It would also require firing all of our janitors and hiring new ones that see their first job as educators, not custodians. We have “community service” at our school. It’s a joke, because the janitors (rightfully) have no desire to come up with tasks for the kids to do, nor do they want the kids getting in the way of the routine that they perfected years ago and which isn’t going to change. And I can’t blame them for that: kids have to be taught to do anything, and it takes more time to teach them than to just do the job–especially when it’s a job you’ve been doing for 20 years and can do completely on autopilot.
Now, I’d love it if they would use the kids to do more than the bare-minimum job they do (my classroom gets mopped in August and December, that’s it. I do all the dusting myself), but that’s what we pay them for and that’s what they hired on for.
More broadly, we have found detentions almost impossible to have because so many kids don’t have any transportation other than the bus. Furthermore, if they don’t come to detention, all you can do is escalate it to in-school suspension, which some of the kids really prefer anyway. And then you are taking kids out of class, and while having the kids gone might be nice for the teachers, the kids really need to be in class–these are the kids that need every day of instruction if they are going to pass TAKS!
When it comes down to it, I control my class through sheer force of personality. If you have that, ANY system will work. If you don’t, no system will work very well.
Thanks for the replies, and my apologies for getting back to this thread earlier.
As I said, ideally, the task assigned to the student would match the student’s abilities and possibly the nature of the crime, so rather than, say assigning Kalhoun a fiendish math problem, she might be assigned an essay detailing who influenced, say Monet’s work or how patronage affected which artists survived and prospered.
For students who are in detention for destructive activity, making them work with the janitors sounds like a good idea, too, or find some other way to learn what goes into producing whatever they destroyed or damaged.
Anyway, this is all blue-sky philosophizing, but your comments have been interesting so far.
The daughter of a friend of mine told me that if a student gets detention, they are not allowed to do anything. They can’t do schoolwork, read…nothing. That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. When I got detention (way back when) we were assigned extra work!
I think it depends on the type of infraction. If it’s the usual unhurtful stuff I think somehting like this is good. It still robs the kids of the one thing they want: time with their friends.
In 5th grade I had a teacher who, for detention, gave us a writing assignment, like 500 words (maybe it was more) on Life Inside a Ping Pong Ball. Or Life Inside a Pencil Sharpener. And you kept coming back until you had something serious. Eventually, you forgot about the kids in the park and concentrated on the assignment. Pretty cool now that I think about it.
On the other extreme, when in junior high and we had study hall, which my particular session was presided over by the old-school gym teacher, he would have us stand for as long as possible with our arms extended with a book in each hand. When the books gor too heavy, he gave us magazines, then pencils. And there was no fucking around with theis guy. To make matters worse, he was beloved by parents.
This just opens the door to the argument that the class has taken up the student’s time by making him attend when he’d rather be doing something else. Perhaps his teachers should be required to give that time back by cleaning his room, alphabetizing his CDs, passing that Halo level he’s been stuck at, and so on.
