Amen. The ridicule of “Duck and Cover” and other civil defense efforts is a pet peeve of mine. Duck and Cover has become synonymous with absurdity and lying to the public, when in fact it was a sound and necessary response.
No one ever said that Duck and Cover would save students if a nuclear bomb dropped on their school or even their community. If that happens, the students die.
But if the bomb drops on the city center 60 miles away, do you really want students just sitting in their desks when the blast wave hits them? Or standing at the window pointing at the big flash of light?
As powerful as they are, nuclear bombs don’t obliterate everything for an unlimited distance. If the school is far enough away to survive the ground zero blast but close enough to suffer some damage from the shock wave, Duck and Cover is good policy. (Much of the same theory applies to the home shelters and other Cold War civil defense suggestions.)
And we have to remember that Duck and Cover, with the educational cartoons starring a cute turtle, was intended to educate little kids.
For what it’s worth, Duck and Cover is considered good enough for the US military even today, though we just call it “Take Cover”, also known as “Hide under or behind something solid.” When people are trying to blow you up, it never hurts to make yourself a smaller target.
High school teachers, huh? Not a good sign. Many posters here have explained the benefits of such an accountability system and it’s hard to fathom why no one on your facutly could see it. Or maybe it’s just a case of a bunch of teachers griping when a new system is suggested. I used to tell my students at the beginning of the year that if for any reason they were not in the room with me when the warning went off - bathroom break, nurse visit, errand, etc. - they damn well better find me in my regular spot when we were outside - regardless of how they got out of the building. All of us had the same policy. 35 years, 60 gazillion fire drills, no kids lost. It works.
A supply/cover teacher wouldn’t know the kids’ faces well enough to be able to spot quickly if someone’s missing, or if the kids are moving around to allow Billy and Sarah to grab some together-time in a building which they think isn’t really on fire. And periods in-between classes aren’t covered. In a real fire, there’d be panic; it wouldn’t be a good time to expect kids to make a decision about where to go to get attendance taken. It’s much safer to have ‘this is the way we always do it’ and practice it so that it’s, uh, drilled in.
If a student’s entered or left the school, someone on the staff should be responsible for recording that; that person checks up on those people, like at the school I was talking about. It’s really quite a simple system.
If you have kids wandering in and out of school unrecorded then any method of taking attendance is going to be problematic.
Setting aside the issue of lunch or between periods which is clearly a valid point - I don’t understand why you think 1 particular teacher would know students from 1 period better than a different teacher at a different period.
Let’s pretend there are 7 periods, thus 7 classes during the day and 7 different teachers - why do you think the teacher from a homeroom or 1st period would know the students faces any better then the teacher in the 7th period? They all seem equal to me.
They are equal. The point is just to pick one and stick with it. But it makes sense to choose home room because that’s where a lot of administrative functions are handled.
Because I was talking about supply/cover teachers, not regular teachers.
pabstist, the new method at your school is virtually identical to the method used where I work. Except our parking lot has permanent signs on the light poles to tell you which one you should group under for roll call, so there’s probably a bit less confusion.
In my high school you maintained the same “homeroom” teacher, and the same “homeroom” group of students, for all 4 years. “Homeroom” was a miniperiod of 15 minutes between 2nd & 3rd period.
Is a “supply/cover” teacher another word for substitute teacher?
Or a staff member who is pulled in when the regular teacher has to be out the room during the day, but not necessarily absent- an emergency conference etc.
Yep - I knew there was a different word I should have added, but hoped people would infer that I meant a non-regular teacher.
There might be one for homeroom too, of course, but IME that’s far more likely to be a regular teacher from the school (often a dept head who doesn’t have their own form group) rather than one from outside.
I am not sure how your system works but when I was in high school, there was a 1o minute homeroom (attendance and announcements) followed by 5 periods.
Of those 5 periods, one of 3rd or 4th period was your lunch (half of students had 3rd, half had fourth). If you were in 11th or 12th grade, you often took a ‘spare’ period which could fall in any of the five. You had to remain on school grounds unless you ‘signed out.’
So, picking a period would not have worked for our school at all.
As such, we were to go to our homeroom teachers and check in if there were a drill (once checked in, we could do what we liked as long as we didn’t go back in or leave school grounds).
Cool. My school as well, though it was between 4th and 5th periods for us. Until now I’ve heard of anyone else having have homeroom any other time than first thing in the morning.
We had 9 period day* with either a 1-8 or a 2-9 basic schedule. Not everyone would be at school yet if they had homeroom before 1st period.
*there was a “zero period” as well for a total of 10 academic periods, but only electives were given during zero period - usually advanced electives of interest to relatively few – so taking on a zero was voluntary and not considered a part of an “ordinary” schedule.
This is exactly the policy my company has (and I work at a chemical factory and lab where damn near everything we use and make burns like hell itself.) The local fire department likes that we follow this, and we drill at least four times a year.
In our case, it makes a bit more sense in that we have designated safety officers that have walkie-talkie radios with them. So everyone gets to the meeting point, the safety officer does a count (they also have our portable sign-in boards we all use, and that they can grab on the way out, that list who should be with them, and whether that person was in the building at the time). If someone isn’t there, they can radio to the other safety officers to see if somehow the missing person ended up at the wrong position, but is still out and safe.
Believe me, it does make sense. We’ve never had a bad fire, but if we did - you really, really don’t want a fire(wo)man risking their life to wade into a burning lab filled with hellaciously inflammable “fuel” unless they have to. If you can verify that everyone is out and safe, then the fire department can be more cautious.
Plus, having everyone verified puts everyone else at ease. You’re not torn up wondering if your friend is trapped in there.
TLDR; the system is good because you can quickly figure out who’s safely out and who is dangerously in. Makes a bit less sense for the school, unless the students are tracked and noted every time they enter or exit the school. But even if this doesn’t occur I still don’t think it’s a bad system.
Maybe I should simplify my original question-
During a fire alarm or bomb threat evacuation is it best, safest, etc to-
- Go out the nearest door and walk in a straight line as a group to a meeting point.
- Go out any door and ramble around the building individually until you get to the meeting point.
- Get the hell out of the building ASAP and run for the hills.
I guess that boils it down in a nutshell. Forget about the details of attendance.
And something I/we forgot to think about is bomb threats. Should students be walking around the building if a bomb could potentially explode? The students aren’t told to stay 1,000 feet away from the building, just to walk around it.
All the scenarios involve getting out quickly and more-or-less orderly. Your choices are really
- Have a meeting point that depends on where you currently are, but people get to their meeting points quickly.
- Have a single meeting point assigned to each person, but that person may have farther to walk to get to that meeting point.
- Don’t have meeting points at all.
3 is a problem in that no one knows if anyone is still in the building. 2 is probably best in a work environment where the individuals are all responsible for themselves, and may be in a variety of locations. I suspect it’s flowing into schools because it’s better in other situations. It may not be as clearly the best in a school, but IMHO, it’s still a better choice.
Did we go to the same high school? Mine did the same thing.
Our homeroom teachers and classmates would recognize us more easily than our subject teachers and classmates. Although we had a new homeroom teacher each year, the students generally stayed together. Our class schedules, on the other hand changed quarterly (back then- it changed later). I didn’t have sixteen different gym teachers, but I was in gym class with sixteen sets of different classmates
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Fine if the subject teacher knows all the students, if it’s not in between classes, if there are enough meeting points for each class in each subject, if all the students know all of the multiple possible meeting points they could go to for each subject, and if they remember them all in the panic of a real fire. That’s a lot of ‘ifs.’
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They don’t ramble around the building individually. The subject teacher gets them to their meeting point or very close to it (the school with tons of fire alarms had people standing near the meeting points herding the student onwards) then, if they’re also a homeroom teacher, goes to their place to take attendance. If they’re late due to straggling students (as happened to me a couple of times and to my colleagues), the kids are still there lining up and the other homeroom teachers are usually familiar enough with the kids to identify most of the students. Not all - that’s why you need the homeroom teacher - but they can make a start.
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How would you know who’s still in the building? If you don’t take attendance, you don’t know who’s left in the building. That means you either give up on those who might still be in there, or you send someone in there to look for them. In a real fire, that means people are more likely to die.
If there were a bomb, it wouldn’t make the building immediately go BOOM on the outside simultaneously with the inside. When there’s real smoke and fire coming out, or sounds of explosions, the teachers will move the kids away from the building. Or perhaps everyone will then run - but at least we’ll already know who’s running.
Taking attendance is sensible and having one specific person to take attendance, and one specific place to go, helps with taking attendance and quelling panic.
FWIW, each floor at the schools I worked in had its own fire warden who was someone without their own homeroom group, some first aid training, and a walkie-talkie.
There were a couple of bomb threats at my school (on the outskirts of London in the eighties) and several at my workplace (London in the 90s). There were also occasionally real bombs going off in London at the time. We did fire drill (with attendance) and then immediately sent everyone away from the school/workplace; it was great, TBH - a free day!
I know fire drill can seem like an inconvenience, but it is there for an actual reason, and the way it’s done is actually to reduce the potential number of deaths.