To think droves of teachers will make the decision by husband made today- to leave

[Peakyshelby]

Well after 6 years of teaching my husband has broken down, gone to the doctors, been signed off and says he is done.

he has done 3 years in 2 schools and then done supply for 3 years. There is too much to list but the highlights have been

been told to go and fuck himself and other insults thrown at him by kids with hardly any consequences from parents and schools

having stuff chucked at him

having to appear as a witness in court when a parent beat up his own child at home time in the playground

having parents create a smear group on WhatsApp against him and 2 other newly qualified teachers because the parents said there little darlings behaviour must be down to inexperienced teachers not being able to handle them.

having parents laugh and him and tell him he is picking on their little darlings by trying to sanction them.

have children laughing at him and saying my mum and dad don’t care what I do

hardly any support from above.

There is too much more to write but today he had a 10 year old child walk up to him and pour a water bottle over his head.

he is done. He qualified with a group of 10 others and 8 of them have since quit. 2 did not get through there NQT year.

He says the system is broken

And yes the majority of the pupils at the sixth forms are BAME

Exactly what I was thinking. Have 3 DS who are or were in state schools in a leafy area. All reported regular disruption to the school day because of pupil behavioural issues. Yet there’s constant bashing on here of parents going with private education.

We should be berating those who don’t give a shit about their kids not those investing in them.

With the lack of funding and downright vileness of some children, kudos to those teachers who stay in and stay motivated 🙏

Oh and just to illustrate further, I was once banned from a family trip to Italy because my grades had slipped due to my own laziness and for talking back. :)

Parents left me with my grandmother with strict instructions not to let me go on the PC and to ensure I’m studying, and off they went. It was a harsh but valuable lesson - grades never slipped again after that.

I'm guessing all these highly successful English graduates who've never bothered with all that 'grammar stuff' don't speak any foreign languages or have ever tried to teach foreign languages?

It's so much easier if you actually understand the terminology used to identify language components and how language is constructed. It's certainly taught in many other European countries where they are much better language learners... but, hey, who needs foreign languages when everyone else bothers to learn English, eh?

Almost 25 years ago I was training to work in a nursery. I was doing a placement in a school nursery and when older pupils acted out in class they were sent to the nursery to complete their work. Meaning that the nursery staff had to supervise primary age children whilst ensuring the nursery was running smoothly. If the primary aged children misbehaved in the nursery the parents were asked to collect them. A lot of the parents never wanted to collect their children as if the school fed the children the parents decided it meant they didn’t have to. A lot of the children also had social workers. Sometimes the children are acting out because something in their lives is very wrong and they don’t know how to express it.

Lostboys16 · Today 13:39
I'm guessing all these highly successful English graduates who've never bothered with all that 'grammar stuff' don't speak any foreign languages or have ever tried to teach foreign languages.

This is so true. I’m learning another language at the moment and my teacher says she has to spend half the lesson explaining in English what are adjectives and adverbs.

We weren't taught grammar in the 70s and I never had any desire to find out about it.

There are a lot of children from shit homes who don't misbehave. I taught in a school like this and it was a lovely place. My most recent school was full of entitled children who had never been told no in their lives.

It would help a great deal if children were taught maths explicitly rather than by discovery methods. There is one efficient way of addition, it uses columns and place value. Once you can do it you understand place value. There is no 'understanding' a mathematical concept without knowing how to do it.
As to grammar, I have suffered all my life (and I am a writer) because my school decided teaching grammar was old-fashioned. I envied my late DH his ability to shift round sentences because he knew the grammar and use of syntax that let him know he was still making sense. Definitely teach grammar and as soon as possible.
I thank Heaven fasting that Grove (otherwise a creep, I think) forced schools to abandon 'whole word' methods of teaching reading and made them use systematic synthetic phonics. I have four step-grandchildren who have problems reading because of whole word. That my own DCs learnt to read is certainly because their RC primary used phonics (not SSP, but something similar - much the way children were taught when I was a child - though my DM taught me to read and I read well, using implicit phonics).

For lack of explicit phonics teaching, I was unable to spell English at all well (3/10 for spelling tests) until I learnt French phonics, it clicked and I began using this new knowledge to spell and also decode unknown words e.g. Aristophanes, Ariadne (Greek phonics, I know), which I had not been able to do before despite having a very wide vocabulary. Had basic grammar at primary school, but little to nothing about subject/object, anaphoric and cataphoric reference etc.

You have never found algebra etc useful. But should we only teach children what will be useful? How do we know what will be useful? Why bother with Shakespeare for working-class children? They will never go to see any of the plays - I have heard this one in school, referring esp to children from other cultures as well as w/c children, and was appalled and pointed out why it was so wrong and patronising (and racist, I think). Our education is supposed to make us a rounded human being, not just fit us to work at a job. This is why I am furious at the almost total removal of the arts from state school curricula (the people wanting them removed make bloody sure their kids get this education, which is vital in order to progress in society as well as being illuminating and beautiful).

As to the phonics check I approve of it hugely. It shows whether a child can actually decode (by use of phonically legal nonsense words) rather than that they have just learned words by sight. Because it is words in isolation it also makes sure that when reading they are using phonics rather than relying on picture and context clues - which is how poor readers manage to scramble through a text.

We used the colums method of addition and it worked particularly well with the children who struggled with maths. Then, that was all out the window and we had to teach them horizontal addition. I was banging my head against a wall arguing that the children couldn't see the value of each digit therfore it was hard to understand.

Adjectives, nouns, adverbs are useful to know yes. That's year 2 stuff though! What they need to know in year 6 goes well beyond that and it's problematic. Michael Rosen does a good breakdown of the issues with it if you're interested in why.

I went to a state primary but moved to a really good prep school for the final year, as my parents wanted to send me to a selective secondary.

In that year I learned more than I had in the whole of the rest of my primary education including grammar.

Having done only one year of grammar, the rest of my grammar came from French and Latin at secondary school.

Everyone who learns a foreign language has to learn grammar - so why do English speakers studying English make such a fuss about it?

I’m 42 and learned about nouns, verbs and adjectives in last few years of primary school. But I don’t remember learning about tenses until secondary school and those we did learn were for French, not English!

The phonics check has issues as well. Some of the better readers actually perform less well because their brain is leaping ahead to make sense of what they are reading.

https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-letters-cambridge-typoglycaemia

She has a point, as do you. Sometimes it's the area, sometimes it's not.

Absolutely. I am just refuting the assumption I have only experienced schools in affluent areas.

That's the point of the nonsense words. They should not have to make sense of the word to read it using phonics. Using context to identify a word in a text is a poor reader's strategy, not a good reader's strategy (shown by the fact that 'better readers' make mistakes, i.e. turn a nonsense word such as 'strom' into a real word: 'storm'). A good reader reads the word actually there and then says, I don't know that word, how do I work out what it MEANS, cue using context for meaning and own general knowledge (point of a knowledge rich curriculum) or asking the teacher - what does Brobdignagian mean? or get a dictionary and look it up.
The 'better readers who perform less well because their brain is leaping ahead to make sense of what they are reading' are the poor readers. They are using context and meaning to decode a word. The 'good readers' are the one's who can read 'phob' with automaticity (and possibly ask what it is, but the pictures show it is the name of an alien creature) because they can decode. They will use their knowledge of things/people/ideas to work out what the word means whilst your 'better readers' are struggling to work out what a letter string (aka word) says from the words they recognise around it.
https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-letters-cambridge-typoglycaemia points out that although we do use word shape and prediction when we are reading that is not as revealing as it would appear (also the text given has never been used in any research). Good readers can read the jumbled text, with effort, acting just like a poor reader using word shape etc. That does not mean reading using word-shape, prediction and context (and pictures! where are the pictures in the Tractatus?) are good strategies for reading. They are strategies for reading for people who have not learnt to read using phonics, some of whom may never read well, and many will never read for pleasure because actual reading is much too hard for them to also enjoy the story.

Me too.

I’ve worked in a school and my DCs have been through the education system and it does seem to be getting worse wrt behaviour. Is it parenting/social media or what?
When my DS was at primary and he was rude to me at home I said - you wouldn’t talk to your head teacher like that so don’t say it to me & he said he was scared of his HT (hated getting told off at school) so that’s why he behaved there & was a bugger at home!
I am sorry your dh has found it so tough, but some parents are just really entitled and can’t see their perfect child has done wrong. I have seen it myself.

Michael Rosen does a good breakdown of the issues with it if you're interested in why.

Thank you - I’ll check it out.

I think it's quite sad that people, including teachers and graduates in English, see little or no need for grammar knowledge.

In music, sport, any field where you wish to master your subject, you learn the rules. Yet our own language apparently doesn't merit this.

In my Scottish state primary school in a working class area many years ago we learned lots of grammar. That all disappeared soon afterwards from the curriculum.

It enabled me to learn foreign languages to a high standard. I know not everyone wants to learn other languages but I am firmly of the belief that our economy has suffered because of our very low achievements in languages. And anyway, a high standard of English is important in many jobs for clarity and accuracy.

I know the OP was about bad behaviour in schools so this is off topic but important!

https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2024/06/this-years-ks2-grammar-punctuation-and.html

Nobody is saying that we shouldn't teach grammar at all. It's just that the depth of knowledge required of 11-year-olds is unnecessary. How often do you think about these things when you are writing? They have all come from this year's SATs paper.

adverbial
passive
past progressive
prepositions
simple past
co-ordinating conjunction
modal verb
relative clause
noun phrase
subordinate clause
preposition phrase
possessive pronoun
relative pronoun

As Michael Rosen says, "Please let's bear in mind right from the start that this test was NOT introduced because a group of grammarians and educationists said that it would be a good idea if 10 and 11 year olds knew this stuff. It was only introduced for one reason, as stated clearly in the Bew Report (2011). That is, that it would be a good way to assess teachers. Why? Because (again the Bew Report) 'grammar' has right and wrong answers. There is not a grammarian in the world who would or could seriously claim that. Language is not regular. The descriptions of language are not regular. As one simple example, as Professor David Crystal pointed out with the first of these Grammar tests, there was a question about the sun shining 'brightly'. The word the children had to insert was 'brightly'. If children wrote 'bright' that was wrong. It wasn't wrong, it's a 'variant usage'. Let's never forget that 'variant usages' are the nightmare of every examiner of these tests. In life, it's what makes us interesting. "

This thread has been an interesting read. I don't think the reason there's such bad behaviour in schools these days is just because there's loads of bad parents now. There's always been shit parents saying students vape in the toilets like it's a new thing when they were smoking in the toilets decades ago. There's always been angry spiteful kids but in the past they wouldn't dare get caught so they'd take it out on weaker kids or bunk off school to go out on some mischief.

I think the difference now is the teachers can't do shit to discipline these kids if you even shout at one you run the risk of being reported and sacked. Which emboldens them further. Can't even expel them because it looks bad on the Ofsted so everyone has to suffer their bad behaviour the classmates and the teachers, reading about the pregnant teachers who have miscarried because they've had things thrown at them is especially infuriating

Well, if it's doing all that (and healthcare ain't free btw, it's paid for through taxation and it's good or bad according to post code and also what is wrong with you) then it's mis-spending. Nationalize the utility and water companies (re-nationalize) and make them do the work we need: affordable power for industry, clean water and waterways. Don't pay child credits - that's just subsidising crappy employers (part of the very well-off's welfare state to the detriment of the rest of us). Instil discipline in schools by allowing the exclusion permanently of disruptive pupils so the rest can have an education. Make state education as good as that bought (tax free) by richer parents e.g. include the arts and the humanities, not just STEM.
Stop forcing parents out to work whilst leaving their children in nurseries. Unlike other European countries, the UK does not care about the educational outcome of childcare (though it says it does) but only to make sure every economic unit is out there making money for the rich (who benefit massively from the NHS, the welfare state - above child credits and also payments to workers to top up wages - and the services which we all need but they use more e.g. police, defence). When a society calls the mother of three children under five unemployed there is something deeply rotten at its core.