"I am frankly terrified by the notion that people believe other teachers are close to acting this way themselves and thinking 'there but for the grace of God'. There are dozens of teachers right now being subjected to abuse and threats in classrooms up and down the country and they are light years away from behaving violently towards the pupils under their care."
Tambajab, it's not dozen of teachers, it's hundreds, every day. The reason so many teachers will not live near the schools they teach in is because students have been known to terrorise them at home. I've known teachers who regularly have eggs thrown at their houses, tyres slashed, cars keyed. It's sustained, deliberate provocation, often condoned by their parents, all done in the knowledge that there are little or no consequences for their behaviour. In the last year, the department I used to work in had two teachers die from heart attacks, and three have nervous breakdowns. This is out of a department of 17. Add to that three deaths from cancer over the last 5 years and you begin to build up a picture of how stressful this job is.
As McSnail pointed out, teachers have very little power over pupils save their force of personality. We all have bad days. Whereas parents can have a bad day with their children, they have access to a range of sanctions and, at the best of times, don't have to put up with more than 9 or 10 children at once. Whereas teachers have to put up with 30 or so children, hour on hour, all day. If we fail to control a class then the emphasis is always on what we have done wrong, not what the children did.
By 14 a child should know what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. If the stories are true about the chanting and provocation, ask yourself this: "Would that boy behave like that to a policeman? "What about towards his parents?" The fact is, they know that they can get away with that behaviour towards teachers because they won't get arrested, won't be grounded, won't get a clip around their ear. Would you work under conditions like that?
Here's why I left teaching. One day I broke up a confrontation in a coridoor between two lads, both much taller and bigger than me. Using, to quote McSnail, my forceful personality, I calmed them down, though this did include a 6 foot 4, 17 year old 'boy' standing toe to toe with me screaming in my face. A normal situation in a normal day in my working life. Later that afternoon that same boy stabbed a fellow student. He had been carrying that knife, though I didn't know it, when he was threatening me, my class and questioning my sexual orientation . In the aftermath of the incident I was asked why I hadn't taken the knife off the boy. Apart from the fact that I'm not psychic and couldn't be expected to divine he had one by telepathy, I have no training in confronting aggressive, violent people. I wasn't wearing a stab vest, I couldn't call for help because this was just a routine incident that happens dozens of times every day and no member of SMT would have come to intervene in what was a routine incident. And I couldn't have left my class because of Health and Safety regulations. Yet somehow it was implied that an incident that happened hours after a confrontation with me was somehow my fault. This is routine, blame the teacher.
Funnily enough, teachers are human. In the face of extreme provocation, with no other way of defending themselves, sometimes they lash out.