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Ban Lucifer
#31
RE: Ban Lucifer
I have to agree. The general behaviour of children has gotten worse. On the whole, I blame the parents. I taught in several high schools at the end of my teaching career of several years, for about 3 weeks, before I had a breakdown. These kids are just unbelievable. We had some "bad kids" in our day, but they were nothing compared to this.

One big problem is that parents now often do not support the schools. You need parental permission for a detention, and instead they will call the school staff liars. They won't help deal with the problem, they'll just say "My Johnny wouldn't do that."

So I think we're dealing with a very spoiled generation of children, due to absent parenting. It would be my guess that the prevalence of attention grabbing technology has made it the "easy option". Why spend all that time talking to your kid, making sure they are OK and doing activities with them when you can just sit them in front of an Xbox? The result is kids with fucked up social skills, who are used to getting what they want. When I witness parenting on the street, it tends to be either letting them run riot, or else coming down on them way too hard by screaming at them, without explaining why the behaviour is wrong. Also, when kids want something, they get it. Parents would often rather keep the kid "happy" in the short term, rather than address their behavioural problems in the long term.

In both schools and parenting, corporal punishment has gone (that is a good thing) but not much has taken its place.
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#32
RE: Ban Lucifer
Rob I have a couple problems with that. My nieces tell me they don't have a black boad and instead use a smart board and have iPads they share. Here the school is just as culpable in the technofing of them as anywhere else.

Second there are good and bad teachers. My youngest neice is a better math teacher then the teacher they have. But the teacher knows this and often has my niece explain how she solved the problem in 'kid speak" thus getting more to understand.

Granted these are all subjective examples. As are yours. There is good and bad in the system, its a very gray area, National education.
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#33
RE: Ban Lucifer
(June 7, 2015 at 1:44 am)Goosebump Wrote: Public school on the whole is a widely subjective experience. I've had the privilege or misfortune to witness rural well to do and inner city Philadelphia public school systems. My two younger siblings were homeschooled after 6th grade. I myself am a highschool drop out which led to my siblings' homeschooling.

If nothing else I can relate a little to what your facing. But what is this stigmata against home schooling? I'm unaware of it... Should this be another thread?

Yes, I realized I was hijacking this thread, so I made a homeschooling one.  Thank you for sharing your experience with it though, that is interesting. I'm sorry you dropped out, my husband had a similarly bad PS experience, and I had a very good one, so I know it can vary widely.

There is a TON of stigma around home schooling. Look at the Duggars.  So many people assume negative things about people pulling heir kids out of school.

But, enough of me hijacking this thread, lol.  I'll answer any other questions in the other one. Smile  
Back to banning (or not, I hope) Lucifer.
“Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?” 
― Tom StoppardRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
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#34
RE: Ban Lucifer
Goosebump: Yeah for sure, I was probably over the top. It's not solely parenting, of course schools and every other aspect of life can be a problem too. It's just I see what parenting is like on the streets, and it doesn't surprise me at all how kids are turning out now. I'm sure there are problems in schools as well that don't help.

Agreed, there are very good and very bad teachers. The profession has now become so stressful that there's a shortage of teachers, and finding the best ones is harder and harder. The biggest problem is that teaching is expected to be not just teaching, but crowd control. That is an entirely different skill, and to limit the choice of teachers to those who can single handedly silence a group of 25 rowdy kids with a word or a glare is cutting down the pool considerably. I really think we need seperate people just to deal with behaviour, I believe they do this in China, or somewhere.

I'm sure there are very good schools, filled with well behaved children with good parents. But it does not seem to be the norm. The sad thing is that those who would actually benefit from being there get drowned out in the noise of those who wish to simply piss about, and it's very hard for them to go against the flow.

I taught in at least 3 high schools, and only one of them had any kind of decent behaviour or a discipline system. In the other two I had no power to do anything. If the kids fucked about and wouldn't listen to me, I had to give them a 5 minute detention. Problem is, it's the whole class, and they won't even listen to me tell them I'm giving them a detention. It's a joke. I can increase this up to longer detentions and such, but these kids couldn't have cared less. I got barely any teaching in. These kids had no idea how to behave, some of them approaching 16 years old and supposedly old enough to start becoming adults. When one of them physically threatened me, that was the last straw.

I'm a good teacher, but sadly I'm small and very lacking in "presence". People don't respect me as an instant authority. I went through teacher training, and they utterly failed to address this issue. They pretended that if children are misbehaving, it is basically your fault, like a window is open and they are being distracted. Close the window, and everyone is fine. Fuck off! The rest of the two years we were doing stupid pointless group discussions like, "Should we have equal opportunities in school?" Erm, yes. What do we talk about for the rest of the hour? What a waste of time. I learnt nothing about dealing with behaviour, or anything else for that matter.

So it doesn't matter how good I am at teaching, if people won't listen to me I can't teach them anything.
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#35
RE: Ban Lucifer
My aunt Pam was ( she died 2 years ago) 4'10" tall and taught in north east Philadelphia. She was also white and Jewish. She, with one other teacher and an aid managed a classroom of 70+ 3rs graders. When I'd stop by to barrow a car or drop it off she put my ass to work doing an activity or encouraging a group to pay attention. Command of a room can be learned, it has nothing to do with size, ethnicity, gender or relateability. She earned her students' respect. That's part of being a great middle and highschool teacher I think.
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#36
RE: Ban Lucifer
Sure, I suck, I get it Tongue

I tried my very hardest, for 4+ years to work on it, but sadly no matter what I did it made no difference. Some people have an amazing ability to control classes, and I'm sure it comes with practice. But it's just not me, sadly, and the profession lost a very passionate and capable teacher (sorry for the horn blowing) in schools where supply teachers who have no subject knowledge are the norm. One of the kids genuinely said in shock, "You're an actual maths teacher?"

I did private tutoring as well, as that suits me far better, but sadly I couldn't get enough work to do it even part time.
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#37
RE: Ban Lucifer
(June 7, 2015 at 2:37 am)robvalue Wrote: Sure, I suck, I get it Tongue

I tried my very hardest, for 4+ years to work on it, but sadly no matter what I did it made no difference. Some people have an amazing ability to control classes, and I'm sure it comes with practice. But it's just not me, sadly, and the profession lost a very passionate and capable teacher (sorry for the horn blowing) in schools where supply teachers who have no subject knowledge are the norm.

Having grown up with studied and been exposed to so much education from a teacher's perspective I almost think it is a calling. It wasn't for me either. The good news is you didn't just put in you notice 35 years in having made no difference in the lives of the thousands of kids you could have taught.

Part of the problem is tenor for bad teachers. But there is a thousand other things as well. We are in the processes of moving from the 1920s ensemble line teaching to what is more relevant. And we are trying to do it with no political will and cuts in funding. It is probably the worst time in moderninity to be a teacher.
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#38
RE: Ban Lucifer
Before I went onto that high school, I was teaching in a college, mainly 16-18 year olds. Some of them were well behaved and actually wanted to learn. With those, I made quite a bit of progress. It wasn't until the work dried up there and I had to try somewhere else that I came up against this brick wall. I have some fond memories of teaching, things students have accomplished and their kind words about me. Quite common was, "We just learnt more about maths with you in 5 minutes than we did all through school!"

I honestly think they need to split the role, instead of expecting someone to be really good at patiently, carefully explaining things and also to be capable of ever more demanding crowd control. You're simply cutting out too many good potential teachers this way.
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#39
RE: Ban Lucifer
The biggest problem I see with teaching kids is the peer pressure. If you break the kids into three groups, ungifted, average and gifted, it is impossible to serve justice with all three in the same class, but once you break them up into separate groups, the ungifted tend to group into the 'bad boys' and they are usually the troublemakers and of course the stigma attached to the 'nerds' and 'brown-nosers' presents its own set of issues.
You make people miserable and there's nothing they can do about it, just like god.
-- Homer Simpson

God has no place within these walls, just as facts have no place within organized religion.
-- Superintendent Chalmers

Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends. There are some things we don't want to know. Important things.
-- Ned Flanders

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#40
RE: Ban Lucifer
But...but.... Sad i haven't done anything wrong Sad
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