To be honest, it shouldn’t. That student can go home and talk to an admin or whatever.
A teacher who called a student a cunt should be punished, as should a teacher who is egging a student on. But a teacher who just fails to “deflate” the situation- it is a high stress situation and people won’t always make the best choices there.
The students were cheering the assault on their teacher and you are prone to blame the teacher. You seem like a very decent person. It is so easy to slip into a blame the teacher mode.
Remember, the teacher is legally responsible for everyone in that classroom; the student is not.
The student should be expelled for assault even if it’s shoving. The teacher could lose her or his job for shoving a student.
It was a problem to remove students from my classroom sometimes. I would send them to the office and they wouldn’t go. We didn’t have cell phones or classroom phones or classroom computers then to notify the office . I solved the problem by dragging the student’s desk into the hallway with the student in it.
I don’t know how much assaults on teachers happened when I was going through school in the Fifties. But it happened to me my second year of teaching in 1970. The students involved were trespassing from another school. The assault put me in the hospital for three days. The principal was not supportive then either even though it didn’t involve any of our students. It drew negative attention to the conditions at our school and made him look bad.
Agreed on all counts (although my high school was more mid-size than small).
The worst that ever happened at my school was some asshole who constantly pulled the fire alarm. Then one day the resident badass was expelled for something and the fire alarms magically stopped.
While schools aren’t completely safe, the idea that they’re teeming pits of bullies and badasses waiting to cause trouble at a moment’s notice is false too.
Total bullshit, a buddy of mine was one of those good Catholic boys who used to get his dick sucked by the good Catholic girls and it was so easy to poke holes in the stories that I stopped bothering after the third time he swore it happened.
Are overall teaching conditions (including benefits, support, victimhood, etc.) getting worse and worse? It seems that way to me, what with No Child Left Behind, decreased funding, and seemingly more and more school violence, but I really can’t tell if it’s just increased reporting of the bad or not…
In case you didn’t pick up on it, I’m also a teacher. I know about the stress of dealing with pubescent kids who don’t have a lot of guidance at home. I’ve also known teachers who crossed a lot of lines I wouldn’t.
If a kid started hitting me, I don’t think all of my kids would stand back and videotape it, cheer, etc. Somebody would try to stop it; some kid would run to the office or next door to get another teacher. But I have to admit, you never know when they might go into “Lord of the Flies” mode.
Here in Texas, some districts have “alternative certification,” which means that if you have a bachelor’s in a relevant field, but no cert, they’ll let you teach while you take night classes in education. There have always been bad teachers (as well as very good) but this is likely to increase the number of bad.
The idea that “anybody” can teach is laughable and frankly, offensive to many of us who chose it on purpose. Interfacing effectively with 30 kids in one classroom is not something everybody can do. Some come to the job with an agenda. They may see it was their personal fiefdom. Their discipline “style” may be to berate or ridicule the students, which gets results in the short-term. As I posted elsewhere, we had the students run out an alternative teacher—very capable in her field but not in teaching—in about four weeks.
I’d like to know more about the school and teacher in question. Maybe it’s an inner-city school with a bunch of gangs, a teacher’s worst nightmare. Or maybe they’re basically poor kids who are very teachable because they know an education could change their lives, but their teacher acted like a total Nazi. Again, that doesn’t justify what happened but it puts a different spin on the matter.
I hope the kid got punished severely for gross insubordination, but I doubt it.
Admin wants to play this patty-cake game with students. These days schools seem more reluctant to discipline, when students need it more than ever. Getting away with transgressions only makes them more bold.
Sorry to hear this and surprised that it went that way in 1970. God forbid the principal should be expected to provide a safe, secure learning environment, eh? I thought that back in the day, principals and teachers and parents stood together to educate the child. I guess that “day” was pre-1970. Now principals have one agenda, parents another, and teachers yet another…we’ve been divided for the students to conquer.
Oops, I forgot a major player: the state. When I moved to El Paso, one of the districts (Ysleta) came under fire from TEA.
Says Wikipedia:
During the 1990s, the district operated at state minimum achievement levels. Due to changes in leadership, the district turned itself around and in 1998 it emerged the first urban school district anywhere in the state to be named a “Recognized District” for student performance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test or TAAS. Ten district schools have been named National Blue Ribbon Schools while eight others are National Title One Distinguished Campuses.
Before leaving the area, I saw letters to the editor in the paper that basically said, “Why is it that our kids can pass the Texas test but don’t do well on SAT, ACT, etc.?”
Answer: they don’t correlate. These tests are supposed to ensure a “minimum” level of skills, not a college-bound curriculum. So, thanks for chasing your tail and jumping through the hoops…and good luck to you with that college thing! WTF?!
And btw, since I’m sure many or most of those reading this board aren’t teachers, the consequences of rating schools has only become worse. Now in Texas if the school persists in performing poorly, they can choose a different school. I guess we’re all supposed to emulate the “success” of Ysleta. IMO it’s a definite lurch toward a voucher system, which would make the debacle complete.
Well, back to the OP: maybe the teacher was trying to get the kids to pass so that they’ll do well on the marvelous state test or that her failure rates won’t be too high etc. Maybe she’d had problems with that kid before and met with the parents, who only enabled the kid by accusing the teacher of “picking on” the student. Maybe admin washed their hands of it, not wanting an angry parent at a school board meeting.
Hard to say, based on the evidence presented.
It’s a teacher’s job to make the best choices. Again, this situation may be exactly what it appears. I have no reason to believe it isn’t. But I will tell you, when you know one teacher that’s managed to be shoved or grabbed once every year or so, and you know that teacher is filled with contempt and antagonism towards every student on campus, you start to wonder if perhaps the teacher couldn’t learn to handle things differently.
For example, of the dozen or so cases like this I have seen, virtually every single one has come when a teacher has tried to physically take something from a student who wouldn’t voluntarily give it up–a cell phone or a hat or an earing. Most kids will let you snatch things out of their hands, but some kids have what’s basically a trigger about that, and they won’t let go, or they will grab your wrist or push you away. All you have to do in these cases is, instead of snatching, walk down to the office or the nearest vice principal and explain what happened, let them corral the kid and sit him in the office until he is bored enough to hand it over or a parent shows up–and then you punish him once for the contraband and once for the insubordination. No one is hurt, no one gets a criminal record or is sent to a useless, dangerous alternative school–it’s better for everyone. But the third time a given teacher tries to snatch something out of someone’s hand–after being told not to handle it that way–you start to feel that while the kid was wrong, the teacher was more wrong, because they should know better and here they have pushed this kid to a place they never had to be in, and once that kid has that record/goes to alternative school, the chances of him spending him life on the fringes of society go up considerably.
While I am sure there are admins out there that brush everything including felony assault under the rug, in my own experience, assault has always been taken seriously. The only teachers that complained they weren’t supported were the ones where there were real questions about the behavior of the teacher.
I googled Jolita Berry under news and got this:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-md.ci.violence13apr13,0,6500996.story
Yes, yes it does. And it’s frightening. I feel like as a married father of three that tries to do well by his woman and family that I’m swimming against the current of every possible bad influence and set of bad behaviors and examples imaginable.
One of my patients has PTSD after being physically and verbally assaulted by a child whom she was caring for as part of her job. She was punched and kicked black and blue.
She’s terrified to be at work, genuinely scared for her life and everyone she speaks at to work can’t understand what could possibly be scary about kids.
Yup…that helps. :rolleyes:
Sometimes all the de-escalation and self-defence training in the world will not protect you from an assault if that person chooses to assault you. The least you should be able to expect is support from your colleagues, employers and the law, and you should not be forced into close proximity with your attacker on a daily basis.
Why would a system that solves a lot of the problems be a “debacle”?
I was going to link that article this morning. It looks like the district is on target to match the 515 suspensions of last year with 112 logged so far. Upthread, it was offered that the teacher was nasty to the students, thus causing the problem. If that is the case, then bad teachers are concentrated in that school district. From the above article:
Baltimore City has 6.5 suspensions per 1000 students
Baltimore County has 4.6 suspensions per 1000 students
Anne Arundel County has 2.9 suspensions per 1000 students
Howard County has 1.9 suspensions per 1000 students
Harford and Carroll Counties have 1.7 suspensions per 1000 students
My gut feeling is that the problem begins with kids coming from a home/life environment where respect for authority isn’t taught or encouraged, and where transgressions aren’t punished, thereby creating a very clear lesson on what won’t happen if you break rules.
For too many, I fear this learning carries over into adulthood, perpetuating the cycle.
I never said that. I said that such situations can occur, and so an admin taking steps to discover what exactly happened–after the child has been removed–and advising the teacher about ways to avoid the situation in the future can, in some cases, be appropriate.
As far as “end of days” type things, I just don’t see it. I have such amazing kids, and some outright evil sociopaths, and an awful lot in the middle. I have kids in AP classes working 40 hours a week to support disabled parents; I have kids taking a course load that would floor me because they have the drive to get the best education they possibly can, I have kids that have such amazing talents that it humbles me. Even the ones that screw up are not useless lumps of flesh: I’ve got a girl right now, back in class two and a half weeks after giving birth, not wanting to miss a day more than she has to. I’m really not scared for the future.
In the real world, dealing with people like that, she absolutely asked for what she got- its sad that society has come that, but it has. And the teacher should know that- anyone who deals with people like that is an idiot if they didn’t expect that to be seen as a challenge, and if you back down from that type of challenge you’re “not hard”, or a punk. If I’m driving down the street and there are a bunch of gangster types playing ball in the street, in happy land if I honk at them I’m 100% in the right and they’ll smile and get out of the way, but in the real world I’ve just basically asked for an assault.
Because standing up to bullies is stupid, right? Christ, you’re a dumbass.
Basically, you should just shut up and take it, don’t try to fight back, never ever, is that it? Because that’s the message I’m getting.
I never thought of that scenario before. Thanks for sharing.
Nor did I claim that you did, did I? My comment arose from thoughts about the last paragraph of post #17, which suggested that possibility.
:dubious:
Awful glad I don’t live in your “real” world.
I didn’t say stand there and let someone beat the shit out of you and take it and not defend yourself. I said that certain actions are seen by certain segments of society as provocative, and anyone dealing with them should have the common sense to know that. I know if I honk at those types taking their time getting out of the street, I shouldn’t be surprised the next day if my car is vandalized. Now I have to take time and fix my car, but hey, I’m no pussy! Geez, what part of Pittsburgh do YOU live in?
Next time you’re in a squirelly mood, go slumming and drive down a street where some gangster types are playing ball in street, and give them a good honking when they don’t disperse fast enough. Then when they start talking shit to you, be sure you inform them how you fully intend on defending yourself should they do anything. Let me know how that turns out.
Sorry, Wee Bairn, but the two are not the same. Children in school are subject to the authority (or supposed to be) of the teachers and school administrators. The apparent refusal of some to recognize that authority is a problem at the core of the OP.
Gangster types playing ball in the street aren’t subject to your authority. You’re nobody to them, and they know it. If their ball playing regularly interferes with passage of traffic, let the PD address it. They are the authority in charge of enforcing traffic and other laws.