Keep him from making the call and keep him on task in the classroom.
Are you honestly telling me you will be punished by the school if you fail to initiate a physical confrontation with a drug dealer?
No. But I am legally responsible for seeing that no student, including the drug dealer, does anything to cause harm to himself or any other student in my classroom if it is forseeable and could be prevented.
Almost all of my male students were taller than I. I’m 5’3". And yes, I have had physical confrontations with students. I’ve taken a knife away from a student who was about six feet tall. I’ve broken up students that were fighting. That’s part of the job. I’ve walked between students who were about to start swinging. (But I’ve never had a fight break out in my classroom.) And once I got my lights punched out my trespassers. (I’ve had students with guns.)
When you become a teacher you are expected to be able to maintain order in your classroom. Every teacher has some problems, but overall you have to have good management skills. If you don’t, you probably won’t get tenure or won’t want to stay in teaching.
I would not get into a physical confrontation over a phone. Most of the time the student would not try that in my class. If she or he did, more likely than not, the student would hand over the phone. If not, that student would not be allowed to attend my class for a few days.
I don’t consider taking an item away from a student to be necessarily a “physical confrontation.” A teacher can remove something such as a telephone without actually touching the student. That’s where I would draw the line.
I wouldn’t change the rules. I would change the entire public school system. But short of that, I would make self-defense part of standard teacher education.
"In the statement, Phillips insisted the district is “sensitive to the needs of students whose parents serve our country” and that the guidance department has arranged for a number of students to get calls from their parents.
Fellow student Terri Eady scoffed at that suggestion. Eady, 18, whose father is in Iraq, said she has never been told her father could call her at school and never heard about anyone getting such a phone call."
Looks like the school is “exaggerating” their policy of arranging calls. Or at least how widely known the policy is.
The student was new to the school system, and even those who have been there longer don’t know anything about the arrangement.
No it doesn’t. There is no rational way to read the story to come to your conclusion, and the school officials themselves haven’t even claimed this.
Listen to yourself. You are so biased that you are coming up with things out of the blue that the school officials themselves haven’t even tried to claim!
The student handled the situation badly. Nobody is denying that. But at the same time, he is new to the system, the students are not aware of the “arranged calls”, his father is dead, his mother is fighting in Iraq, the teacher grabbed his phone and disconnected him from his mother, and the officials wouldn’t let him answer when she called back and chastised him for “hanging up.”
They messed up. They shouldn’t have grabbed the phone, as it was absolutely unnecessary. They messed up. They should have let him answer when his mom called back. The student, in a perfect world, would have remained calm as this all went down, but the teacher and the school acted poorly, and there need to be changes made.
Has the school official actually said there is a system to arrange calls?
Has he said the students know they can do so?
Has he said how many do so?
No. All he says is that “a number” of students have gotten arranged calls. That tells us almost nothing. It would be true if even one student had ever gotten an arranged call.
So we should give the teacher some leeway because it was a gray area? I thought the policy here was supposed to be black and white, zero tolerance, and no excuses.
Zero tolerance, no excuses only applies to the “underlings”. It does not obviously apply to those who are “in charge”. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. Wouldn’t abuse of power and punishing someone for not breaking a rule that already had exceptions provided for be more serious to “a reasonable person” than a phone call from the war zone?
As for the “official statement” that was presented, it sounds like fabricated CYA pablum, designed to say nothing. Fellow student Terri Eady seems to be saying that it’s bullshit, and I wonder how many other students are saying the same (or would if asked). I wonder how many teachers and administrators know about this “policy exception” that has magically appeared After The Fact. If there is a zero tolerance, no excuses thing going on, have the guts to say so; don’t act like a big badass and then turn all pissy and waffle when you get called on it.
There are four possibilities:
the school “policy” allowing calls under special circumstances doesn’t exist or
was made up after the fact to cover someone’s butt or
was never communicated to anyone in the first place
someone chose to ignore it.
One more thing - nobody YET has answered my previous question about Time Zones, and the possibility that this was the Only Time the calls could be made.
More and more, the whole thing is starting to smell again. I don’t want to hear “rules are rules” again. Obviously they aren’t, except when they apply to someone else. Now what happens to the suspension, since the phone rule has not been broken> Does the teacher get advised on how to follow the rules or is she special? Or are the students still expected to blindly follow all rules (no exceptions) even when the rule has an exception or doesn’t exist?
Maybe all the students did learn an important lesson - that adults are also stupid, incompetent, and mostly full of shit?
There are no gray areas here. The school made that abundantly clear when they thought they had the upper hand. Now they get the same “leeway”, none.
Perhaps no one has answered because it is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand. If you show me where the student made a good faith effort to be exempted from the policy, and where the school callously rebuffed him, we can talk.
Otherwise, you’ll need to show me where there were no other means of communication available for either
a) the mom to coordinate with her son about when calls will happen (e-mail springs to mind)
b) the mom or student to communicate with the school to either exempt the student from the policy or route all calls through the school.
as for holmes- I think we agree a whole lot more on this than you think. If it had been me, I’d have done the same thing- let the kid finish the call, and then punish him for the infraction. But once again, that’s now, after I’ve had x number of days to meditate on it. If taking phones was SOP for this policy, though, I don’t see how the teacher could have been expected, AT THE TIME, to make a better decision.
But, as I said in my first post on this subject- I tend to side with teachers in cases like this because I have a very small idea of how many calls like this they have to make in a day and still remain sane. Outside of criminal actions, a flub here and there, a less than optimal call now and again, are well within tolerance for what they are charged with. But that’s just my own bias.
To hell with good faith and exemptions. How can you stay stuck on that when the school system itself has no clue what the policy is? Is this a school or a slave camp? Now that it’s hitting the fan, the school is generating bullshit statements to cover their asses, instead of saying “we made a mistake”. Instead of owning up, they are backpedalling like crazy. Where is the good faith in that? How about removing the suspension from the school records? Why is it looking like nobody ever knew anything about even the possibility of exemptions until after the fact? If there are exemptions, then what happened to “enforce the law equally hard for everyone and no exceptions”? If there are exemptions, then why would this one individual be singled out to have to beg for any added “special permissions”?
Furthermore, the time difference is very relevant. Do the math. 12 noon stateside is night time in Baghdad. It may be the only time it is possible to call. It is the least disruptive (to the school) time to call. If the parent uses a phone to do it, maybe it is because she has no access to computers because maybe they’re being used for ummm like combat related stuff ya know. Maybe the only computer around is a Tempest computer full of secret information/records and she doesn’t have the proper clearance to even be in the same room with it.
Here’s your clue. If a parent needs to contact their child, it is that parent’s choice how and when to do it. If I had a kid, I highly doubt I would allow some two bit wannabe bureaucrat dictate when or how I will be allowed to talk to him/her. The school’s convenience does not mean a thing. Besides which, if it was during lunch break, what damn hardship did it place on the teacher or the school system?
So it’s back to zero tolerance for anyone except the teacher and the school. Got it. The old double standard.
Other than The Almighty Rules, what good reason is there to deny a parent and child, separated by thousands of miles, the ability to communicate on an occasional basis? (rules even the almighty school doesn’t seem to understand)? There is none, except in the small minds of miserable people. :dubious:
I myself have received e-mail from friends stationed in Baghdad and even farther out in the sticks. If having no access to e-mail is applicable here, I’d like to hear about it. But I don’t think it’s the norm for regular troops on station. And of course, no one is saying that the mother could not have called- but she should have called the school directly, and trusted them to call the student to the office to speak. It happens all the time.
You are, apparently, the sort of parent that gives my wife and her colleagues fits on a regular basis. While the teacher has the burden of pounding some much needed information into your precious child’s melon, you want to be there at every step, interfering. If I need to talk to my child at school, I go to the office first- because that’s policy. They page him and he comes from his class, or they show me to the nurse’s station, or whatever. That way, class isn’t disrupted by my presence. I’d never think to just go barging into the class, because I know how disruptive that can be, and I don’t feel like my whims trump the school’s policy- because I understand the reasons for it, and I don’t see myself as above the rule of law. On the other side, I don’t know of any school that would refuse a parent’s visit or call to the office. If they do that, let me know, and I’ll protest louder than anyone.
And yes, teachers have different rights than students. They have different responsibilities, too. Funny how that works.
It is not constant interference, as you are trying to make it. It is sporadic calls, or maybe only the ONE call, DURING LUNCH TIME. The student WAS NOT IN CLASS HE WAS ON LUNCH BREAK. Am I getting through yet? Nobody was barging into any class, at all. There was no disruption, until Avenging Teach decided to throw some weight around. (Oh my, no teachers ever ever ever do that do they?) Don’t even try to go there. I say again for the impaired among us. it was DURING LUNCH TIME. It was not a thousanth call from Soccer Mom down the street, it was one call from Army Mom, thousands of miles away.
You are assuming Army Mom has email - I say she may not have it. It’s possible. Or the child may not have a computer. Or there may be a computer at the school, but they have some rule (no exceptions) against personal emails.
As far as trusting some bureaucrat to forward and coordinate incoming calls, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. I work with bureaucrats, and I are one. Care to guess how many will say “He isn’t around” and hang up, because that is easier than getting off their dead ass? It happens ALL the time. I’ve seen it for myself.
Finally, the “above the law” crap you keep slinging over and over ad nauseum tells me there IS no other reason. Don’t you have anything else to justify what is looking more and more like the school screwed up? Or are you maybe just unwilling to see that there was a big foulup?
Yeah, teachers get more slack because they have more responsibilities… UNTIL it goes wrong. Then the Magical Suddenly Appearing Official Statement appears, and ta da nobody is responsible. No excuses. No variance. Zero tolerance. No exemptions. Until He/She Who Is In Charge gets her tit in the wringer. Then it all changes. Weasel words. You want to take a hard line, be prepared to get it thrown right back at you, at any time. That’s just what happened in this whole storyline.
Aside… If I were in Army Mom’s boat, I wouldn’t give a good goddam if it gave wifey-poo the fits.
A little bit more. Why is the Zero Tolerance so important, when “you” are putting it on someone else, yet when it comes back to bite “you” on the ass, it never applies? In my mind,
no slack for one = no slack for the other.
Unless you are perfect, you better not demand it from anyone else.
Why are Rules so inflexible except when YOU don’t like it because it affected wifey the Avenging Teacher? Why is the student expected to be a good little sheep and never even take a shit without permission, because it might (it didn’t after all) break some rule the Avenging teach didn’t even understand? Don’t you see something wrong with that?
Additional info. At 9:40AM here in California, it was 12:40 (lunchtime) in Georgia. That makes it 8:40PM in Iraq.
Assuming school lets out at 3:00PM in Georgia, that makes it 11:40PM in Iraq. Let’s give about an hour for the student to get home from school. That now makes it 12:40 in the morning in Iraq. Do you suggest that Mom either stay up all night to call, or simply never call, just so wifey and her buddies don’t get all put out? The father is dead, the mother just might be soon (with a bit of bad luck) and you are more interested in some teacher having an inconvenience? Your priorities are really fucked up.
This is a situation wherein any reasonable individual would realize that receiving cell phone calls would be a potential problem. The administrator cannot expect to give everyone a free pass simply because they failed to perceive reasonably self-evident complications.
Because presumably, the students may need to use the phones on their way to or from the school. Or maybe the students would have reason to use the phones during dire emergencies.
Reasonable, indeed. Many of the posters on this thread…not so much.
I honestly do not understand the mental disconnect here (as I’m sure some of those on the other side don’t with me as well). The rule is no cellphones. Not “no cellphone use except at lunch,” not “no cellphone use except if your mom’s in Iraq,” not “no cellphone use unless you really really think you’re special.” Just “no cellphone use during school.” As clear as it can POSSIBLY be.
If a student needs an exception from a rule, he needs to talk to the administration. That’s just plain common sense. If, for instance, backpacks are banned in the hallways, but a student is disabled and cannot carry his books, what is most reasonable, to just start wearing the backpack and to hell with the principal, or to talk to the administration and try to make arrangements in order to fix the situation?
I maintain that this is a situation in which the student knewin advance that it might be necessary to recieve calls during the school day. The student also knew that cellphone use was prohibited during school.
lunch break or not, the student is not out from beneath the school’s supervision. This is NOT a place of employment where your lunch time is your own. During school hours, school rules are still be enforced.
you keep parroting your numbers about timing, even though I explained why they are irrelevant. I will concede that there is no other time she could have called her son- but there were several good ways to abide by school rules and still speak with him. If he had turned his phone off in accordance with school policy, what would she have done?
your none-too-subtle jabs at my wife aside, I’d hope you have more respect for teachers in general. I find it ironic that we trust teachers with our children 8 hours out of the day, and then want to second-guess and micromanage everything they do. By ironic, I mean it just sucks.
you keep playing ‘gotcha’ with me- implying that as things progress, the school’s actions look worse and worse. Can you tell me how? Please do not include any media hyping, politicking, or ‘support our troops’ nonsense. Objectively, how is the school’s case getting worse?
you object to my giving slack to the teacher- can you show me what policy she violated? I might disagree with her exact approach, but I still can’t see what rule she broke. I can see what rule was broken by the student, precipitating this whole incident. As long as she didn’t punch the kid to get the phone, her confiscating it was SOP for contraband.
And yes, I know that I infuriate you with talk of things like ‘rules,’ ‘policy,’ and ‘enforcement.’
And rules are enforced at the discretion of the administration. In this case, after they discovered the circumstances, they should have declined to enforce the rule. Rules are not rules.
And they may well have, had the student not flipped out. That is NOT an overrule you can expect an individual teacher operating in a monitor position to make. That is an ADMINISTRATIVE decision. The student did not want to allow the administration to make the decision, he wanted to throw a temper-tantrum.
Again, he wasn’t suspended for using the phone (i.e. they DID decline to enforce the rule), he was suspended for his inappropriate reaction.
Again, at the discretion of the ADMINISTRATION, demonstrating poor judgment. There would not have been any reaction had the teacher not flipped out to begin with. Everybody over-reacted, it’s push, call it even, rescind the suspension. But nooooooo!, rules are rules, tantrums must be dealt with, no excuses, right?