Well, that’s good, at least. One of my least favorite memories from school was when the entire band was given detention because a few people forgot thier instruments/were horsing around. As a kid who was very careful to behave and perform well in classes, I was furious at being punished for other people’s actions. It’s unreasonable to expect children to police their peers when the adult “in charge” can’t even do it.
Why is that unreasonable? If a teacher has 32 kids to track, and 4 act up in 4 separate corners, it can be difficult to police.
If the other kids are just sitting and watching, or even worse encouraging the behavior then they are guilty as well.
Remeber that teachers are also limited in what they are allowed to do. Detention, Suspension & Expulsion can be difficult. Handing out extra assignments is tough as well, as it forces additional work on the teacher.
Finally, truly identifying all of those guilty can be trying, especially when it is done behind the teacher’s back. Teacher turns around to a room of kids with an attitude of “I didn’t do it.” Now, the teacher can waste the rest of the class trying to find the miscreant, or…
Do what the military does, and what many an operation does - collective, group punishment. Why? So that the next time the class Jackass acts up, the people around him say, “Shut the fuck up, dickweed, or we are all gonna get screwed.”
Now, this would not be necessary back when immedate corporate punishment was allowed, or when a call to someone’s parents resulted in a double whuppin (one at school from the Vice Principal, and one at home from dad). Unfortunately, the parents are more likely to defend their little shit head when called in (if the parents show up at all).
You don’t want collective punishment? Tell your classmates to grow the fuck up.
(yes, I know that this is not allowed in the student handbook - and good for you for dealing with this properly. I would personally oppose this rule in my kids schools)
So the message that it sends is that unfairness is appropriate as long as it’s less work? Is it appropriate, then, for police to take you into custody until they find the person on your block who stole a car? Where does it end? I, for one, don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to model schools on the military.
It was also ineffective; it didn’t cause the misbehaving students to behave better. It merely angered the parents who were dealing with upset kids who’d never gotten detention before.
Not less work, just often the only thing that DOES work that is allowed. Not in your situation, but I have seen it work just fine in many situations involving middle school to college aged individuals.
And there’s me thinking the sub was there to teach, not to police the class…!
All these people saying that the kids in the class should peer pressure the bad kids makes me laugh. There’s no way most of the class will do that. And for the ones who do? Well, in high school it might just get you bitched out verbally by the clowns, but in the younger grades you’ll get your ass kicked on the playground. A geek’s best defense was always to appear invisible…
I’m not a military type, but as I understand it, the purpose of that practice in the military is to instill group cohesion. If your unit is in basic training, and one guy fucks up, everyone gets punished, because when the unit is in the field and one guy fucks up, everyone gets killed. Like a lot of military discipline, it’s unfair, but necessary because of the high stakes of military service. Since the odds of a classroom full of high school kids being wiped out by Charlie during recess is rather slim, it’s difficult to excuse the unfairness of group discipline as a necessary evil to prevent a greater harm.
And, yeah, like kushiel said, the class geek is not going to tell the football captain to sit down and shut up. Not unless he wants to spend sixth period in the comfortable confines of his own locker.
Where I live and went to school (10 years ago), subs weren’t allowed to teach anything. They were basically babysitters to keep you from destroying the classroom. So, their entire job was to police the class.
Just to show this is not limited to the classroom, an Upstate New York judge was annoyed when a cell phone rang in his courtroom, and when nobody would own up to it, had 46 people jailed to try to discover the culprit.
The New York Commission on Judicial Conduct was not amused, voting to remove him from the bench.
I’ll admit that all of my classes were Honors level, so maybe we had a different way of doing things. But like I said, it was a whopping. . . what? Three and a half years ago that I graduated, so I think that’s still pretty recent. When someone would act like a jackass or a little group in the corner would act like douchebags, they’d be told to shut the hell up by everyone else (most of the time, but particularly when we had subs because most of us were old enough to realize it was incredibly rude to act that way towards a sub).
It wasn’t one person doing the shooshing, it would often be the majority of folks, too.
Oh, and it was a damned engineering academy at the high school, but the academy had everyone from the president of the chess club to the captain of the football team. There was no picking on the geeks, because, well, we were all in Honors and therefore had little room to talk 
.
And who is talking about play grounds? These are high school students- obviously ones old enough to understand what is right and wrong, old enough to stand up for what they believe in. Students that in no more than a year or two will be able to vote or join the military.
If you are at work in a meeting and you have a coworker acting like a total jackass while a guest is presenting something- you know, he’s yelling across the table to his friend about the girl he felt up last night or the party he went to with SUPER HAWT CHICKS- wouldn’t you calmly and sternly tell him to knock it the fuck off because he’s making you all look bad? Or would you wait for the CEO of the company to come in and tell him to stop?
No, but the football captain can tell just about anyone to sit down and shut up and they will: using peer pressure in a positive way is all about finding the kids who DO have influence and giving them reason to help you shepherd the class. That reason doesn’t have to be punative: the bulk of it is a matter of getting the leaders to respect you enough that when they see you getting annoyed, they step up. Enough of that, they will do the same even when you aren’t there because they respect your class and know what you’d like or don’t like.
The only time I’ve ever punished a whole class was a day when I was out of school and there was a screw-up at the front office and they didn’t send a sub so all day long my kids came in my class, sat down, and just fucked around. No one went and told the office that there wasn’t a sub, and none of the work I left (in a pile on my otherwise totally-clear desk, with sub plans taped to the desk next to the work) got done. I was furious, and gave them all zeros on the assignment. Understand, it was one of 25 or so daily grades, which are only 30% of the six weeks grade, which is only 25% of the semester grade, so it wasn’t a crippling blow to anyone’s GPA, but I wanted to make the point that they were AP kids and that their education was something that they had to fight for, not do everything they could to avoid. I felt like punishing the whole class was acceptable because had any one of them walked down to the office–or called me, they all have my cell phone number and it’s on the board–the whole thing could have been fixed. So it’s like they all failed as individuals to take responsibility, not that a majority of the group failed.
The wrong against the OP may be slight in your opinion, but as a matter of actual fact the OP is being punished for the actions of others. He (I am making an assumption) is in the right, and should not be forced to suffer consequences of actions he did not commit. Would you tell an adult who was only put in jail for a day that it’s ‘just county lockup, not the gulag’ if they were arrested for being at a concert where some of the audience acted up?
Exactly. The severity of the wrong should not be taken into account when deciding whether or not the wrong is actually wrong.
Also, the sub is supposedly a certified teacher, a trained professional whose education (and student teaching) was supposed to include proper classroom management. It is not supposed to include the educational equivalent of ‘Respect mah a-thor-i-tay!’
We don’t allow a judge to hold an entire courtroom audience in jail for contempt if 4 of them are being disruptive, do we?
Did you ever actually go to high school?
You think that it’s common for the captain of the varsity football team to be the one who enforces order when there’s a substitute teacher?
Do you think The Donna Reed Show was a documentary?
Actually, whoever was responsible for making sure that your lesson plans were carried out in your absence is the one who failed. That person is not the student. The student’s job is to show up and learn from the teacher. It is the responsibility of the school to make sure there is a teacher. Your punishment of the students for the failure of your principal sounds a lot like bullying behavior.
You were wronged by someone in authority over you, and you took it out on people who had no avenue of defense.
Congratulations, you’re a bully.
Me, I’d act like an adult and tell him to knock it off. But that’s not really the question. Question is, would (or should) you expect a group of high-schoolers to act like adults? Does it matter if they’re seniors or freshmen? How about middle-schoolers? Where’s age limit above which you’re disappointed when they act like children?
That’s bizarre. It’s not your students’ responsibility to hunt down a teacher or go thumbing through your lesson plans to figure out what you wanted them to do. I suppose punishing them was a valuable life lesson about getting blamed for other people’s fuckups, though.
From my experience, it’s usually the popular kids who act up–the ones who can get away with it socially, because they can make life hell for anyone they don’t like. People who can bully someone into doing as they want generally fall into this group more than in the “sit down and shut up, jerkwad” group. The rest of the class isn’t likely to tell the goof-offs to shut up, because either a) they don’t care that other kids are goofing off, or b) they fall too low on the totem pole to be able to exert that sort of power anyways.
Agreed. Besides, what the hell did you expect them to do? They’re high-schoolers, it’s in their nature to take any chance to avoid work that they can get. The office forgot to send a teacher so you punish them for…not doing what the teacher wanted? Very bizarre indeed.
Not necessarily.
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to use the “bullying” label, but basically, I agree. When I was in high school, if there was no teacher in the classroom, there’s no way it would have occured to me to personally go down to the office and say, “Hey, we need a sub!”
Not usually. In some states, subs only have to have a high school degree: in others, a college degree in anything. Typically, tou can’t pay someone $50-100/day, no promise of working every day, and no benefits AND demand they be a certified professional.
I was speaking metaphorically, with “captain of the football team” as shorthand for “kids that have leadership skills” I know my kids. I teach in a small school, I know my kids from the time they are freshman until the time they land in my class, first as Junior English students, then as Senior Econ students. I am a class sponsor most years. I coach an academic decathlon team and I go to sporting events, concerts, plays, and ceremonies of all types, and I always spend part of the time sitting with my kids. I taught their siblings and cousins, I edit their college essays and write their letters of rec, I open my room up two hours before school starts and stay an hour after it ends and there are always, always students there. I know my kids, and when I say I know who the ringleaders are, how the social structures are set up, I mean it, and it’s an important part of maintaining a smooth class that doesn’t feel like a dictatorship–I can give a kid a look or a glance and he/she calms down his/her buddies not because he/she fears punishment but because he/she respects me and the course enough to want order and is willing to help me maintain it. All good teachers do this, and I don’t see that there is anything draconian about it.
That’s just bullshit. If we were talking about 14 year olds, sure. If we were talking about regular classes, sure. But these were 16 and 17 year olds in an college-level class who know damn well that something is off if there is no sub there. All they had to do was find ANY adult and tell them, or call my cell phone-- 90% of them have cell phones, my number is on the board, and since they are sure enough comfortable enough to call me five times a night with questions about assignments, I don’t think they were too intimidated to call me. High school kids who want the rank points and kudos of being in a college-level class have to step up and take responsibility for their learning–it can’t be something that is imposed on them from outside and that they are allowed to do their best to avoid.
I don’t know. Speaking as a teenager, and one who did very well in high school, thank you, it would never occur to me to call the office and ask if there was supposed to be a sub. And I know it would never have occurred to my classmates either. Then again, half the time my school didn’t hire subs for the juniors and seniors. If the teacher had left lesson plans, we might get sent to the library. Of course the librarian was part time and rarely there. But usually we just got a free study period. Some people studied for another class, others read, and the rest talked. Anyway, if one of my teachers had failed me on an assignment because I hadn’t magically grokked her expectations for a weird and unusual situation, well, I would lose some respect for her.
Unh-huh. And you’re also in a position of power, spurring the action of the kid and backing up the authority of the kid. I’d ask whether they do so without you spurring them on, but frankly, the fact that you have to give them that look or glance to spur them into action is proof enough that left to their own authority, they’re not so likely to intervene.
Wait, was the OP’s class a college-level class? If not, your position collapses.
According to their profile, the OP’s birth year is listed as '94.
Of course they are unlikely to intervene without me spuring them on. I was just illustrating that a good teacher DOES use the social dynamic of the class to help maintain control, and that it doesn’t have to be a matter of “You there! Control your classmates or everyone suffers”. It can be much more subtle. Some people in this thread seem to think classroom management should be done by the teacher dealing with each individual alone without any sort of class dynamic.
I am not defending what the sub did, I am agreeing that group punishment are, 99% of the time, unwarranted, but conceeding that there are extraordinary circumstances and sharing one that I saw. If I did not make that clear, I apologize.