To be sick of having my stuff trashed

[flobird]

Stupid rant and I just want sympathy but I am so fucking sick of giving pens and rulers out only for them to be smashed and thrown across the room or crushed/wrecked.

I feel like I'm constantly replacing stuff

If I charged them for a pen or objected to giving them a pen, no work would be completed.

Seriously.

Then it's my neck on the line!

I work in a 'nice' school in a reasonably affluent area. The amount of pupils who turn up ill equipped for lessons is massive. They get earnings which accumulate until they have a detention then, more often than not, you get mummy and daddy on the phone complaining how little Jimmy has been treated. Parents are the problem in my school, not the kids.

I can't imagine how hard your job must be OP.

Not the case because I've done it in tough schools and it works. They do want to be in the lesson, most kids do. It's their performance area. Let them be picked up by senior management. I have rung home and asked parents to bring up their equipment or for them to go home. It's a whole school issue.

At the moment who is suffering? They can't walk off site easily and anyway you have told them to be quick and come back with the pen. You haven't told them to go home.

Putting up with it is madness.

What have you found that works balloon?

Give out pens take them back at the end of the lesson? Tried this but kids are ingenious at subverting every system.

This is so familiar. SLT do not respond to students wandering round school. They see it as a teacher that is failing. Teaching seems to me to be more about behaviour management, and not ahem teaching. I do not wish to partake in behaviour management that why I am an ex science teacher!

I used to work in the 'pre-exclusion' department of a school freshly out of special measures, with the aim of becoming a maths teacher. The above posts are why I never started training and became an accountant instead. It's exhausting, especially when you don't have SLT to back you up.

I have the utmost respect for teachers. The workloads are gruelling. Really feel for you OP.

Reading this thread makes me really grateful our SLT are really on it. So SO grateful.

So if you say "No pen, don't come in to the lesson," they will be overjoyed. They will wander round the school and not come back. They may leave the school entirely.

What would happen then? Surely disruptive or ill-prepared kids shouldn't be in the classroom?

What is SLT?

I am more concerned about the pupils tbh. How can you teach in a room with broken furniture and a dirty floor? How are the students going to value or respect their education in those conditions? Low level disruption is so destructive to learning. Poor sods.

Not blaming you OP. It all sounds like a no win situation.

flobird, head to one of those conference/training/advertising sessions that they hold in conference centres, and grab pens from every stand. You could get enough to see you through a month or two.....

Oh so familiar. I've taught all over the county and had this problem to some extent in most schools regardless of catchment. The "worst" schools tend to be better because SLT is on board and there's systems like equipment checks in registration to help. The most difficult ones are the middling schools.

It's not an individual teacher's problem. The child that beings nothing to the first lesson will have nothing in 5 lessons through the day. It does need a whole school mentality to make it a big problem.

In the worst school for this, the general behaviour was atrocious because the lengthy, bureaucractic behaviour system was utterly ineffective. I was an NQT with an inappropriately large bottom set group. 20 out of 26 did not bring equipment. What I purchased myself and lent out was taken, trashed or chucked out of the windows. I had no support from colleagues due to timetabling clashes. It wasn't a battle for an individual teacher. It was a war that needed the whole school and parental support to sort out the underlying attitudes.

Can you make friends with a local doctors surgery? My Dad used to have a handful of pens from a drugs rep that advertised incontinence medicine, amazingly no one ever wanted to keep them, and he kept hold of them for years despite frequent lends. Maybe a daft idea for your situation, I don't know?

SLT is senior leadership team. ( heads and deputies etc) agree it's a whole school issue.
Love the idea of pens advertising medical products!

There are easier ways to make a living.

I once met One of my worst disruptive students a few years later. I had become a nurse then and had to stick a needle in him, and swab his private parts! It was a good day. He was with his mum and as good as gold!

60 pens for £24.60 What slogan should the OP put on them to ensure they get returned?

You can have 4 lines of 30 characters per line!

They should say "I love Justin bieber"

bet their own pens would show up then

Comfy incontinence pads - perfect for every day use!

Giles - seriously, 'I love Justin Bieber' would see said pen hurled across the room with force ('I'm not using THAT.')

I'll stick with those from the local discount store. 20 for 50p :)

I think a lot of posters have no idea at all what it's like to work in a school where most kids are not motivated at all.

The saddest thing I saw in education was when we had a taster day for year 10 students. I was in a college and took them for an IT class. There were 12 students in the class. Three of them wanted to work. The other nine broke all of the little legs on the keyboard, unplugged and plugged in every computer about ten times, bashed the on/off switch repeatedly. After ten minutes I "sent them for a break" so that they didn't damage any more machines. There was literally no getting through to them - they weren't even looking at me. There was no teacher from school with them in the class, just me. So 9 went off for a break and the other 3 sat and did the work I'd set them.

I asked them how they could stand it - just the noise level was tremendous. They said they'd accepted they wouldn't get any qualifications in school. Said it very matter of factly. They said they would go to college and re-do their GCSEs.

My heart broke for those children.

It's rubbish isn't it, Imperial?

That's largely why I try to have everything organised and ready - so the ones who do want to work can get on and then we can press forward with the lesson.

If a member of staff refuses to let a pupil in because they do not have a pen, it is the member of staff that will get blamed by the SLT for any problems that occur because of this. In no school that I worked in would you get backed up by the SLT for doing this.
With some classes that I taught I used to provide for all the pupils that wanted one, a bag with their name on containing the basics, which was put on their desk at the start of the lesson and collected in at the end. Since it 'belonged' to them, the equipment tended to get looked after better.

If I wouldn't let children in because they had no pen, they would go and maraud around the corridors wreaking havoc in other classrooms before returning to mine and running in, whining loudly about the injustice of the situation and unsettling everybody else.

(By the way, the start of lessons aren't a pen hunt. Pens are out on the desks ready. It's the smashing them or 'exploding' that gives me the rage.)

If a member of staff refuses to let a pupil in because they do not have a pen, it is the member of staff that will get blamed by the SLT for any problems that occur because of this. In no school that I worked in would you get backed up by the SLT for doing this.

I'm sorry to hear that. Our SLT rang parents and sent kids home to get equipped at the start of the process. Then we had whittled it down to the hardcore and it was manageable.

I've been using pens for around 50 years, and I've never ever known one to 'explode'.
I can understand the OP's point of view. My friend was a playground assistant for a few months in my son's senior school (stopped kids going out of school grounds, checking for smoking, etc), every single day she was told to 'fuck off' ,often by teenagers much bigger than her getting right in her face. And that's a school where nearly everyone leaves with some GCSE's, in a low crime (though far from wealthy) area.
Something is very wrong here.