Are kids more bratty now, or are teachers less effective?

Mayabird · Post by **Mayabird** » 2005-01-23 05:18pm

brianeyci wrote:
Mayabird wrote:I'm not saying that's everything, but from what I've seen degrees in education lower the actual education done.
I don't know where your teachers came from, but here they need a 4 year university degree to get into teacher's college (1 year), and you need to have taught at least two full credits at post-secondary level in a subject to teach it which almost guarantees that the person has a university degree.

Brian

You're from Canada, not Georgia. Mine (for the most part) very proudly came from the sticks and went to the university (sic) of georgia.

Tinkerbell · Post by **Tinkerbell** » 2005-01-23 05:20pm

Coming from the perspective of an insubordinant fuck (and I will admit to being such), the amount of shit that happens in a classroom is a direct result of how much the teacher will allow.

Brianeyci is right. It is respect. I am notorious for doing as much as I know I can get away with. I know which teachers will yell at me and which ones won't. There are certain teachers I will not fuck with, because my ass will burn and I know it. You can tell these things within minutes of entering a room.

OTOH, if a teacher respects me, I will not take advantage of that. I know for a fact that my physics teacher woud let me get away with murder. But, he trusts me. And I can't speak for the rest of the student population, but that goes a long way with me. It is not unommon for me to get up in the middle of his class, say I'll be back in 5 minutes, and go get a soda or something. But on the same note, I come back in 5 minutes. Because of the respect and trust he has for me, I show up on time, pay attention in class, and don't give him a hard time.

Not only does a student need to respect the teachers, teachers need to reciprocate.

Tinkerbell · Post by **Tinkerbell** » 2005-01-23 05:24pm

Jalinth wrote: You don't need corporal punishment, but schools do need discipline tools other than suspension/'expulsion - garbage pick-up and similar duties are a good one - nothing nasty, but not pleasant.

TBH, I don't mind getting detentions at all. It's two hours where no one can bug me, and I just get to sit in a silent room and read. Hell, it's damn near enjoyable. Like scheduled serenity time.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2005-01-23 05:28pm

I seem to recall a news story 4 or 5 years ago in America. The students of a Biology class had to do a big report, and were told that it would be half of their grade. The teacher ran the papers through a 'cheat-checker' and discovered that something like half the class had plagarized whole sections of their papers from the same websites.

The teacher xeroxed the papers for evidence, and then went to the principal. Individually, the parents were reasonable and acknowledged that their child would be failing biology. The kids were dumbstruck that they had been caught, protesting that the cheatcheck was "an invasion of privacy" and unfait. But the next day the parents all showed up and demanded something be done. The teacher was going to allow an alternate assignment which could be done to get the kids a D, but that was insufficient. The parents threatened a lawsuit on some bogus grounds, and the teacher was forced to set the paper at 10% of the final grade instead of 50%.

Next day in class the little twerps were dancing on the tables and saying "We don't have to listen to you!" IIRC, both the teacher and the principal quit.

Kids are brats, but its not new

"The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners, they scoff at authority and lack respect for their elders. Children nowadays are really tyrants, they no longer stand up when their elders come into the room where they are sitting, they contradict their parents, chat together in the presence of adults, eat gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers. "

-Socrates, 470 BC

StimNeuro · Post by **StimNeuro** » 2005-01-23 05:30pm

Illuminatus Primus wrote:
Durandal wrote:Fear of lawsuits is something to consider, as well. It doesn't take very much to get a teacher fired these days. All it takes is one parent with money threatening litigation to get a teacher fired to avoid a costly legal battle for the school. So younger teachers tend to tread very lightly on what disciplinary actions they invoke.
Did you go to the same nation's high schools as I? The unions make it nigh-impossible to fire teachers unless they do something really stupid and openly insult or threaten a student or sexually harass one. Hell in my school an inappropriate sexual relationship was caught up and delayed in the bureaucratic murass so long that the guy killed himself due to family problems before he even once got any sort of disciplinary action taken. And for incompetence? Forget it.

Doesn't help the unions help fix salaries to seniority, preventing the schools from rewarding better educated teachers.

It really depends on what part of the country you are in. In some places, the teacher union isn't very powerful or popular. I know that down here in North Georgia, unions of any type aren't very powerful,

Melchior · Post by **Melchior** » 2005-01-23 05:30pm

I hail from Italy, that could very well be the only western democracy (well, sort of) where teachers are not required to know anything about teaching, but are required to have the equivalent of a Ph.D. in their discipline to teach to ten years old.
Also, there is almost no control about what they do: there are been case of high school teachers that raped a student and HAVE BEEN TRANSFERRED TO AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (6 to 11 years, AFAIK).
Well, even they complain a lot, and would like things to be "like when we were young".
Last year I had an history teacher that teached that crusades where morally justified (she was a fundie) and routinely requested students to leave classroom because they made too much noise opening their pens.
You can't give the power to inflict punishments to people like that, who deserve no respect and don't get any.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2005-01-23 05:32pm

xBlackFlash wrote:Coming from the perspective of an insubordinant fuck (and I will admit to being such), the amount of shit that happens in a classroom is a direct result of how much the teacher will allow.

Comming from the perspective of a teacher, the worst situations I've dealt with are in regards to individuals causing problems while the rest of the class is well behaved.

Tinkerbell · Post by **Tinkerbell** » 2005-01-23 05:37pm

Alyeska wrote:
xBlackFlash wrote:Coming from the perspective of an insubordinant fuck (and I will admit to being such), the amount of shit that happens in a classroom is a direct result of how much the teacher will allow.
Comming from the perspective of a teacher, the worst situations I've dealt with are in regards to individuals causing problems while the rest of the class is well behaved.

All I can offer are my direct experiences (which, I will be the first to admit, are limited). I don't claim to speak dogmatic law. From what I've seen, it seems easier to remove one student, therefore eliminating the problem, than to control a roomful of students.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2005-01-23 05:38pm

Once said students are removed, the class becomes remarkably well behaved, but when you have trouble getting the kid out of the classroom situations can develope.

Marksist · Post by **Marksist** » 2005-01-23 06:19pm

I think it also has to do with the age of the teacher, it's easier to respect someone just because they are a lot older than you, as most children in America are socialized to respect adults. With a lot of young teachers- especially in High School, it's hard to respect someone that is only a few years older than you.

For example, when I was in 9th grade, I always tried to hang out with people older than me, so I made friends with this senior in the band, Chris J. Well, after he graduated, we stayed friends since he went to college only 30 minutes away to study Music Education. When I became a senior in High School, he was 21, and we used to party together at his apartment, and since he was 21, would buy me alcohol if I wanted, etc. Well he was at the point he could become a substitute teacher, and just so happened to be a sub. for one of my classes. It was very hard to put on a facade of respect in front of the other students, since this is the guy I party with on weekends. And I viewed other young teachers the same way, that they were people young enough that I could party with them, it's hard to respect them as a teacher I guess.

Also, as I got older I tended to think that the older teachers definetely had more discipline in their classrooms, but weren't as good teachers, since they were tenured, and could slack off and just pass out endless amounts of worksheets in lieu of actually teaching.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2005-01-23 06:28pm

I am a fairly easy going teacher. I keep the class under control and put forth moderate effort to keep the class on the teachers instructions. Life as a sub is much easier then life as a real teacher. However, that doesn't mean I let a class disrespect me.

Now my school district will hire young subs, but its requirement is they must be old enough that the sophmores not have gone to school with them (just three grades for highschool). This prevents familarity with the students and maintains respect. When students did question my age, they still understood my authority.

Petrosjko · Post by **Petrosjko** » 2005-01-23 06:34pm

On the matter of problem parents, I can speak to that one from a non-teaching perspective. I briefly worked at an arcade, and when I was hired, my friend who hired me informed me that part of the reason I was hired was because I was large and not easily intimidated.

Okay, I figure, he's talking about the ganger kids we got in who tried to lean on the clerks for refunds.

True, in part.

But not the whole story. My third day on that shitty job, I've got a couple of kids climbing up on one of the machines to drop balls directly into the slot that gets them the most tickets. So I go over and take the balls away, dump them in the slot and firmly order the kids to get off the damn machine. Liability nightmare and all.

And the next thing I know, I've got a father in my face, telling me that I shouldn't have taken the balls away, his kids weren't hurting anything, blah blah blah. And then the guy actually threatened me physically.

No punches were thrown, and he wound up apologizing very profusely at the end, but that was an eye-opener. And to be specific, I did not lay a hand on either of his little brats beyond taking the balls out of their hands.

And it was more the norm than the exception. It was parents trying to bribe their little monsters into behaving, and having a fit when anybody impeded the kids from doing whatever the hell they wanted. It was funny how many times people threatened to have my job, because I was only working there for a month before moving out of state anyway, mostly as a favor to my buddy.

As a general rule, I have a soft spot for kids, but that job sorely tested my patience. There are some seriously negligent parents out there, and they're militantly aggressive in asserting the 'rights' of their children to be monsters.

On the flip side, I agree with Destructionater the 13th on the self-esteem crap and so on they're dishing out in the schools. I can't comment on other districts, but in my area the elementary education is where they ship the smallest minds and biggest idiots. As a consequence, the crucial area where the whole foundation for the educational experience is laid gets neglected horribly. By the time they reach middle school and high school, a goodly number of the children have received no functional education to speak of, and no underlying discipline by which they would acquire such an education. Then they're gimped along and promoted through classes they shouldn't be, just to get them out of the hair of school administration, before they hit the wall of the state achievement tests that they can't graduate without.

Then everyone whines about how it's unfair that they have to pass the tests to graduate. From my understanding, those tests are essentially the same as the standardized tests I took when I was in school, and if somebody can't pass those, they don't frickin' deserve to graduate.

2000AD · Post by **2000AD** » 2005-01-23 07:05pm

I think it's both the kids getting worse and lack of power for teachers.

As a student i saw the new kids at school getting increasingly more badly behaved each year, and probably the biggest reason for that is that kids know the teachers couldn't lay a finger on them.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2005-01-23 07:13pm

Physical punishment is not the answer, and that's just retrograde thinking. Want a solution? Fail the kid. And lest you say that the parents might make a lot of noise, SO FUCKING WHAT? They have no legal case, and if the school board decides to take their bullshit seriously, that's a problem with the school board itself.

2000AD · Post by **2000AD** » 2005-01-23 07:26pm

Darth Wong wrote:Physical punishment is not the answer, and that's just retrograde thinking. Want a solution? Fail the kid. And lest you say that the parents might make a lot of noise, SO FUCKING WHAT? They have no legal case, and if the school board decides to take their bullshit seriously, that's a problem with the school board itself.

The problem there is that most of the arsehole kids wouldn't give two shits about failing their class work as IIRC the main part of the grade for the GSCE is on the exam, at least that's the situation over here.
And since most of the kids seemed to be destined to be benefit scroungers anyway i doubt they'd care about failing that. Maybe this is just my school but i noticed a correlation between the famalies that were benefit scroungers and the arsehole kids, so i doubt the parents would care that much if they failed either.

And the "couldn't lay a finger on them" comment wasn't entirely about physical punishmen, it's also about removing a disruptive child from class. All the teachers today seem to be able to do is ask the child to leave and the child can just tell them where to stick that and the teacher can't do anything. Being able to stick arseholes in another room would at least give some power back to the teachers, the arsehole gets an increased chance of failing and the non-arseholes get an increased chance of passing.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2005-01-23 07:29pm

Illuminatus Primus wrote:Did you go to the same nation's high schools as I? The unions make it nigh-impossible to fire teachers unless they do something really stupid and openly insult or threaten a student or sexually harass one. Hell in my school an inappropriate sexual relationship was caught up and delayed in the bureaucratic murass so long that the guy killed himself due to family problems before he even once got any sort of disciplinary action taken. And for incompetence? Forget it.

Doesn't help the unions help fix salaries to seniority, preventing the schools from rewarding better educated teachers.

Whether or not a potential lawsuit has merit isn't the question. The question is whether or not the school wants to be dragged through court to show that it's a frivolous lawsuit. Wealthy parents can make things very difficult for schools.

Marcao · Post by **Marcao** » 2005-01-23 07:36pm

Darth Wong wrote:Physical punishment is not the answer, and that's just retrograde thinking. Want a solution? Fail the kid. And lest you say that the parents might make a lot of noise, SO FUCKING WHAT? They have no legal case, and if the school board decides to take their bullshit seriously, that's a problem with the school board itself.

I agree that physical punishment is not a viable answer. However, failing a student can only do so much. I am speaking about the NYC public school system here, so this may not be the case in other locations. However, the NYC public school system is well known for social promotion. You can only fail a student so many times before they get passed along upwards.

In the NYC public school system, you can suspend a disruptive student a grand total of seven times before he cannot be suspended anymore. That means that after that week, barring that they catch the student with a gun or selling crack, you can't suspend them.

My father is a social student teacher and has been for the last eighteen years. He deals with students that cannot read at a fourth grade level, and are in his class purely because they are of the right age. They have no foundation, some are immigrants recently arrived from other countries, others are not. The point remains that they have no business being in a 12th grade social studies class, but they are there.

Rye · Post by **Rye** » 2005-01-23 07:47pm

2000AD wrote: And the "couldn't lay a finger on them" comment wasn't entirely about physical punishmen, it's also about removing a disruptive child from class. All the teachers today seem to be able to do is ask the child to leave and the child can just tell them where to stick that and the teacher can't do anything. Being able to stick arseholes in another room would at least give some power back to the teachers, the arsehole gets an increased chance of failing and the non-arseholes get an increased chance of passing.

An Art teacher of mine told me that apparently they're allowed to use "reasonable force" to accomplish what's necessary to remove kids from the room, like grab them by the shoulders and force them out the door, that kind of thing. But it's a big grey area.

But yeah, I echo your other paragraph's sentiment, all the fuck up kids wouldn't give a shit if they failed French, say. I was always in set 1 for everything, so didn't see much evil behaviour beyond the class' inability to shut up, apart from one year when I was in set 2 for french, and there were some fucked up kids in there (i daren't think what lower sets must've been like) saying "you've failed this class" wouldn't have phased them. In fact, I'm certain they would've made sure not to care about it in order to piss the teacher off further, even if just in the heat of the moment.

As for the cause of it, yeah, teachers are an easy target legally since everyone wants to scream "think of the children" the kids know this and are devious li'l bastards. Consumer culture and diet probably has some part to play, too, even if i'm not sure what.

Post by **Vympel** » 2005-01-23 07:48pm

I had this teacher who was an absolute scary bastard. He was in his 60s, was from Malta, and scared the HELL out of you. Favorite quotes from him:

"You are a moron, you waste your father's money coming here!"

"Your work belongs in the toilet!"

"Shut up you!" (you was an appropriate ending to any sentence)

"BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" (in the middle of giving a talk, he would scream this while slamming his hand down on the desk. Everyone would jump)

"See? You're sleeping!"

That guy was awesome. And he wasn't afraid to shake the shit out of us. I never minded.

Big Phil · Post by **Big Phil** » 2005-01-23 07:59pm

On the topic of physical punishment for kids, I have a clear recollection of the few times teachers ever put their hands on students. I went to a Catholic (non-parochial) elementary and middle school - most of the kids who were there were at least middle-class (if not decidedly wealthy), and there were a number of spoiled little rich kids in the school.

Our principal grabbed two kids who were fighting in the lunchroom and smacked their heads together. They stopped fighting, he kept his job until he had an affair with his receptionist 11 years later.

A few years later, another teacher grabbed a kid (who was causing some problem in the hallway, I don't remember what) by the scruff of his neck, and pushed him down the hallway, and hauled him to the principal's office. The kid got suspended for a few days, the teacher eventually got promoted to Head of the Middle School.

I don't know of a case where a parent ever complained about this sort of discipline. I don't know if this still occurs, but in the 1980's teachers weren't afraid of physically disciplining students.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2005-01-23 08:30pm

2000AD wrote:
Darth Wong wrote:Physical punishment is not the answer, and that's just retrograde thinking. Want a solution? Fail the kid. And lest you say that the parents might make a lot of noise, SO FUCKING WHAT? They have no legal case, and if the school board decides to take their bullshit seriously, that's a problem with the school board itself.
The problem there is that most of the arsehole kids wouldn't give two shits about failing their class work as IIRC the main part of the grade for the GSCE is on the exam, at least that's the situation over here.

And since most of the kids seemed to be destined to be benefit scroungers anyway i doubt they'd care about failing that. Maybe this is just my school but i noticed a correlation between the famalies that were benefit scroungers and the arsehole kids, so i doubt the parents would care that much if they failed either.

That is yet another issue to be taken up with the school board. Lay the blame for school system dysfunction where it belongs. Shitty parents and their stupid go-nowhere kids will always exist, so the question is how do we deal with them, and the school boards have chosen to bury their heads in the sand about it. Fail the worthless future losers and expel them from school. It's not as if that type of kid is ever going to amount to anything anyway; might as well just report them to a local police department and tell them to keep an eye on them until they do something bad, which shouldn't take long.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2005-01-23 08:46pm

My English teacher in high school was great. He'd been there for 30 or so years. So we were taking a field trip up to Chicago to see an opera, and we were all on the Metra. Some woman asks my friend, "Excuse me, are you from St. Ed's?"

"Yes ma'am, we are."

"Oh I went to high school there. Does Mr. Haefliger still work there?"

"Yep. He's in the next car up. We're going on a field trip."

"Oh ... does he still throw vocab books at students?"

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2005-01-23 08:58pm

one of my favorite teachers was in math, taught a pack of self confident freshmen in high school. he was in his last year of teaching, and took no shit.

he had a big meter stick, and every few minutes, he'd slam it on a metal cabinet. it made us jump, the first few times.

he also was fond of saying "F for the year!" and telling which ones of us didnt deserve to pass.

Post by **RogueIce** » 2005-01-23 09:16pm

brianeyci wrote:Maybe it has to do with respect. For some unknown reason(s), certain teachers are respected and certain teachers are not, this is fresh in my memory. I will never understand this type of mindset, but it exists and definitely certain teachers with a certain way of talking, speaking or teaching are not "respected" by students.

How did teachers dress thirty years ago?

How do they dress now?

High school was just a couple years ago for me, I remembered the teachers who wore ties having the most "respect". Then again, that might not be universal. My physics teacher wore a different colour golf shirt depending on the day -- red for tests, when he expected half the class to fail lol. And he was the one with the PhD and respected.

Brian

I have noticed this. For some reason, certain teachers just have a certain level of respect amongst the students, where even some of the worst give them no shit.

This fucker for instance was one of the worst (for the curious, the link is his arrest record...all 16 counts of it). And yet, for some teachers, he sat down, shut up, and behaved.

For my school I'd have to lay most of the blame on the administration. They really didn't do a lot to support the teachers. Kids could get away with just about anything they wanted there, and the administration wouldn't do anything to them. They wouldn't be kicked out, suspended, or otherwise face heavy duty punishment. As a result, unless the kids decided to respect the teacher for some reason, the kids knew they could do what they wanted and get away with it.

Of course, my school was just insane. The aforementioned problem student graduated with Honors (the date of his arrest is before graduation!) and our Engineering valedictorian is a damn registered sex offender.

So, we obviously had some very bad problem students...and a really, really bad administration.

Petrosjko · Post by **Petrosjko** » 2005-01-23 09:33pm

I had several very good teachers, and I have a lot of respect for them. They were good people and inspired educators.

But when I'm coming down on teachers, it's because I have very exacting standards for them. To my mind, teaching is a social function on a par with the military, police, firefighting and other essential civic functions. All too often I've seen people who had no business being anywhere near children who were retained because even in this non-union state it takes practically an act of the legislature to fire a teacher.

I think that one of the biggest problems is that they don't weed them out at the college level for going into teaching for the wrong reasons. The best teacher I ever had spent a whole class discussing her reasons for going into teaching with us.

She said that she didn't go into it because she 'loooooooved children'. (She had a particularly derisive tone of voice when she would say 'loooooved children', reflective of her contempt of people who gave that as a reason.) Her take on the matter, with which I agree: to state that one 'loves children' is to depersonalize them into little cute masses. She admitted that her students were people, and she liked some more than others, and flat out didn't like some.

(But I guarantee you that as students we could not tell who she didn't like, and barely could tell who she did like. She was supremely evenhanded.)

She got into teaching because she had a desire to make a difference, to have the opportunity to change even a few lives for the better.

From what I've seen, her disgust with the concept of 'looooooving children' was well founded in the people I've known who got into education for the wrong reason. They come in thinking of their students as precious little dolls, and end up extremely embittered when their illusions are shattered.

To bring up another example, a man I knew who instructed at a firefighting school always used to start off his first class with new students by looking at them and asking them "Are you insane? No, seriously, are you insane? You are coming here to volunteer to do things that everyone else runs away from. If a house or a building is on fire, sane people run away from it. If a tanker is leaking hazardous chemicals, sane people run away from it."

His little speech was always guaranteed to get several people to walk right out of the class. I would think that a similarly blunt statement needs to be made to people who want to go into the teaching profession. Because they make impressions upon children that those children will carry with them for the rest of their lives, for good or for ill.

That is so damned deadly serious that the importance of it can hardly be exaggerated.