[quote=“the_borderer, post:78, topic:103950, full:true”]
I have this dream where schools aren’t run by Little Hitlers or are Schoolyard Somalias (or even worse, both at the same time).
Can someone please tell me that is not such a crazy idea?[/quote]
Honestly, I don’t think the situation is as bad in the US as it is in your country. Certainly our principals do not on average have as much unitary authority or exert it as forcefully as your headmasters do.
When they enforce a no tolerance policy against those who would fight back, the teachers cannot tell who is tough or not. Only who has the self discipline to keep from getting in trouble when the normal response would be to stab the bully with a pencil.
I finally watched (some of) the video. She is not describing an educational facility, she is describing a prison. One that we all share, whether or not we go to that specific ward.
That depends entirely on who fights back. If it’s among boys-will-be-boys, using accepted types of violence, considered to be a fair fight, then yes, they are thought to be okay,
When it’s an undesirable fighting back, and, more importantly managing to inflict real harm, the story changes. Then the retaliation will be called “disappropriate” or even “unjustified”. Especially when the triggering act by the bully was the proverbial last drop. Minor in its own, because the buckets of pain the bully dished out before will get discounted.
Even worse when the response wasn’t “fighting fair”. Then it becomes a catch-22 where the victim can’t use tools or cleverness, because that would be “cowardly”, but also can’t use fists, because then he or she would get beaten up.
Note that while I described physical bullying and physical responses, similar mechanisms work for mental, intellectual, and social bullying. The victim simply doesn’t have a level playing field, but gets denied to use asymmetrical means by the “man up” group.
not getting in trouble is not a self-discipline sensei. That’s a privilege.
How is forcing yourself to not hit back when being attacked some kind of privilege? I think remaining passive in such situations requires a lot of self discipline. More than I ever had.
Top three worst “government” jobs -
Middle School
Prison
DMV
Because at the DMV and prison there are adults that have at least learned some semblance of the idea of consequences.
13 year olds are not even human and can’t process logic. Hell, they’ll barely be human by the time they’re 21.
Weirdness that has found its way to some parts of Canada.
Most districts in my province use the elementary/secondary split, but there are exceptions. The district I grew up in had a junior high that fed into a school that was 8-12 to finish off grades 10-11. Then they expanded the junior high to full secondary (8-12) and added a second secondary adjacent to the local college campus with the idea that the school could take advantage of college resources.
Now both the expanded school (more rural) and the new one (by the college) have been converted to middle schools and the third is the secondary. Both the secondary and the one by the college are dual track (English and French immersion) but the rural school remains English only. Note,however that school assignment is largely based on geography, and by the time you get to secondary school (11-12) you are too far behind to keep up. So you either need to have the money, time and resources to fight district assignment and get your kid an extra 1/2 hour to 45 min commute (on top of the half hour they might have already had) and separate them from their friends, if you want them to be in French immersion, or you are SOL if you are a farming parent. Then when your kid ships off to secondary, they get the added joy of suddenly being the kid that feels left behind because a good portion of their schoolmates are fully bilingual, and another large portion are still further advanced just from the added benefits of spending four years hanging out with immersion-track colleagues.
And then TPTB wonder why certain communities complain about being left out. And it’s not just grumbly white farmers: that rural middle school is the one that serves the Native reserve. But why would we worry about them? (I wish that was sarcasm, but my province is also one of the worst when it comes to treatment of Native people).
The sidewalk path that goes around NCCL’s property passes behind my the backyard of my childhood home.
My wife teaches at a school for disturbed children. I told her about this video and she said “I can see how public school teachers might not be used to that.”
Your wife is a modern day saint.
I was completely out of my mind through middle school, but I NEVER would have considered focusing my angst on making my teachers miserable.
Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about Millennials eating too many avocados, and rather about the generation of screen raised sociopaths that are about to reach majority?
And there’s the problem: It’s actually an interlocking set of problems that nobody wants to believe in because it’s too complex; they just want a Reality™ where all you need is to exterminate Those People Over There, nice and easy.
Applied as a general principle, this could reduce the post count at bb to the point where its online survival might be at risk.
That’s exactly how everyday people are drafted into supporting a system that is damaging all our children’s futures. Of course you want the best school for your kids; everyone does. That’s the hook. Tragedy of the commons, eh?
But it’s based on a false premise, the presentation of education as a zero-sum game where the only way your kids can get ahead is by refusing to give someone else’s kid the education they need to help fuel America’s future success. In reality your own kids would benefit from the elimination of economic discrimination in schooling.
The first step is eliminating the huge disparity between educational opportunities presented to your children, and the children of the Kennedys, Bushes, Trumps and Obamas. That means mandatory comprehensive public schools for everyone, nobody can opt out (although, you can certainly send your kids to additional schooling, or teach them additional skills at home, like good parents always have tried to do.)
Can you imagine having the crappiest school in America be better than the best one your kids can get into today? That’s what I’m advocating. The reason you have to choose between a crap school and being part of the problem is because it’s engineered that way, but it doesn’t have to be. We can change it.
The phrase “skimming the cream from the top” is something a charter school administrator in my area allegedly once said (proudly) of the function of his academy. It has since been ironically used by opponents of the system, such as myself, because it does encapsulate the contempt for the poor that fuels the magnet, charter and private school movements. Parents like to believe that their children are better and more deserving than others, and that natural urge is being co-opted in support of economic segregation, which of course plays out as the main driver of structural racism.
I was in High School in 1978 when Murray Schwartz instituted bussing to desegregate Delaware’s school system, supposedly for a nine year period. My daughter graduated High School this year, from a school located in a prosperous white neighborhood, where about a third of the students are children of color bussed in from Wilmington. About 40% of the students are living in poverty, and most of those are incapable of passing a modern High School math class, and most of the white bank employees who live immediately surrounding the school send their kids to private, charter or magnet schools.
So you could say I’ve been at ground zero of bussing for almost 40 years. It’s been a disaster in nearly every way, particularly for the poor and for Black Americans. The biggest problem has been the way it has driven the creation of taxpayer-funded charter and magnet schools; private schools are a lesser evil since at least the poor don’t (presently - Betsey DeVos hasn’t implemented federal vouchers yet) have to pay taxes to support the higher quality schools their kids don’t attend.
But you’ve explicitly touched on the poison in the well - localized funding of school districts. It doesn’t really work. I personally hate the federal income tax - I see it as a way to rob the working class to pay for foreign military adventuring and other excesses of the boardroom classes - but I’d happily support a federal income tax, in fact I’d voluntarily pay a higher tax rate, if the monies were spent strictly for eliminating the vast shortcomings of American public schools.
Your whole post is gold. You totally get it! Doing the right thing, morally and ethically, is also the fiscally responsible thing. We have to invest in order to reap the rewards of investment; failing to do so is killing us economically.
This right here is the private school myth. “Private schools perform better,” say the think tanks and the private schools, pulling out various statistics that compare their average outcomes directly to those of public schools. Except…
The public school can’t reject lower performing students, which includes those with disabilities. The public school can’t limit class sizes the same way by saying “we’re full up, you’ll have to send your kids to alternative school.” The public school can’t make up funding shortfalls by the simple step of raising tuition.
Yet if you do a more accurate comparison (comparing similar class compositions as opposed to whole school averages), the advantage of the private school largely disappears. That’s before even taking other factors into account.
As for bussing… that’s part of what I was saying above. A kid with a one-way commute of 45 minutes or more is at a disadvantage to a kid with a ten minute commute. They simply have less time to do things like homework or sleep, let alone “enrichment activities”, regardless of parental intent. Yet this is rarely factored in by those who support local funding of schools.
TL;DR the “superiority” of private schools is largely a smokescreen that is damaging to all kids – including those brainwashed by the idea that their private school education was inherently superior.
Agreed! I’ve seen it from all sides, and that’s how it works.
It’s been known for a very long time that what makes one child’s education better than another’s is dedicated teachers, a charismatic principal, and involved parents. The parents of children who have been placed in anything other than the comprehensive, “feeder pattern” school are by definition involved ones. And bussing actively prevents parental involvement - when poor children went to crappy schools in their neighborhoods, their parents could walk to the schools in between working three less-than-minimum-wage jobs, but today can’t. When we asked the parents of Wilmington students why they don’t attend PTO meetings or parent outreach events, they said “who’s going to buy me a car, and when would I have time to drive to the suburbs?” Many of their kids can’t even do school sports, despite the sports busses we provide for them, because they are working full time as well as being in High School.
It’s not! Schools that treat children with respect actually work. Everyone should have the opportunity to go to school like that. I wish we all had that chance as kids.
Let me guess, you just got a HS diploma? None of this is true.
In most places summers are 2 months, they have to work at least a couple of weeks after the end of the year and before the beginning of the year, in some places they are unpaid in the summer (10 month salary spread),and many teachers spend that time either in certification training, working on a master’s degree, or writing lesson plans for the next year. In other words, they don’t get much time off, actually
Again, depends on how long you’ve been working, if you have tenure, if you’re in a union, etc. Since many older teachers who have master degrees and have 20 years or more in, are now being pushed out of the system, younger, cheaper teachers are being brought in and are often burning out before they get much time in.
Spent planning, grading papers, preparing tests, helping students in some capacity. When teachers are on campus, they are actually working. Not sitting around, smoking in the teachers lounge.
