The teachers who can do no right

[flashharriet]

Interesting article here. The case of Jane Watts reminded me of a recent thread on here.

I thought the bit that said "In my view, the first problem is that we now live in a culture where many of us no longer think twice before making a disparaging comment about any grown-ups in front of children" was especially telling - has the pendulum swung too far the other way?

Is discipline about making the teacher feel better, though? Is it about you and your feelings and what you would like to do to their bollocks with a pinking shears , or about the rules and whether they have been broken?

Haven't read the whole thread - but from my classroom management viewpoint discipline is also about making other children feel safer and letting them get on with work.

We have a Yr 11 whose parents think he will get 9 As and can not believe that it wont happen because he bunks lessons, does no homework , no coursework to mark etc etc. It is all the fault of the school because he is 'studying' at home on the computer for hours ....

The horrible ones can just 'eat' up teaching time and probably have a far worst impact on the education of nice ones that if their parents took them off for a two week holiday every year during school time.

Discipline in most cases is about the rules and if they have been contravened. In the case I am talking about it was systemic and unwarranted sexual bullying which contravened both the school's rules and all civilised codes of decency. Had it happened to an adult then I think it would have involved the police, restraining orders and lastly a prosecution for harassment and libel.

When i was teaching invariably the worst behaved where also the most cocky - ' you can't do anything, - your not the boss of me - my mum / dad wont make me do detention - you cant make me ' and i even had one say, 'i'll say you hit me if you don't let me off'

my friends yr 10 child came home crying the other day and told her mum that she had been crying in maths cos the teacher could not control the other girls who were shouting and swearing and causing chaos for the whole of the lesson. she was angry at the teacher, rather than the girls behaving badly. so in a way she was wanting the adult in the room to make it all better. My friend said she told her that it wasn't just down to the teacher, and they discussed what the teacher did / could have done etc and reiterated that it was the girls who were behaving badly and causing the disruption.

I think it becomes soul destroying for the quiet ones who just want to get on with their work and not be subjected to what is in effect hostile behaviour every day.

Surely there is nothing to stop the measures you outlined being applied for the sake of the victim, even though it was a minor who was victimised by another? In an egregious case like this, did the school have a policy in place that involved going to the authorities? Or would the bully's right to an education have meant that he could stay in the school alongside his victim while the case dragged on.

In general, it's a pity that the notion of having a right to an education is not accompanied by any idea of responsibility both to yourself as a student and to the other students' right to go to school and learn in an orderly environment. I have often wondered if compulsory education should be scrapped, and only those students and parents who have bought the philosophy that education is a good thing would go to school beyond elementary level. I believe that a generation or two later people would eventually wise up.

The victim tried to kill herself; I don't think she was thinking rationally about it, and it the school wasn't in the kind of catchment where legal action is considered in the first instance.

Students are taught that rights carry responsibilities, but it doesn't always go in.

What would you do with all the teenagers if you scrap compulsory education? There aren't the jobs for them, and you create another underclass.

I suspect that for a lot of students, school is just somewhere to go to waste their time (and other people's time) all day. The general public pays for a lot of schools that achieve nothing, and for a lot of learning environments where students who want to learn are actually prevented from doing so due to the unruliness of their peers. Why not divert that money into an alternative option for children who are giving nothing and getting nothing in the schools -- thinking of something here like better vocational ed, paid apprenticeships, public works labour programmes, (this is just off the top of my head and not the product of much thought). It seems crazy to make kids spend the day in school if they are actually making it more difficult for teachers to teach and other students to learn while they are there. Are we happy to see taxes go towards unproductive warehousing of unwilling teenagers?

Scaryteacher talks sense.
Why do we pussyfoot around people who are behaving in a vile manner? They don't appreciate the courtesy, but view it as weakness.

My attitude is exactly the same as my own parents: I will criticise any adult (teacher or not) if I feel it called for- but at the same time I make it clear to dcs that I expect their behaviour to be impeccable. They have never let me down yet.

I know my parents' stance was guided by the fact that they were teachers and had too much experience to think of teachers as a breed apart.

I could not pretend to dd that her headteacher's decision to leave her sitting on her own for a term she couldn't access stairs for her maths class (disability) was the right one. Nor will I pretend that the facts her history teacher presented her with last year were anything like correct or that the project task she set her was actually possible for someone who knew anything of the history of the relevant period. Ad I have very strong suspicions as to her French teacher's accent- so naturally I will try (tactfully) to encourage dd to acquire a better one.

But what I will teach dd, and what she has to learn from me, is how to handle a situation in a civilised fashion, while causing the minimum of upset. This is something she will need later in life: her colleagues won't always be reasonable, sometimes she will understand things better than her boss- it's how you handle it.

I have also tried to keep things in proportion a bit (as in "yes, I don't particularly approve of this in your teacher, but I don't feel strongly enough about it to actually haul myself off the settee and do something about it").

Apprenticeships in what exactly? It's working to a certain extent in some parts of Devon that still have shipbuilding, like Appledore, but the apprentices aren't the 14 year old of yore. I also can't see some of the kids having the stamina to do the necessary combination of on the job training and the college work required as well. The new 14-19 strategy is supposed to address this, and I know at Launceston College for instance they are converting the old boarding house to run it in consortium with some of the other comps in Cornwall as a hotel and catering training facility, but there isn't much else.

Yes, there is always a call for electricians and plumbers, but the kids won't have the capital behind them to start a business, or the skills either.

Some one suggested National Service the other day, but the under resourced and over stretched Armed Forces don't want them, as the pace of ops is too great to release people for training them.

At the least, they will need English and Maths to function in the adult world; to read a bus timetable, to fill in the benefit forms etc, or in the case of some of my students cope with the endless DEFRA forms.