We weren’t there, so we can’t know why she was so upset with you. But even though it’s the sub telling the story, I trust the teacher who’s worked with the boy all year way more than I trust the sub who came in one day and thinks the boy works as a symbol of teachers’ “distorted sense of priorities that doesn’t adequately allow for the rights of reg ed teachers and students.”
Why muddy the situation?
If you want to claim that “the rich white douchebro star football player” is treated differently than his poor black star football player classmate, you would be disagreed with. Tossing in more variables fuzzes up the problem.
ok
I totally agree and I’ve seen how just one teacher can really affect a kid and get them on the right track.
Now the question is how to find that adult that can work with the kid . If your a teacher of 125 kids, very hard or a counselor with an already overworked caseload.
Sometimes groups like Big brothers can help.
Meaning I shouldn’t have sent the kid to the office for hitting another kid? 
That’s insane. I have sent kids to the office for far less, like just talking repeatedly after having been told to be quiet. Being sent to the office is not some final punishment. It’s just the start of a process, and in the meantime the rest of the class can get on with the tasks at hand. If the assistant principal judges the student to not need any further punishment, that’s their call. And I was never told by administrators that I should stop sending so many kids their way, and they still kept calling me for sub jobs on a regular basis. They are the ones who run the school, so…
I’m pretty sure that if one of your own children was hit at school and the teacher did not even send the kid inflicting the violence down to the principal’s office, you would be pretty unhappy about that.
Turning this over a bit more in my mind, I realized it’s an even more bizarre rubric than I first perceived. It would be like if you were a juror in a trial for assault and battery, and you heard from the victim and from an impartial witness that John Doe definitely did it. But John’s mother, who was not present at the scene of the crime, also took the stand, insisting “John’s a good boy, he wouldn’t hurt anyone!” So you decide you should trust the word of the woman who has after all known him his entire life, and you vote not guilty. :smack:
No, not like that. Like, I don’t know all the pieces you’re not including, but the fact that the kid’s regular teacher was irritated with your actions, and that you as a sub are still angry about it years later, makes me think the details you left out are pretty important.
It would be nothing remotely like that. Worst analogy ever, dude.
I think you nailed it.
How far do we take expecting teachers to be saints, with the wisdom to see past multiple layers of defensiveness to heal the traumatized core?
I expect them (myself) to TRY, even if we often fail. I expect them to try to remain objective and not get personally offened in a power struggle with a child. I expect them to not let their own egos get in the way of the best interest of the child. I expect them to give the child the benefit of the doubt.
Why on earth is that controversial?
Exactly. It’s hard not to take things personally, but it’s a key piece of professionalism. Your job is to help all kids learn, and anything that gets in the way of doing your (our) job needs to be confronted.
There are no missing details, not that I was privvy to. Except that they were playing dodgeball, if that somehow matters. I didn’t do anything to the kid but send him to the office, and the SpEd teacher took me completely by surprise in lambasting me for doing so. She frankly did not strike me as terribly composed or professional, but I cannot deny her passion and dedication, even if her ire was totally misdirected.
I don’t consider you a reliable narrator here, certainly not to the degree that I accept your account, without her perspective, as one that “illustrates how they [teachers] can get a distorted sense of priorities that doesn’t adequately allow for the rights of reg ed teachers and students.” That’s all. Plenty of people love to opine about schools without having the least idea what they’re talking about. You, as the sub, do have the least idea; but her perspective is vital to understanding this story, and we don’t have that.
Yes, the vast majority of problems can be solved without ever removing students from the classroom. But sometimes, the solution that doesn’t require removing the student is one that requires the skilled cooperation of every single teacher that kid has ever had, and not all teachers are great, and so that specific kid’s problem would require a time machine to solve. And sometimes, even very skilled teachers can’t find what the root cause is for a problem. And so, yes, sometimes the best you can do in this flawed world is, in fact, just to remove that one student from the classroom for the sake of the other 23. It’s not very often, maybe, but it does sometimes happen that way.
You hit upon a good point being often by the time we get a kid in high school they have been so messed up by the system in elementary and middle school we cannt handle them.
For example in most districts in elementary school they have this system where all the kids get passed on every year regardless if they actually learned anything. So over times many dont. So their math and reading levels are way below grade level. Now in most cases if a kid has all F’s the school can suggest they be held back but its the parents decision.
granted elementary level is when you need to start making those interventions with their personal lives if that is what is keeping them back.
Then you get to middle school and often kids get further behind both academically and behaviorally.
Then by HS we expect them to be ready to handle advanced topics plus start getting ready for college when in truth your still teaching concepts at the 5th grade level. I remember one HS math teacher being frustrated that his advanced algebra class was barely above the basic levels.
You really see the difference when you go from a well managed school to a bad one.
I think one of the problems is that with teachers, our classroom is our castle. Our little kingdom and we want things run a certain way. Your right though if we go to far in that and not see the needs of the kids we get into trouble.
Overwhelmingly, the differences in school achievement levels are correlated with socioeconomics, not with management styles. North Carolina is a great laboratory for this: since we’re one of the few states that gives letter grades to schools based (80%) on achievement levels, you can see the overwhelming correlation between wealth and achievement.
Nothing has radicalized me as much as paying attention to these education statistics.
For some people, that’s just proof that lazy stupid people are also bad parents who don’t care about their kids, and since their kids are so unworthy their own parents don’t give a shit, why should we?
I, too, grow more radicalized.
Or be even nastier about it: the parents are poor because they are stupid, therefore their kids are stupid by genetics, so why waste money trying to put lipstick on pigs?
In a previous discussion the ones ignoring that correlation completely ignored or dismissed how some retiring millionaire made a real difference by instead of blaming their poor students for the decay of his neighborhood decided to not only help the poor students but their families too to become more stable economically.
I consider the results good evidence to point out how sick are the priorities of many in power that prefer to spend billions in unneeded military or wall projects instead of looking to make American communities safer and more stable with well funded education and more family support for poor families.