Great thought, but… do you REMEMBER what high school was like? More specifically, WHO are the students? These are kids going through the aftermath of puberty: massive hormonal boosts, brains which are not yet fully developed, a time in your life when peer pressure is extremely important, etc.
Teenagers suck! I’ve been one, and I sucked then, too. And I went to a nice school, got good grades, but that’s irrelevant. I still got into fights, I still got detention, I still had issues with my equally sucky peers.
I fully agree that many public schools are awful nowadays, but I think even top notch schools need some form of punishment, even if it does simply affect change in behavior, because sometimes that’s all you can hope for until the teenager grows up and matures. Control the basic behavioral problems and they’ll get better when their brain maturity catches up to their physical maturity.
PS - yes, we had Sat detentions in our school, too. But the more common variety was after school detention. Sat stays were for repeat troublemakers.
I’m not sure I am in favor of detention at all let alone Saturday detention. It’s not that I object to teaching children consequences for their actions, it’s that I have a problem with state mandated school attendance.
Do folks who oppose SATURDAY detention also oppose AFTER SCHOOL detention?
They seem to think that schools only have “rights” regarding students from opening bell to dismissal bell…so I assume they think that schools have no “right” to have a student stay later?
I assume they also think that schools MUST provide transportation for those students who have after school detention?
{soapbox}
If folks want to know why there are such severe discipline problems in schools…the attitudes expressed by some in this thread are one part of the reason IMHO. Instead of a partnership with school teachers and administrators in creating excellence and appropriate behavior…several seem to want to take an adversarial stance, more concerned about their “rights” than the fact that their little kidlet’s behavior was so bad as to warrant this kind of remedy in the first place. And again…Saturday detentions are not a first response to minor infractions like being tardy to class once…they are a response when other responses have not worked…(probably in part because of the parent’s attitude.)
{/soapbox}
Yup. At the school I went to, that wasn’t a problem, since there were already late buses for athletes. This is the largest school district in the state (geographically), and there’s only one middle school and one high school… those kids who have detention sure aren’t going to walk 10+ miles home.
IMO it has more to do with the fact that hundreds or thousands of kids are crammed together in what’s essentially a prison, where everything they do is ultimately meaningless. I think Paul Graham’s theories on how the school structure affects students’ behavior are right on.
If they’re requiring students to go to a specific place outside the school day, then they should provide either transportation or an alternate assignment. If they’re merely asking students to do research somehow, and they can use a library, or an encyclopedia, or a web site, etc. then I’d say that’s fine.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I’m a high school student, and that’s just not true. I don’t have a complete list for you, but several first infractions that result in a 5-hour Saturday school include:
Being late to class without a pass (at teacher’s discretion)
Skipping class
Leaving campus during lunch
Having a cell phone ring, although technically a teacher is supposed to confiscate the phone and assign the detention if the cell phone is ON.
I’m not sure what the official policy on this one is, but a guy I know got a Saturday detention when a guy said ‘condom’ while talking with his friends. Somebody overheard him and complained.
Of course, my entire town tries to tends to over-punish teens. My local police department has the “Rat-em-out” program (yes, that’s the official name) which pays kids to report underage drinking parties. It also charges kids with “presence violations” for simply being around underage drinkers (sometimes even alcohol in general), even though they have comitted no crime. Under this flawed law, it would be illegal to be in the same place with my parents, if they happened to have a guest over that was having a beer. :rolleyes:
“Schools are pretty stupid places these days and getting stupider.” I sometimes lament the fact that kids today don’t have the balls - or the more widespread support that it might requre - to simply rebel. Why should human beings be placed in such a demeaning setting “for their own good”? Why don’t they just get together one day and say, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more. Either treat us respectfully or we’re not going back,” then get up and all walk out of school. Those teachers and administrators who see their jobs in terms of power, rather than empowerment, would get a major lesson. Argh, don’t get me started.
The state mandates that they stay in school till 18. There are some kids who are not interested in learning. All the fluffy Rousseau ideas asside, there is only so much I can do to motivate a kid who is homeless, or the forteen year old who had a baby who died, or the kid in the middle of the tug-of-war of his parent’s divorce, or the kid who watched his father murder his mother. These are all kids I had to teach last year. I was not in the deapest of the inner city this was just a normal school. These were the kids who actually talked to me.
There is a desperate need for discipline. (This is not quite the same as punishment.) and alot of these kids do not seem to get it at home. I saw so many wonderful young men and women. I also saw kids who are completly ill prepared for the job market. Kids who just plain had no idea how to behave in public. Not just stupid teenage stuff but the degree of inapropreate behavior they believed they were entitled to boggled the mind.
That thing of people being so caught up in defending their kid’s rights instead of making sure he has the tools to get ahead in life is more to do with the problem in the classroom than anything else. That and the fact that there has been decades of the political game of blame the teacher. The honest fact is that teachers are better educated now than any time in the past. There are more requirements, and there are very few women who go into the teaching anymore while they wait for their M.R.S. So at least at the begining of careers most teachers want to be there and are motivated.
I do not know when burn out happens. Perhaps it happens at the point the third parent manages to bully a school district administrator into pressuring a teacher into passing a kid when he didn’t earn it. Maybe it happens when a kid manages to derail a teacher’s career when his parents sue because he got caught cheating on a paper. Maybe its the constant wear of parents who do not give a shit that their kid hasn’t been in class for three months.
Not so fast there, youngster. It’s clear that you’re frustrated by the inane quality of the parent - administration relationships that occur today. And you may be working your butt off. But I’d take issue with your claim that…“The honest fact is that teachers are better educated now than any time in the past.” I happen to work in the edubiz in a large state university, I have 33 years of experience as a classroom teacher, and when I was a child, I spent many years in school. I know this stuff. 50 years ago, although most teachers were, indeed, women, they were among the best educated women in the country. They had college degrees that required a broad spectrum of basic knowledge. They also studied methods of instruction. Today, a student graduating with a conventional four-year education major will spend at least two years in theoretical course work. They will spend many hours in schools, observing and practice teaching. These things are good. Some may graduate with one course in natural sciences. Some may graduate with no art, no music, no history, philosophy, mathematics or political science coursework. These things are not good, and these are the empty spaces that I refer to when I suggest that teachers are NOT very well educated these days. They are not the best and the brightest. They may be driven by a powerful social conscience, and that’s very important. But they may not be. There are still plenty of them who decide to go into teaching because it’s perceived as easy, and given the requrements, it is. At our university, the entrance requrements into the college of education, beyond the Miller’s Analogy test, is little more than the ownership of matching socks. The best and the brightest, the truly smart and broadly well-educated college graduates are not going into teaching. That is a significant problem.
Does anyone else think that Saturday detentions might have been created TO inconvenience the parent? Perhaps in the hope that the parent, now inconvenienced by their child’s behavior - just as the teacher and the other students were “inconvenienced” by the child’s behavior at school - might now discipline their child as well? It’s a wake up call to parents who haven’t been really aware of the magnitude of the problem.
Of course, this doesn’t work if:
A. Parents won’t entertain the idea that their child was the one who acted in a manner which created this situation. If the parent believes it’s the school’s fault, not the child’s fault, then this only reinforces the child’s perception of the school as “the enemy.”
B. You go to school in Naperville. MAN, Lando, that sucks. And it’s stupid, really. If they’re handing out Saturdays for nonsense, then as a parent, I go into the pattern described in A. It IS the school’s fault, my kid doesn’t deserve this for this stupid shit. Plus, how can the school or the parent react effectively to really bad stuff if they’ve blown their wad over a ringing cellphone?
When I went to school, way back in the early 90’s, many of the “good kids” didn’t even know Saturdays existed, they were so bad. Only if you ditched multiple after-schools would you get an inschool, and ditching inschool would get you a Saturday. Ditching Saturday got you an out of school (suspension), usually.
And even then, detentions and suspensions were stupid, really. It was a “punishment” only to those of us who were horrified at the stigma and repercussions from our parents. The “bad kids” didn’t give it another thought. It was vacation. Plus, they got to hang out with their friends, who were most likely in detention or suspension as well. (I was a good kid, my best friend was a bad kid, so I got to see both sides of the pic.)
The only teacher I remember who had a reasonable take on the detention as punishment idea stated it like this: “Look, you’ve taken class time away from the class with your behavior. This time didn’t belong to you. Therefore, you owe us some of your personal time. You have no personal time during school hours: those hours are all of ours. The only personal time you own is after school and on weekends. See you after school.” Of course, there’s no real way to “pay back” time unless everyone stays, but the argument was emotionally satisfying to a 15 year old.
And when you’re 35, you’ll pay some bearded vegetarian $650 for a weekend of this and call it a retreat.
Ok, I will grant you that you don’t always get the best and the brightest in teaching programs today. Men have always had better financial opportunities, women finaly do. I do know that I will need a masters before i come close to the money I made at the Post office, and that the money I am looking at for substitute teaching is something slightly less than I can make at McDonalds.
I can’t exactly speak to how the teaching schools run their programs because I come to teaching as a post baccalaureate student, after a twenty year career in technical theater. I do think there is a problem today with the fact most people seem to treat University as a trade school and almost no one gets a true liberal arts education anymore.
So, we agree. And, in fact, the program in which I am now working takes only students such as yourself: career changers and other folks who already have an undergraduate degree in science or math - or a closely related field. This ensures that they are at least grounded in one significant content area, so that they can then concentrate on the business of being a (science or math) teacher, which is what we (try to) teach them. We have taken in engineers, physicians, lawyers, biologists and other scientists, and a number of Ph. D.'s in those fields. It’s too early to tell for sure, but my feeling is that the folks who are somewhat older and who have more educational as well as practical experience are those who will do the best. But the jury is out on that.
Indeed. The sense of entitlement is mind-boggling. I also take issue with this:
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Schools today are better equipped, more interesting, curricula more varied, teachers better trained (this point may indeed be arguable, CC, but I’m thinking of all the continuing ed and new teaching methodologies to adapt to different “learner types” that our district continually pushes), offer more extra-curricular opportunities, and are just overall better than ever before in many tangible ways than ever before, in terms of what is offered to students. Why is it that countless generations have successfully completed a well-rounded public school K-12 education, but somehow when it’s YOUR kid (I don’t know what your situation is, Mr2001 but your comments sound like those of a dissatisfied parent), it’s a soulless prison and the result is “ultimately meaningless”?
Give me a break. Do you mean that they’ll never find a practical application for cell reproduction, basic Euclidian geometry, or diagramming a sentence? Is that what you mean? What exactly would provide “meaning” to kids today?
In my opinion the philosophy of a an education, public-school or otherwise, is not a stiffly-defined black box that obligates a child to six hours per day of time for 200 days per year, with nothing else required of the child. It involves, as a result of the assignments assigned: developing self-direction, time-management (eg, figuring out when to do your homework when there’s baseball practice tonight), being resourceful (eg, going to the library, figuring out how to build that solar-system model), and things like that. It will inevitably spill into a child’s “outside-school” life a little, and that’s ok with me. Education is important and is a life-long quest, no matter how one ends up making one’s living.
I see these comments as another pathetic attempt to blame someone else when the real problem lies with a child’s behavior and home environment.
I’d like to suggest that if there is dissatisfaction with the “products” of public school, that the responsibility for that product lies in the combination of forces and features that comprise the home as well as the school system. It’s very similar to the nature/nuture discussion. In the same way that human growth and development is a reflection of the interaction of our genetic endowment with the environment in which we live, so the end result of 8 or 12 or more years in school is reflective of the overall results of forces, vectors, influences, interests, desires, talents, abilities, etc. of all the actors: the students, their homes, the teachers, the school, the system, etc. One cannot begin to address the end result without taking into account all the features. The argument that says, “It’s the parents!” or the one that says, “It’s the teacher!” are both too limited to be of much use. The problems are all contextual, as are the solutions. At the same time, it’s also pretty easy to point to a few features of home OR school, and suppose that were those things to change, the students would be more likely to develop substantial academic character. It’s just that most situations in schools are much more complex than the general public appreciates. These are human beings having their own lives. It’s not - contrary to the ugly business model that has taken hold - a factory where we make widgets.
Exactly. Attempting to force kids to attend school outside a school week is no more legitimate than attempting to force them to attend school outside a school season.
We had Saturday detention at my high school when I attended. I think I got it twice, both times being an exercise in how to sleep without looking like one was sleeping (which served me not too well in the military). I did get an in-school suspension once, which amounted to having teachers give the required reading and some in-class exercises to me where I did them in the school office, and not having lunch with fellow students.
I don’t particularly see the problem with Saturday detention. I just wish it wasn’t called “detention,” because at the time detention meant “forced study time” and learning isn’t a punishment, and shouldn’t be used as a punishment. If you missed a class without a decent excuse then you should make up the class. If there is some other kind of punishment needed, then—I don’t know what the solution is. I guess forced study time is a good use of time but its use in a context of punishment is really questionable to me.
