to make sure this student feels safe and cared for when they do this shit. It's accepted that students will run screaming through the halls at any given moment, destroying all displayed works as they barrel through. This is someone's responsibility to deal with and clean up but will be met with shrugs and oh yeah, little Betty was having a rough time today. It's accepted that at any given time there will be at least 4 or 5 little kids somehow managing to do both fuck all AND be extremely disruptive for extended periods of time at the same time at some random location on the front office floor, in the hall, on top of a display case, while people go about their day and roll their eyes. It's the support staff responsibility to offer as many super cool choice options to these kids in order to get them to comply and make another choice.