Bad teachers or bad kids

[Reallytired]

A governant advisor estimates that there are 17000 bad teachers. I find this very hard to believe.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7088383.stm

Why are teachers given 100% the blame for classroom disruption. Surely its the kids who are responsible for their behaviour (or possibly the parents for teaching them right from wrong). Kids KNOW they are untouchable.

I think that schools should be prepared to root out disruptive kids who ruin the learning enviromnent for everyone. There needs to be more specialist good quality provision for kids with behavioural problems.

If these kids were in an appriopiate special school they would be in a class with 7 kids, a teacher and LSA. They would get the attention they needed to learn how to behave and the good kids in the mainstream school could get on with their learning.

There is no way I would be a teacher.

there is a mum at my kids SN school whos DS is very lively, according to her he is a misunderstood angel. she is always complaining about the school yet the only time i see her at school is when she has been summonsed to pick up angel son, i have never seen her at parents evenings or helping out in class/ at swimming. she used to always moan to me about the school (in front of angel son) so i told her it sounded like she felt the school couldn't meet her sons needs and had she thought of home education? she has stopped complaining to me now

MB, I shudder to think how far out of reach many of the kids I teach are by the time they reach you.

An OFSTED inspector once told me that there was no reason why I couldn't or shouldn't get the same results and have the same classroom atmosphere in Salford as in Windsor.

I mean, Who are these people?

How, when, why did things start to go wrong?

Have the sort of issues you are discussing always existed - or we just more aware of them now?

(genuine question from a non-teacher)

I agree with Slug. People presume that teaching in FE is much easier as the kids have (are you ready....) "learnt to behave" and have "chosen to be there"

HAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHahahhahaa!

Don't get me wrong. There are some fantastic kids but it takes SOOOOOOOOOOO much effort to motivate kids into the bare minimum of work. I often feel like unless student are spoon-fed there is no hope of getting decent results and I suspect its these results that those 'bad teachers' are judges on.

Worked in secondary schools and its sad how one or two unwilling kids will wreck the flow of a fun lesson. I wonder how many kids start school so eager to learn and have it worn out of them

CC my poor SIL is working with a boy (NT) of 7 who constantly bites people. He has already bitten his LSW so badly he drew blood.

How the hell can she teach him, or the rest of the class while this is going on?

Her SMT do worse than nothing. When the kid bites, they take him out of the classroom and let him play games on the computer. well duurrr, why do they think he keeps biting then???

What does SMT mean?

I wonder if anything much has changed, tbh. There were shitty pupils and shitty schools when I was little, and according to some policy paper out the other week, just as many 'failing' schools in the '50s - it was just kept quiet, as in not in the national news.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. I went to several very good infant, junior and middle schools - all just our local state school and taking a mix of children from various backgrounds. Then we moved and I went to a sink comp - the one that the book/film 'Kes' was based on. Good God, it was shocking. The level of agression and hostility to any idea of learning from a good third of the kids was amazing. Because I was a naive child from a good middle school, I put my hand up to answer questions - big mistake. But somehow managed to work it out and persuade them to accept me - they treated me as 'different' but OK.

Then when we moved again six months later, the poor geography teacher was desperately trying to persuade my mother to let me stay at the school and travel in every day - I don't think he'd ever had a pupil put up their hand before because even the bright ones knew it was asking for trouble.

The next very well regarded comp was actually even worse - trading on its reputation as an ex-grammar but a scary, scary place. No-one outside seemed to have a clue what was going on in there - one NQT was driven to a breakdown. The kids spent her lessons throwing chairs at her. Everyone knew - her lessons were literally a riot. But the headteacher did sod-all. Same attitude when I was being very badly bullied - he couldn't have cared less.

I'm not a teacher, so can't judge whether things on average are any worse than they were 20 years ago. But I suspect there were plenty of crap schools, crap parents and crap children then, too.

senior management team

Wonder if that ex grammar was my old school Eden. In the same county as the KES school We were awful, really badly behaved

In fact my HoD used to teach at my old school, and did TP there when I was there, he said it was terrible.

i find children are more badly behaved, they're not allowed to let off steam

I'm not sure how much has changed. I do think the attitude of parents has changed. I remember going home and telling my mum I'd been told off. I got a clip around the ear and told I must have deserved it.

It was very much that your teacher was a person in authority who deserved respect. Too many parents nowadays actively encourage their children to treat their teachers like shit! and

only read mb's posts on this thread but they're spot on

we had the slipper as punishment, a slipper haha