This is happening around the country, not just in New York:
In my school, law and order have gone the way of the slide rule.Now refresh your memory about this post from just a few days ago.
I am a math teacher at a middle school in Flushing, Queens, and two months ago, I was helping one of my students work out an arithmetic problem when he called me a “f–kin’ asshole.” When I asked for an apology, he shoved a chair at me and stormed out.
Five minutes later, an administrator brought the student back to class. She informed me that she had called his parents and that he could return.
And what did I do? I went on teaching.
In my 20 years working for the Board of Ed, I’ve never seen such a disregard for the rules — and human decency — as I’m seeing now.
Smoke weed on campus? Grab your fellow student’s breast? Tell your teacher to f–k off? You just earned yourself an in-house suspension — also known as a hang-out-with-your-phone-in-an-empty-classroom day.
3 comments:
It is happening everywhere. This behavior is driven by hero worship fueled by social media. Kids see other kids get famous for fighting or doing outrageously dumb things and they WANT that. They want it badly enough to hurt others or themselves. Our administration couldn't get young black males to stay after school for tutorials in spite of test scores that lag behind most other demographic groups. They offered snacks, rides home and more. But their PARENTS would make excuses and get them out of tutorials. So the next step was to have tutorials in the middle of the day during a fiasco hour called "Block Lunch" In theory the students who need help so they would pass their classes would go to midday tutorials and become successful citizens. The reality it is that they run around the hallways, using the F-bomb for every part of speech. They don't attend tutorials, they schedule fights, bother the few students trying to achieve and in general it's a nightmare that only administrators who have gone to Restorative Justice Space Camp could love.
And we're being pushed to implement "interventions" during the school day. So, we're going to take instructional time away from everyone--thereby making even more students who need "interventions"--and conduct these tutorial periods during the day. I foresee *exactly* what you have described.
It is long past time to separate the willing and educable from the unwilling and/or uneducable, starting in kindergarten. (I am old enough to remember the days when parents - and almost all kids of all flavors had two, widowhood aside) - were required to bring their kids to school (May-June IIRC) to be evaluated for readiness for kindergarten. The criteria, both social and “academic”, were well-publicized and parents worked to make sure their kids were ready. There was a stigma attached to parents who did not do so (where kids had no handicaps that would prevent). Kids who were not quite but close might be re-evaluated again just before school started. A year or semester delay for those with maturity issues and alternative placements for the others.
How many kids are being denied a real, appropriate, education because they are forced into classrooms where the teachers spend far too much time dealing with kids who don’t belong there? Millions, I am sure. Separate by academic level, explicitly teach content-rich curricula across all fields (Core Knowledge, Singapore Math etc), and encourage all levels to go as far and as fast as they can. It is unfair to both teachers and kids to do otherwise. Allowing disruptive behavior and profane language, let alone threats and violence, is no way to prepare kids for successful adulthood. When I was in college, in the 60s, a poster with the phrase “It’s hard to soar like an eagle when surrounded by turkeys”, with suitable graphics, adorned many dorm walls. Not PC, and pretty brutal, but not untrue.
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