How large was your school ? I mean, if your mother was the only teacher who taught biology , there’s no way around it but I went to a large school and there were few classes that only one teacher taught.
So did mine - I suppose they could have handled that stuff during a third period class except that there was a decent amount of grade specific info and homerooms contained a single grade while classes might contain anyone from freshmen to seniors.
Most of the grade-specific stuff is at the start and end of our grades, so Freshman Seminar teachers gets all the 9th grade garbage and Government teachers (YO!) get the Senior Stuff. Everything else goes into Announcements that waste the first few minutes of 2nd period each day. Class of 2023 had 612 students walk, so 4 of us could cover all the seniors.
The scary thing is that 2 of my peers teaching Govt. are former students of mine. Warren Oates was right.
Homeroom (or something equivalent to it) is quite common in high school. In my experience, every district seems to think it’s re-inventing the wheel: “We don’t have homeroom; we have Advisory Period! It’s oh-so-different and completely superior to homeroom!”. But yeah, it’s homeroom.
And bad teachers can be gotten rid of, if something sufficiently scandalous happens. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it happening just from simple incompetence (and I have seen some cases where it should have happened from simple incompetence). During one of my education classes, I was actually assigned field experience shadowing a teacher whose class consisted entirely of the students screaming. That was the entire day. If the teacher did anything at all, I couldn’t tell, over the screaming. To be fair, the teacher was a phys ed teacher, who (for some reason) was assigned to teach a regular classroom instead of phys ed: Classroom management skills are a lot different in a gym than in a classroom.
One of the teachers in my elementary school live two doors from me, her daughter was my main baby sitter. Neither me nor my brother ever had her, and I understood it was school policy, which seems reasonable.
My junior and senior highs had home rooms, but the home room teacher had no influence on your grades or anything, so if you had to have a relative as a teacher that would be the place for it.
I’d hope the admin would try to work out the problem first. My older daughter hated one of her English teachers, though not for being given bad grades, just because she thought the teacher was incompetent. She resorted to writing gibberish in the middle of papers and still got As, which showed that she never really read them.
My younger daughter had her for German 5 years later, and she was one of the best teachers she ever had, really changing her life. It turns out she didn’t want to teach English, but had to because there were not enough German students, and she resented doing it and didn’t feel she was good at it. You can never tell.
The judge was right. the proper way to fire someone (except in the USA where non-union effectively have no rights) is progressive discipline. Talk to them, give warnings, failing to fix the problem results in more warnings and attempts to teach correct behaviour, etc. etc. until as Cheech and Chong say “I’ve talked to you and talked to you until I’m blue in the face, and I’m done talking to you!” Piling up a list of problems behind their back, then springing them on the problem employee in one swell foop and telling them they’re fired - demonstrates bad faith and a pre-determination to get rid of the employee, rather than an attempt to fix their problems - which is the first thing the employer must try. This is why there are unions.
(I had a co-worker this happened to; they transferred him from database (which he knew) to process control (which he had no experience) then after multiple complaints - which they never told him about - they told him they were letting him go with 2 months’ severance pay. I told him which lawyer in town worked with the union - although he wasn’t union - and he decided if they didn’t want him, why stick around? The lawyer settled with them for 6 months’ pay, for a guy who’d worked there 4 years. There was a hint that skin colour was a factor.)
My school didn’t have homerooms, and I was expecting them after all the “teenage” books I’d read in elementary school. I felt cheated.
My wife had a terrible employee who was a union nurse. She would constantly pick fights with other nurses, then do outrageous things like block them from being able to get to the med cabinet or simply refuse to work and sit with a novel while everyone else did her job.
My wife tried progressive management. First she talked to her, setting expectations and explaining where she was going wrong. Then another talk, with a warning. This was followed by a performance improvement plan, which the employee rejected and filed a grievance with the union. The union backed her, and started going after my wife, the manager. Employee went back to work, and her continuing malfeasances were documented again. The union then. recognizing that she actually was a problem, had her attend some kind of counselling/training, after which her record had to be expunged and she would be given a fresh start.
Well, it didn’t take. The employee resumed her terrible behaviour after a while, kicking off a whole new round of meetings, remediations, etc. This time, at the end of it the union agreed that the employee was non-functional. Their answer: They would only agree to have her transferred to another unit, and only on the condition that her record of bad behaviour not follow her. My wife signed off, and the employee was gone. It took more than a year and a huge amount of effort to get rid of her.
I wonder how the new, unsuspecting unit liked her?
This is exactly backwards. Complaints need to be documented on an ongoing basis and shared with the employee. You can’t just accumulate “complaints” and then bang, you’re fired.
This would be unfair dismissal in my non union private sector workplace.
There are ways for people to get fired without going through a corrective action plan. In the 20 years I’ve been here it’s been for:
employee threatened other employees with physical harm, using racial or sexually hostile language
employee did not show up did two weeks an we found that he had failed probation and was serving a custodial sentence for forgery of checks
employee stole money or goods from us.
Collecting data about the employee’s problems is fine. Not telling the employee that they are doing anything wrong while,docu,enting their errors for the purpose of firing them would be wrong. But if the documentation was collected as part of the employee management process, it’s not just fine but mandatory if you need to take further action.
My junior high had an advisory period, which, as Chronos says, is essentially homeroom. High school, however, did not. This actually had negative effects, as the advisory period was when they’d fit in other activities, from club meetings, pep rallies, school assemblies, etc. Without that extra period, those had to take place either be during lunch (e.g. the clubs) or involve a shortened class schedule (e.g. anything that involved the whole school).
They had been warning him for a couple years and nothing happened. I don’t know if he knew the book was being collected but they did warn him repeatedly.
We had an experimental schedule that started when I was in 9th grade (last year of junior high) . You were either early or late schedule. If you were early, you attended first period through fifth; if you were late, you attended 2nd period through sixth. And everybody had an ‘x’ period which floated through the week. So, you didn’t attend every class every day. And it worked out that there were no 5th or 6th period on Tuesdays, so any assemblies or such were on Tuesday afternoon. I can’t even remember now exactly how it worked. Gah!
If he didn’t know, that was wrong. As others point out - there has to be progressive warnings and disciplines. Exactly this:
In the only union environment I’ve had experience, the result ultimately boils down to an arbitration (which I assume is what the judge was). If it went all the way to fina arbitration with progressive discipline over egregious behaviour and the union won, then the arbitrator was stupid. More likely it sounds like the management declined to go to final arbitration and knuckled under. Upper management lacking testicular fortitude is always a problem.
If this happened during your junior high advisory period, it was very different from any high school homeroom I am familiar with. Attendance was taken ( to be compared with attendance in individual classes) and various documents were distributed - it took 10-15 minutes, not long enough for meetings or assemblies.
The advisory period was around 25 minutes, I believe. And, yes, some assemblies might be longer than that, so they would still have to mess with the schedule. But it was still far less disruptive.
I don’t really recall too much of what we did during the advisory period normally. But I don’t remember there being any paperwork. I mostly remember that there was this special TV broadcast called “Channel 1”, which was for educational use, and would play during this period.
I was busy doing other things for most of the time I had Advisory, from being taken out of class to work on computer stuff for the coach who ran the computer lab, being part of a couple clubs, and being in band, which used advisory for extra practice time.
When I was set to go to second grade it was supposed to be at the Lutheran parochial school where my parents wanted me to go, but I got sent back to the public school that year. My maternal grandmother was the second grade teacher and my parents knew that sooner or later I’d raise my hand in class and call her Grandma rather than her name. But my cousin stayed, and he wasn’t twisted by the experience.
Don’t get me wrong I adored my grandmother. She is one of the top four people I ever have loved.
Our Home Room was the first 15 minutes (if I remember right). It was long enough for attendance, national anthem, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and then the regular announcements over the PA system.
In my experience, private schools often have less leverage, not more. Unless you have a substantial endowment, you’re paying salaries out of tuition, and if you don’t hit entollment targets, layoffs are immediate.
Public school generally doesnt have to care if you threaten to take your ball and go home. Squeaky wheels get the grease, and it is absolutely true that admin doesn’t like complaints and will often bend over backwards to keep families happy. But its never as intense as a provate school worried about operating costs.
This particular school. AFAIK, had a waiting list. I had to take one of those aptitude tests just to get in. They did get rid of a few kids for disciplinary or intellectual reasons. Overheard the beginning of school, out in the corridor.
“I’ve gat a surprise for you. Freddy’s going to do much better this year.”
“I’ve got a surprise for you, Mrs. --------. Freddy’s not comimg back this year.”
Freddy started 2 years ahead of me, IIRC I first noticed him in Grade 3. He repeated grade 6, then this was the interaction with my grade 7 teacher when he was due to repeat grade 7. He was certifiably “challenged” but I guess his mother pulled a bit of weight in the Catholic community - but it only went so far.
I guess too it depends on the size of the field you can draw from. Catholic probably has a greater draw than some very restrictive fundamentalist schools, or ones with no particular focus. Plus, in the 60’s there were a lot more kids floating around as a proportion of the general population.
My impression was that our school was pretty easy-going, but they had limits. Of course, back then corporal punishment was normal, and a parent who did not like that or did not like the teacher or curriculum was welcome to remove their darling. We did in fact have a few non-catholics (there for the quality education) who were expemted from the religion class.
By the 70’s teachers were mentioning they could no long flunk kids, repeating was not the thing, and they even had to say something nice about every student on their report card comments. The place went downhill. My mother mentioned that a year or two after I graduated apparently the parents’ group had complained and the school had reinstituted strict dress codes, and better behavioural guidelines.
Now I’m told the tuition is $10,000 a year, whereas I paid my own tuition my last two years from the money I earned caddying summers and weekends.
“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
-L.P. Hartley