Argh, class from hell again - please forgive my rant!

[Hulababy]

Not really education, more a work rant...but I need to just get it out before I explode!

Day started fantastic. Has the Regional Director for the KS3 ICT coming in to shadow the LEA Advisor. School has no HoD for my subject (ICT) so Advisor comes in once a week to work with us. RD came in my first lesson - bottom set, very low abaility Y8 and it went great RD was very pleased and had no faults at all. Next two lessons went well too, but then.....

.... the Y9 class from hell.

I really thought we were having some head way with this lot but today was the worst lesson in my entire teaching career, and I feel c**p. They were awful. The class is 30 kids, mixed ability (but the top and bottom kids in year are creamed off). Have tiny ICT room. 20 PCs crammed together. Not enough room really for 30 to cram in but hey ho. 6 have EBD issues, but I'd say at least that amount again have behavioural problems in school.

Came into class high - refused to settle to the activity awaiting them. One lad came in and first thing he did was to pull someone';s chair over and knock the other lad to floor. Dealt with that...

...but it just continued No learning took place for the majority. My computers were pulled apart, wires ripped out back, mouses dismantled. Called for Active Patrol but no one around to answer. Gave out some detentions.concern forms to worst offenders, who couldn't have cared less anyway.

I've now spoken to Deputy Head and asked for a non ICT room for a while. No way are they going back in my room and ruining my equipment. Also spoken to LEA Advisor (who has seen them first hand and he agrees with me, and is coming up with some alternative ICT work that doesn't use computers whilst we get the discipline and behaviour sorted.

I have complained every week about these and spend so much time planning and preparing for the lesson. If I do anything that remotely challenges them or makes them think they can't cope and go mad. But management don't appear to be doing anything. The people I chat to in the staff room are all complaining about this year group. The new Head of Y9 doesn't appear to have improved them at all.

Maybe I am a c**p teacher; at times I feel like it. Hand up though, I don't know what to do next with these kids They make me so and so all at once.

But all my inspections and onservations are always good, so why is this going so bad????

Anyway, sorry for ranting and going on. I needed to ge it all out, even if no one listens IYSWIM. Therapy and all that. Please feel free to ignore though as I know I have waffled tons.

IF you think of a new way Cam, let us all know! Sure they'd be alot of teachers out there eager to find out what it was

Oe of the teachers at school has apparantly been given 4 weeks to improve after half term. No idea really what the issues are but there is no support from management from what she says. She has to improve and yet she is not even being released from doing cover lessons in order to seek advice, observe lessons, etc. She has to teach whole of Y9, along with rest of KS3 So heavy timetable. As I said, I don't know her well but even so.... we need some support here , but it doesn't seem to be coming from anyone.

Today was much better. Y7 were lovely

Do you break up on Friday for half term? We had Ofsted in last week and our kids have been hyper this week - the godawful weather doesn't help either. Hang in there and look forward to the hol. I had a year 7 class from hell last year and felt I'd achieved absolutely nothing with them but another teacher came to tell me today how thankful she was that because of my hard work with them they now all knew how to sit on their chairs! Just keep thinking of small gains!

Yes, half term is next week. Today was my last day there before half term though

Sounds like you did teach your Y7's something then

Send them out to work for a year so they'd be grateful to go back to school! Seriously though I wonder whether the first, middle and upper school system is better so that 13 year olds are at the top of the middle school and can feel more responsible? Private preps often go up to 13 may have seemed to work better for this reason? and then move to senior school the following year.

Sorry- i missed this last night for some reason Hula.
I think that you have wider issues here than just this one class. Your school is under special measures isn't it? Is this a new head or the old one?
It's time for some very drastic action- if support from te SMT is not forthcoming refuse to have the buggers in your class until they can behave. You can't refuse to teach them but if I remember correctly you are within your rights to set work to be completed elsewhere.
Personally I'd go to my union now- if you're not getting support from SMT then involve the union- something has got to be done about these kids andit's not really down to you if they're like this for other staff. Find out who else they're like this for and if it's the majority then demand action... phone the union tomorrow to see where you stand on not having the bad ones in your classroom

I have just done a morning in a school with year 10 as part of my companys community relations doing mock interviews and CV writing.

...2 1/2 hours was more then enough for me! I admire you immensley for being able to teach the little monsters!

PS. I have also decided to ban my 2 DS's from turning into teenagers!

Pixiefish - it is the same head and the same senior management too. And yes, we are in special measures.

I know what you are saying, and from what I can gather Y9 is very much an issue throughout the school. Not just with me. These kids can be just as bad when the LEA Advisor is in the classroom too.

I will see what the LEA Advisor has to say after half term (I have broken up for the holidays now ) and how the pupils are with the new work and the non-ICT room. No doubt I will be back....

The only advice I can give you now is not to accept this hula- aren't there a few kids in that class who do behave- SMT have a responsibility to those kids' education.
I would phone the union tomorrow though hula just to get their slant on it and to get any advice- remember they've been campaigning for us against pupil indiscipline.

I'll e-mail the chap I "spoke" to about INSET pay Pixiefish and see what he says - just for reference.

There are som in that class who would love to learn and I feel for them. I really do, honest. It seems so unfair that they have to suffer and loose out. As my room is free one thing I am going to suggest to the LEA Advisor is that the good ones can go and work there, and make progress. And we can then gradually move the kids back into the ICT room between us, weedling out the worst offenders. If they misbehave in the ICT room, back they go into the normal classroom. And so on. Just an idea and not sure how well it would work or even if it is feasable. But I will see.

But at least in a normal classroom they can't damage the pc's. Good idea about letting some of them work in the computer lab- make sure you give the others something really crap and boring to do. I know your head is against this but they're not supporting you and I think that until he does then every man for himself and you've got to do what you can to contaion these animals for 50 minutes.

Don't worry I intend too. Luckily LEA Advisor is with me and supporting really well. So important for me to have him around, with having no HoD I could have really been out on a limb here. He's such a fab bloke and works so hard. The department is running so much better since here stepped in this term. Just a shame he doesn't fancy the job FT!

Come to conclusion that I have to start doing this MY way, as the anagement's way isn't working.

Deadline for applications for the new HoD was last Friday. No idea if there were any suitable candidates this time. Unless they are very quick though I can't see us having a HoD after Christmas either.

We're in a similar situation with no second- very hard work- hod a bit bogged under with everything- discipline a bit of a prob at our place as well- tend to have to sort it ourselves- i'll email a couple of suggestions

Cheers As you know I am more than willing to try anything once to see if it'll work

pixiefish, please don't refer to 13 year old children as "these animals" in your post on Wednesday.

True, the behaviour of some of them would shame an animal.

Had one threaten another girl that she would throw acid over her week before last. When I told her that she had to leave my leson she told me to 'fuck off'.

cam- their behavious does not suggest that they are civilised.

Far too many of the kids I teach are essentially feral.

Hula - maybe they need to sit in a nice cold room copying out pages and pages from a nice textbook about computer programming??? - I know they have to learn but if they don't want to hey what are you supposed to do??

I must confess that I have don't this with some of my more challenging kids. It is amazing how it helps then to calm down and control themselves! One even commented on how much he had written in a lesson, and was quite proud of himself, so it wasn't a wasted activity

Sadly I know from preveious postings that Hula can't do this as the school is in special measures and the smt have tied the teachers hands.

hula- really sorry to hear about this class. They sound like very hard work and with no support from the senior management team it must be even harder. I do hope things improve and am glad you're feeling better about things today.

More generally, do people think that very poor behaviour in school children could be linked in any way to their teachers' perception of them as feral animals?

Do you think that the perception could be linked to the behaviour that we see?

I never let my feelings influence the way I teat a child in my care. However some of them are ,essentially, feral. They have no manners whatseoever, they swear, hit, threaten and bully. Thses are note, please understand children with reconised conditions like ADHD but simply children who have never been taught the way to behave. And when you talk to their parents you can understand just how the poor kids have turned out the way that they have. There is nothing quite like being told to fuck off by a child and then being threatened by the childs parents to set you up for a good day.

There are schools where assults are a regular occurence (not my school thank god). A teacher in london was raped by a boy in Y9 ( I think) in her first week of teaching this year. I think that he is feral, don't you?

Sorry that should have been, 'these are not children with adhd'

My trouble with thinking of/referring to people as animals or feral or the like is that it is the first stage in a dehumanising process. I know that probably sounds ridiculously dramatic and OTT to some people but I genuinely think that it is problematic to do this, even if it is something we keep to ourselves. I?m not quite sure how to communicate what I mean properly but it?s ultimately something to do with recognising the personhood of others, maybe. I do know that I would feel utterly devastated if I believed that I or someone I loved was thought of as a non-person by another, even my/their behaviour was sometimes/often challenging. To me there is something fundamentally ethically important about ?personhood?, I guess, and my feeling is that if we don?t/can?t accord that status to certain people or groups of people then something is very wrong. It?s not that I don?t honestly sympathise with teachers struggling with classes dominated by children who are showing extremely difficult behaviour. It really sounds like an awful job at times (and wonderful at others) and I?m not surprised it gets you stressed, upset, angry, frustrated some days. But that?s not to say I agree that children behaving badly are not people and I think that, when you get down to brass tacks, that is what it means to say that someone is an animal or feral.

On a slightly different point, of course I feel utterly and totally sorry for the teacher who was raped, hmb. It was a truly terrible thing to happen and my heart goes out to her. I cannot imagine how awful it was for her to experience such a terrifying ordeal. I would guess that she feels that her life is in tatters and that this is something that will stay with her forever. It is a tragedy. But my interpretation is that the young person who did this to her has also ruined his own life. He has committed a horrifying (and, in this context at least, unusual) crime and made another person suffer horribly and he will now, rightly, be commensurately punished. He, also rightly, will have to live with all the consequences that committing such a dreadful crime brings- penal, emotional, educational, social- many of these for the rest of his life. To have irrevocably ruined your life at fourteen is a tragedy too, IMO. I don't know anything about this boy and his life, don't know why he did such a dreadful, dreadful thing at just 13 or 14 years old but I strongly suspect that things must have been very, very wrong for him to do such a thing. I'm just not sure that labelling him as feral helps matters any, tbh.

that should be "even IF my/their behaviour was sometimes/often challenging."