OK, so violence in schools is very bad. This is not about that. It’s about the autorities giving up.
This is a kinda lame rant, but I just read an article in my local morning paper and it pissed me off.
My dad used to work as a janitor in a school till he was retired. The other day he told me something I didn’t know: Kids in ‘Junior High’ (being 13-15 here) had music on i classrooms while studying. Yes. Music. The teacher put on a Top40 station on the radio, while they where doing math problems. In fact, my dad told me this when we talked about collective punishments:
“When they had been really rowdy, the techer took away their radio priviligies.”
Me: “What!?”
And so he explained.
This is not a school in a poor neighbourhood, where teachers and staff have lost controll. This is very WASP:ish (without the AS, since we’re Swedish), suburban school in an affluent area. And teachers are so jaded with the whole teaching thing, that they put on the radio when the kids are doing math problems or working a chem experiment in science class.
Now, today I read that the Norwegian gov’t will ban cell phones from school.
Almost every kid in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway have a cell phone now, from the age 10 and up. What I didn’t know was that it’s turned into such a problem in school. It seems teachers don’t have a legal ground to confiscate them during class, if they don’t disturb. So kids have them without the ringing, just vibrating, meaning they spend class sending SMS-messages. Said one kid, 17:
“I might have sent one or two… thousand messages during last school year…”
Maybe he was bragging, but still…
A 12 y.o. when asked how kids did before cell phones:
“What, waddya mean?”
Another guy, always answers his phone while in class: “I excuse myself and tell the teacher I’m going to the bathroom, and then I take the call. It could be important - my girlfriend calling about what we’re gonna do after school.”
A kid having a cell phone is a good thing, IMO. It makes for a more secure life. Parents give their kids cell phones with ‘cash cards’, pre paid. When they’ve used that months amount, no more outgoing, only incoming, and ‘911’-calls, so it doesn’t get to be terribly expensive. Also, in GSM-Land, you never pay for receiving a call, when you’re connected to your own, nationwide network.
BUT: Has the attention span of kids gotten so bad, they can’t be without their phones for 40 minutes? Are teachers so bad at teaching and handling discipline, that kids can use their private phones during class. Are kids so easily bored that they have to listen to radio to be able to study?
These are the kids that are gonna pay for my retirement in 25 years. God help me.
:mad: