Zirojtan wrote:How many kids honestly have ADHD though?
Last year I had two out of roughly 100 that I
know had it. One was undiagnosed and untreated at the start of the year, diagnosed and not
effectively treated until the end. The other had been diagnosed, and prescribed medication... but the child's mother was never able to compel them to take their meds consistently before school. You could tell, on the days the child had not taken their meds, and during the weeks when they weren't doing so consistently.
Each of them caused me about as many disruptions and distractions as five to ten ordinary students. And let me tell you, they did come across as sincerely, honestly mentally ill. I cannot speak for any other students, but those two had very, very visible behavioral and impulse-control issues. Issues serious enough that in adult life, I would have advised any adult with similar problems to seek medical help.
Just as well, not only are they now perfectly functional adults without any kind of medication whatsoever, but I myself was said to have "uncontrollable ADHD" in the 1rst grade after having bit my teacher, and the school refused to take me back until I was medicated.
Suppose you had been jittery, unable to make and sustain eye contact because of distractions, prone to changing the subject of your thoughts or speech in mid-sentence. Suppose you grew so agitated that you routinely screamed at other students and stormed out of the classroom, and that this happened every couple of weeks. Suppose that you oscillated wildly between professing that you wanted to learn and do the work necessary for that, and
completely ignoring that work in class, to the point where every time the teacher comes by and points silently to the assignment, your eyes get wide as if you had never seen it before.
I have seen all these things. Their equivalents in adult life would make us look at a person and think "that person is mentally ill." They would make it very hard for a person to hold down a steady job, or continue their education at a higher level.
I agree that it is important for kids to get the proper attention at home, however, I also contend that many kids behave very differently at school than they would at home...
Ayup.
and many of these behaviors don't get nipped in their bud by the elementary school teachers that have the kids for the first several years of their education.
The number of elementary school teachers we need is even larger than the number of high school teachers we need, and managing dozens of small children at once is
not easy.
Looking at it from the other side of the line- if you were intelligent enough to get a GED at seventeen, then part of your problem is that very few school districts contain more than a handful of schools/programs pitched to your level of intelligence.
If I was intelligent enough? Any person who actually paid any attention to anything at all that they studied in school could probably pass that test in the 8th grade.
Let me tell you, you would be freaking
amazed at the number of people out there who "do not pay attention" as you put it. Unfortunately, when you focus on getting as close to a 100% high school graduation rate as possible, you have to spend most of your energy reaching these children, because it's not enough to say "oh, well, 60% of the kids paid attention today, 10% will figure it out at home, and the other 30% can fail and that's not a problem."
Maybe it's the fault of the elementary school teachers. I don't know. If so, then if nothing else it'd be one heck of a relief if all the reformists would stop blaming the high schools (whose graduates and non-graduates are the visible products of the system) and start focusing on the lower-level schools.
Which means you
teach less, and which means you have more kids physically present in the room who take more work per person to manage, which in turn means
both teaching less
and hiring more teachers, which in turn means a drop in average quality because we don't have millions of highly experienced and competent teachers just floating out there waiting to be reeled in by the system.
Agreed, however this [very early start time] isn't a normal reason that I hear teachers complaining about their job.
Yes, because it's pointless. The teachers can't do anything about it. And the reality is that a lot of jobs
do require you to get up at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning to get to work on time- it's just that many of those jobs are in some way unpleasant, over and above getting up early in the morning. They're jobs that people usually try to get out of, if they can, unless they are capital-M Morning People.
Incidentally, this will also tend to increase the number of people on such jobs who suffer from chronic sleep deprivation, which makes people cranky and stupid... which are exactly the things you perceive in your own teachers' personality. Coincidence? I think not.
"Well, when you get a job, what do you think it's going to be like?" That in and of itself was something that I heard many teachers in all of the schools I went to save the one in England say in different situations, which I view to be one of the fundamental problems with American Education...
Hint: giving people some kind of practice and advance warning for what a workplace environment has to be like IS a major function of the school system. In 1900, the vast majority of American children, once their age got up out of the single digits, were involved in extensive chores in a farm or household. They were more frequently supervised by adults (typically stay-at-home housewives or servants). On a farm in particular, even children were routinely getting up at the crack of dawn to do these chores.
So it wasn't that hard to get people used to ideas like:
-You MUST show up and get the job done, whether you happen to feel like it or not.
-You MUST be able to get along with people well enough that you can interact with authority figures for information without insulting them, or you will run into unending grief throughout your existence
-You MUST follow basic directions about how the job gets done, or you will be replaced by someone who can. You might even get into legal trouble by ignoring the wrong rule.
-You MUST try to avoid creating scenes in public that distract people from what they are trying to do- which might even be life or career-threatening if they are distracted in the middle of an important task.
By the time kids hit the workforce, these basic principles were nailed down in their minds fairly well, as a rule. If they weren't, no one thought twice about effectively writing them off: a lot of people wound up as outcasts in those days, who today we would extend more assistance and treatment to.
Society has changed; nowadays, if a kid isn't going to school, it is damnably hard to make sure they aren't just playing video games all day. Both parents are working, which is great for their self-actualization but makes it harder to monitor a child. More children are just plain badly socialized in these regards, up into their teens, at which point they hit puberty and become completely unmanageable.
So yes, school actually
is left, largely in loco parentis, with the task of getting it across to the kids that they need to behave like people who will be held accountable for their actions. Once a child knows this,
then you can start talking to them in ways that make it more clear that you respect their intelligence, that you are encouraging them to think and learn.
But trying to respect the intelligence of someone whose self control and all-round maturity stalled at the age of six... that is a losing game. And it's very hard to tell apart the kids who are unmotivated (and therefore act out and don't do their work) from the kids who are just plain undersocialized (and therefore act out
even more, and don't even really grasp that they should be doing work in the first place).
When I hear teachers complain about their jobs, what I hear them complain about the most is not how the hours aren't conducive to either them doing their job adequately or to maximizing educational experiences, but instead about how little they're paid and how overworked they are.
First of all, if you went to schools in a lot of parts of the country... yes, the teachers are in fact not so well paid. Average teacher salaries aren't exactly luxurious. They're generally
adequate to support one person living alone in something like middle-class lifestyle, but they start looking awfully slim when you have dependents.
Most teachers have gotten used to the parts of their jobs that really make the job difficult, and don't expect that to be changed. This leads to them simply asking for more money to
do the job external conditions have made so shitty. The teacher might as well say, "If I have to put in 50-60 hour weeks and deal with soul-sucking meetings and deal with bureaucratic regulations on what and how I teach that change without warning every damn year, at least pay me enough to put my children through college!"
So, while I understand where teachers are coming from, I also understand that crying in your soup and saying "there's nothing we can do about it" is just outright pathetic, especially when many teachers seem to find the time to demand higher wages, but not a restructuring of how the education system works. I'm very sure that if teachers started a campaign to restructure the system and reached out to parents for their support that in a number of areas the country over we'd get somewhere But I am yet to hear of such a campaign being started.
If there were widespread agreement on what needs doing, and it was just a question of manning up and doing it,
There are two possible explanations. One is that the TAs are evil aliens. The other is that your signature actually was hard for them to read, and you should have tried changing it.
As far as this specific example is concerned, I didn't know that this was the problem until I actually rifled through the drawer and found an assignment that the teacher had missed and brought to one of the TAs and said: "This is mine." At which time she told me the normal procedure with my papers... in the third term. Now, looking back, I of course could have been more attentive and pushy and connected the dots myself, but I was a 15 year old boy who didn't really care for school at that point in time anyways because I learned more when I got home and read about whatever random subject came to mind on the internet than I did there.
So the problem there is a lack of communication between the student and the teacher. At fifteen you should not be
solely responsible for keeping track of whether or not your own assignments were getting turned in and graded. But at fifteen you should certainly be expected to at least notice that there's a problem before five or six months have passed.
Again, a realistic school day means that a teacher typically has about 2-3 minutes to spend worrying about each individual student,
at best. Much of that time goes to directly assisting individuals who actually show up and ask about some problem or concern of theirs. Very little is left for the kid with the unreadable signature whose papers are being persistently discarded by the TA and marked as "not turned in," especially if that child does not ask any questions about what is going on.
If the TAs were being more responsible this would not be an issue- where do you suggest finding such people, and how?
If the teacher did all the grading
hopefully this would not be an issue- but that is an invitation to massive grading backlogs, because grading all the assignments that come out of a typical classroom during one day can take several hours.
Take it up with him if you think that needs doing. Not my coworkers; we're about four levels too low on the pyramid to do anything about it.
Again, this is no excuse. If you want the structure of the education system in your state to change, it would really help to have the teachers on the side of that change instead of just groups of parents.
Honestly, what I've perceived being the issue here is that the faculty itself is divided. The "morning people" don't perceive the problem, or dismiss anyone who complains about it as lazy. In a school which opens at 7:30, there are a lot of morning people, if nothing else because of attrition among the non-morning people who can't handle the work environment.
c) Loops back to (b). There are conflicting pressures at work here: you are supposed to leave no child behind, while simultaneously racing to the top.* One way you measure a school's performance is seat time- did the kids show up for enough child-hours that in principle they could have gotten educated? Obviously, you can't teach someone who isn't there, nor can you provide an adequate high school education in three hours a day, no matter how hard you try.
Oh, I'm very intimately familiar with this one. I didn't go into Tooele's inane attendance policy in my first post, but now that you've brought it up, I shall. At that high school, you could only have 5 absences per term until you started getting what were called "no grades". These weren't actual grades, just a block that the school put on your
real grade because you had been absent. Now, besides the fact that there are a variety of reasons that a student might be absent that many times in one term and that it should be the quality of the work that the student turns in and not their seat time that makes a difference, I actually started accumulating quite a few no grades at the beginning of my sophomore year
without actually having been absent. In fact, I was able to obtain signed statements from a minimum of 5 different students in each class including sometimes the TAs that I was
in class on the dates in question (which I was able to obtain from my teachers, who allowed me to look at the rolls). This happened in 4 separate classes, and in 3 of them I had at least 8 signed statements from other students in class, but that didn't matter. My teachers simply refused to fix their rolls to say that I was there on those dates, even though a number of times the assignments that were handed out on those dates actually showed up on my grade. So, how do you make up a no grade? You have to pay $3.50 per "no grade session", and you needed FIVE no grade sessions to make up ONE no grade. No grade sessions involved sitting in a computer lab where you had no access to the internet and doing homework, if you had any, or otherwise just sitting and staring at a screen.
OK, you have separate problems here. One is inefficient and incompetent handling of attendance. All I can say is that
I do not have that problem; I've done virtually everything else but I can never remember having marked a student absent when they were present.
Another is the handling of excused absences. My system doesn't have that problem either. The problem it DOES have is the kids not bothering to bring in permission slips or excuse notes in a timely fashion, which leaves us unable to identify whether they were out with a good reason or not. Because heaven knows we can't just say "it was authorized because the kid says he was sick." I should not have to call parents weeks after the fact to inform them that their child has been skipping school. We
have a system that enables parents to look this up. And yet, we do have to do that.
Another is the lack of competent remedial education. This is a real issue, because all lessons have to be designed and planned in advance, including the "catch up on the stuff you missed" lessons that SHOULD go in those makeup sessions. Planning lessons that don't fit into a designed curriculum provided by the district/state... it can certainly be done, but it adds an extra overburden of work that teachers in such positions SHOULD do but often don't.
Then there were what they called "tardy lockdowns" during which doors were locked after the bell rang and students who were not in class were rounded up by staff. Both classroom doors were locked, and all external doors were locked as the school had multiple buildings, so students who were on their way from across the campus and didn't make it in time were locked outside until rounded up by staff just as students who didn't make it in the halls were locked out of class. Now, the first time, it was just recorded, showed up as a tardy, and you went to class. The second time, you were fined $5, and that fee actually doubled every time you got caught, if you can even believe that (when I think about it myself it's hard to believe). I never got caught in one of these, but many kids did, and when they didn't have the money on them to pay up, which would have been their lunch money that day, then the fees got stuck on their parents.
The fines are a novel twist, but the idea of such sweeps is not.
My experience is that a school will start doing this in response to having masses of socializing children clogging up the halls and coming late to class because they "had to" stop and talk to three different people on their way over.
Tell me, what would
you do if one third to half of your class was showing up late every day? Extending the time to get between classes seldom helps because the kids
use that time, and still tend to show up late.
Insanity, I know, but that's how it was. Although it begs the question, how could any teacher in good conscience participate in such an obviously belligerent practice? I mean, seriously! Taking kids' lunch money because they were tardy? Doubling the fine each time they were caught, and fining parents for... tardies? Let alone the fire hazard of locking all the doors...
The money fines are a mistake- probably some ill-considered crap an administrator came up with. The locking of hallway doors, similarly stupid. All I can say is that I've never seen it; we have a different policy which would work better if we had about three times as many administrators and security in the building as we actually do.
I never heard any of the teachers in any of my classes complain about the particulars of this procedure, they all just went along with it. Yes, they were random, and relatively rare, but still....
One tip: teachers who actively complain to students about disciplinary policies aren't all that common. There are a lot of reasons for this, including some good ones I'm sure you can think of if you try.
Schools are generally not federally funded. They are state-funded or county/city-funded. Schools are in fact mostly paid for from local property taxes, which is why rich places (outer suburbia) usually have better schools than poor places (rural communities and inner cities).
Well, I don't know why I said federally funded, cuz I know it mostly comes from the state, but they are "government funded and run" in the sense that they are funded by
a government, be it state or city, and that's what I meant. The principle problem I see with public education is that it's public. In order to run efficiently, it needs to be privatized and not run by some group of tax-funded bureaucrats who probably spend half of the time that they're supposed to be discussing intense problems that face their school district shooting the shit. If there were a competitive market, than each school would be more actively pursuing ways to maximize educational experiences simply because of the existence of competition, and they would almost certainly be competing to do this at the most affordable price.
Experience has showed that this doesn't work out as well as it's cracked up to, in a lot of areas. I could discuss that at length too, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to do so right now. I'd love to later, if I can find time.
As to private schools- guess what, if your child keeps picking on the dorky kid, insulting teachers, and ignoring their work in a private school, they will probably not remain in that private school for long. Not unless it's a dedicated school that specifically handles kids with disciplinary problems. So no, I would not hold up the private schools as paradigms for "this is how to provide places for kids with disciplinary problems to go." For that you need a school that can take wildly undisciplined children and impose discipline upon them, and very few private interests will even consider running one of those.
That wasn't what I was getting at at all...
It's still true. The question I originally asked was "how do you expect education to be highly productive and effective, if it must take
everyone, including students whose behavior actively harms the education of the rest of the students?"
The answer "privatize the schools" won't cut it. The answer "hire more staff and work harder on controlling behavior" costs a lot of money and you would (not without reason) decry it as bloat. The answer "accept that roughly 10% of the students coming into the system will be faced with the reality that they
must shape up or be kicked out" is very unpleasant for many reasons, but has the advantage of not making you pay more property taxes. That is how schools
used to do it.
What I was saying that if we had a competitive, privatized market for schools, then there would would probably be more than one school in a number of areas that only have one. Tooele is a town where roughly 45,000 live, and yet it is only in 2010 that they finally got two high schools. Before that, if you wanted to send your kid to another school, you had to travel about 20 mins away to Grantsville, and if you're kid didn't like it or got expelled there then the only option was Salt Lake City, which is 45 mins away.
Ahh. Your district then has a different set of problems than mine. I work in a suburban/urban district, where the high schools are about five to ten miles apart. The problem we confront is a rather different one. Maybe for Utah, the behavioral problem is already solved, and the problem is one of overcentralization or underfunding. I can't presume to say.
If education was privatized, I'm sure that there would be a number of smaller school to which you could send your child.
Hint: there is a practical minimum size for a high school, if you want your high school to provide a flexible education that allows the child to explore a wide variety of interests. At elementary and middle levels this matters less, because education for pre-adolescents isn't so heavily differentiated, at least by US custom. But at the high school level, you would
like the school to support specialized programs, or at least offer a few specialized courses, in arts, sciences, business, and technical subjects. Such programs are not very supportable unless the high school has several hundred to a thousand students, and subdividing them causes problems because it means you have to decide in the 9th grade whether your kid is going to art school OR business academy OR a science and tech program OR... you get the idea.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
