That’s incorrect. Your post is right there. I mean, sure, you’re also making fun of the people who use “at-promise” (and if you’d read the thread you’d see that not a single person has backed that neologism), but your contempt for certain kids comes through loud and clear.
And how did that work out? Public schools no longer discard children who misbehave. And that’s an enormously good thing.
That’s twice you’ve used “Orwellian.” But I don’t think you read the thread. Given nobody’s approval of that term, the discussion has moved far past that point and into much more interesting territory.
When they’re 6 years old and pulled a girl’s hair, sure. It’s less tolerable when they’re in high school and massively disruptive, yet every time they’re sent to the Principle’s office, they come waltzing right back.
I’m all for granting chances to kids who are legit struggling, but there are kids who do not WANT to learn, and instead of sitting there quietly or just straight up skipping school, they show up and wreck havoc, continuously disrupting everyone else’s learning. I hate that shit, I dealt with that through much of high school, and I’d be perfectly happy if those kids were just plain kicked out.
You do realize that children’s brains aren’t fully developed? That what they WANT or do not WANT has very little to do with what is actually good for them? Have you considered that a large part of why they are so disruptive is that our education system has failed to capture their interest and attention at an early age and has never successfully recovered? These are problems, and the kid is a victim of those problems. Rather than trying to fix them, you sneer at the kid. Newsflash: there but for the grace of god go I, or you for that matter. Let’s do a better job of reaching kids early so they actually benefit from their education rather than changing nothing and sneering at the inherent inferiority of the kids who dont succeed.
Teaching to the lowest common denominator does nothing to capture the interest of the upper level kids, this explains WHY the US is falling behind other countries regarding educational standards …
The kid at some point stops being a victim but until you address the kids who have parents with no care at all about the education of their children (or the ability to help them), good luck fixing the system.
You were blatantly and obviously sneering at the children, even if you intended it primarily or only as a vehicle for your sneering at people trying to help children.
Just because you think that the term “at risk” wasn’t originally intended as an insult, and when used as originally intended shouldn’t be interpreted as an insult (which MandaJO and others already explained much more insightfully), doesn’t mean that the term doesn’t get used as an insult and carry shaming associations.
What you prescriptively consider the only “correct” meaning of a particular term doesn’t determine what meaning(s) the term carries in actual usage.
“Teaching to the lowest common denominator” is a crazily-undefined bit of scare language. What on earth do you mean?
Why yes, Shodan, that is what I meant. I meant nobody in THIS DISCUSSION–that is, the discussion that has moved to more interesting matters. Context makes that clear.
I’m sure you would’ve been perfectly happy if those kids were just plain kicked out. It sounds as if you’re comfortable discarding children if they’re inconveniencing you.
I’m not comfortable with that. Yeah, kids with emotional disorders can be hard to be around. I’m pretty sure I have more familiarity with that fact than you do. But kicking them out of school condemns them to some pretty shitty life outcomes, and I’d just as soon not take that step.
and last year SF woman called for people not to call perps “criminals” because it hurt their feelings (I lived 20 yrs in Cali, 11 in People’s Republic of SF)
That said, there’s plenty of work for teachers to do in the field of “not causing students to feel shitty without good reason.” If the goal of feedback is to help a student improve, not to punish transgression, it’s worth considering whether the big red F is the best way to accomplish the goal.
Generally speaking I don’t believe kids are stupid and it won’t take long before they pick up on the negative connotations of being “at-promise.” I also expect at-promise to be used in a mocking manner in the same way special came to be used.
I was told that once in a professional development years ago. The trainer said we should not grade in red because they associate red with failure and it hurts their self-esteem to see a paper full of red.
Most of the people here supporting disruptive students neglect a very important point. Students are human beings and not animals. They can make choices like choosing to attempt to not be disruptive. They can choose to attempt the classwork. They can choose to not wear headphones in class under their hoods. They can choose not not to say “Fuck you.” to a teacher asking if they need help. In most cases, the habitually disruptive CHOOSE to not be disruptive.
Advised by a random trainer not to grade in red is not a draconian change in educational practice.
It’s not about who is responsible for being disruptive. It’s about what is the best way to mitigate and discourage that behavior. Teachers are not passive victims of student choices. Good educational practice can have dramatic effects on classroom order. Now, that also isn’t to say that the teacher is entirely responsible, either. It’s dynamic. It’s complicated. But I know my classrooms have become more orderly, more efficient, more supportive each year I have taught, and I don’t think every group of kids I have gotten has been just naturally more packed with kids making better choices.
I have seen some real asshole kids who later turned out to have been dealing with horrors beyond imagining. I have seen some who seemed more to just be inherent assholes–but I can never be sure. I have also worked with plenty of teachers who seemed to go out of the way to antagonize kids so that they could enjoy their indignation boner, and I have known even more that were just so clueless that they didn’t understand that they were making the problem worse.
Classroom management is complicated. There’s not a single problem and certainly not a simple solution.
I mean, what outcome do you expect a kid to have from a paper full of red–or full of any other corrective ink color? If you’re expecting most kids to see that and say, “Good gravy, I’d best buckle down and systematically correct these errors, but not before doing the background researdch necessary to learn why they’re errors in the first place,” you’ve worked with a different population than I have.
The advice I got when I worked as a college tutor, and which I’ve maintained to my benefit throughout my career, is to focus on one or possibly two types of errors in any given set of feedback. If a student turns in her persuasive essay, and it’s right-justified without periods or capitals and her opinion is unclear and her spelling is awful and there’s no conclusion, I got some choices to make. I might decide that I’d like her to go through her paper and organize everything into sentences, putting periods and capitals where they belong. Or I might decide that this is the time to show her how to format her document with left justification and a tab to indent. Or maybe I’ll teach her how to write an introduction paragraph with a clear statement of opinion.
But if I try to do all these things–especially through a “sea of red”–then I’ll teach her that she’s a shitty writer. I’ll overwhelm her, and she’ll absorb nothing that I say.
Hurting students’ self-esteem is a bad thing to do, partly because hurting people isn’t good, but also because it makes it harder for students to learn. Students who receive “You’re a dumbass” message from teachers–whether explicit or implicit–are going to have a very hard time being smart.
Is your last sentence what you mean to say? I think that “not” is out of place.
And of course people make choices. So what? My job is still to teach them. That means my job is to help them make better choices. And you can’t expel someone into making better choices.
This is why I advocate more wraparound services for students. We need more counselors, more social workers, more school psychologists. We need to make sure students’ health needs (physical and mental) are being met. And we teachers need to advocate in our communities for better conditions for everyone. This means reform of the penal system and policing system, better health care access for families, labor law that’s friendlier to parents, and more.
I’m not sure how that would have affected me as a young student, but when I correct all of the issues that need fixing in something I’m doing, only to have whoever is in charge of gatekeeping its correctness then point out more of them, I sometimes wonder if there is something else I’m missing and it will just be rejected again no matter how much I scour it for mistakes if I submit it again. Which is okay if they are freely communicative - I could just ask if there are other things that need addressing - but if they don’t have time to answer the phone or their emails or if they don’t tell you everything even then, it’s not a very good way to verify a submission.
I get the same way about websites that tell me one thing is wrong at a time and then a different thing once I corrected the previous thing. Let me know all the roadblocks so I can have confidence that they are the only roadblocks.
I think you’re talking about situations where the product is the goal of the exercise. That’s fundamentally different from situations where the development of skills is the product of the exercise. In the former case, sure, it’s helpful to know in advance what steps you need to take to correct all errors, because presumably you already have the skills necessary to correct them. In the latter case, you don’t have the skills necessary and need to learn them, and you are gonna have a helluva time learning multiple skills simultaneously.