A Different Approach to High School Detention

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
sigh

But, like **Argent **says, it seems to me that it would be great to get the troublemakers in contact with the grunge and sweat contingent. Janitors do very hard, but very respectable work. For some students, it would be a deterrent and might stop them from getting future detentions. (More of a deterrent than an hour of navel gazing or busy work, anyway.) For others, a possible career path.

It’s obviously the sort of plan that would take hard work and foresight to implement, including contract talks with the janitors, rewrites to the student handbook and policies, and perhaps even parental permission for a few years until the community accepted it as normal. In the meantime, there’s a dozen other more pressing issues on the principal’s plate, so something like this would never see the light of day. It’s a shame we’ve created a system that makes it so hard to do right by kids and so easy to just warehouse them for an hour after school.
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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.

22

[QUOTE=MaxTheVool]
Using pen and paper, I got as far as 17^8, which equals 6,975,757,441. So all I have to do is square that, then multiply by 17 one more time.
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Actually, as you’re doing it by long arithmetic it’s actually easier - less error-prone - if you do it the ‘long’ way.

23

[QUOTE=DWMarch]
I haven’t read the thread past this point so someone may have mentioned this already but I don’t think this would ever work. Up here in BC, if this policy was put in place there would be an instant strike. The work you describe is usually done by a well-paid member of a powerful labour union who makes good money to do these tasks. Take it away from them and they will respond immediately, with enough force to grind the education system to a screeching halt.

I agree it’s a great idea, but there’s no way it would fly here.
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Put them in charge of supervising the kids. They still get the pay and don’t have to do the work.

24

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.

25

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!

26

. . . This thread isn’t about porn at all, is it? :frowning:

Careful with your thread titles, Sieg! :mad:

27

[QUOTE=Clothahump]
Put them in charge of supervising the kids. They still get the pay and don’t have to do the work.
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IIRC the typical union would rather have more dues paying members doing said work rather than the kids.

28

[QUOTE=Siege]
What do you think?
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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.

29

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
What’s dentention for (besides getting the “bad” kids out of the teacher’s hair)? It’s given because the student has taken up the classroom’s time. So that student should give time back, if not to that particular classroom, then to the school. Scrub floors, clean chalkboards, polish Quidditch statues, grade papers (for another class, obviously), reshelf library books, pick up trash outside, empty wastepaper baskets - there’s endless repetitive, boring or backbreaking tasks that need to be done at all schools.
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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.