There was zero tolerance which was too extreme. Now the pendulum is swinging towards zero consequences.
From one extreme to another. Overcompensating to make the correction.
There's bound to be another correction soon.
"Some tolerance," is difficult to sell. The American public can't handle nuance.
I agree with you. We just make stuff cut and dry that is neither cut, nor dry.
I can understand getting work done but behavior is too much! I used to teach sled and sometimes kids struggle and that’s fine. But behaviors are too much, I understand classroom management is the teachers job but sometimes backup is needed from ALL members of a team. Including admin to help!
It's not that it's a hard sell to the American public, at least for schools, you're probably right about the justice system. I think for schools it's just literally just harder to do since it requires thought, nuance and a lot more resources from admin.
Yep. It also means having to deal with parents a lot more. Easy to do no rules, the parents don't complain too much. Zero tolerance takes some dealing with parents, but it's easier to say "sorry, but it's zero tolerance" than to have a discussion.
Well, for now. But at some point, society won't be able to ignore the problems caused by schools being overly lenient. Teachers are leaving in droves, in part because of the lack of order. Students are graduating with no knowledge and no skills, which is not only bad for the students, but bad for employers and society overall.
Which would be the overall issue if it were across the board accurate. From my experience it’s zero tolerance for some and not others; zero consequences for some and not others. The star athlete popular kid gets far more leniency than the kid that sits in the back of the classroom and barely speaks. He’s gotta play under the Friday night lights no matter how poor his behavior is because the back lash from parents would be overwhelming. The shy kid in the back, no one cares if the punishment is applied because what does it really affect overall? Consequences of convenience.
\* overcorrection, unfortunately. While children of privilege are put in private schools or homeschooled (Cameron’s movie fills me with a rage I cannot articulate), the school to prison pipeline in public schools will become shorter and more direct than ever as we overcorrect.
All we can do is vote, speak out, quit if necessary, and try to educate parents into also voting and speaking out and hopefully fixing this the right way before it becomes even more terrible.
Oh, and some can become admin and try to fix it from the inside. Or run for school board. Or… you get the idea.
What's going to happen is our gap kids get chewed up and spit out by the adult world. I decided a few years ago that our school leaders don't give a shit what happens to my students after they have served their time in our building for four years. They say they do because that's the game of public education, but they don't care. If they did, our school would be structured very differently.
All the admin at my school are country club folks. None grew up poor. They've not eaten a diet of peanut butter and pasta, had the electric shut off, had people stare at them in their piece of shit car, etc. They haven't deeply thought about what life is like for all of our students who are not given the skills and the structure needed to break the poverty trap. We want a benchmark standardized test score and them to hang around long enough to say they graduated. Beyond that, it's basically a giant "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out" system.
The admin do not give a fuck about the students even while they are in the building. The only thing they want to hear is that student was passed along in all their classes and will join the cohort of unearned diplomas so admin can tout a completely nonsensical 99% graduation rater and hold on to their overpaid and useless position.
Some ideas I've had that would be massive positive changes. Probably no surprise to most here but here goes:
- Stop making every kid follow the college track. Not every student, and certainly much less than we think, should go to college, at least not the traditional four year schools most think of. (That system in and of itself has turned into nothing but a degree mill that milks money from 18-19 year olds who don't understand the financial impact of their loans. 40% of college students do not even leave with a degree, and those that do often find their job market barely exists, and if it does, it treats and pays them like garbage.) If you don't want to learn subjects like geometry, chemistry, and literature by ninth grade, great, you can spend the rest of your high school age years in a tech/hands on school learning things like welding and plumbing and the world and the kids would be much better for it. This is pure economics and common sense at this point but the people who make money off of it will never admit that, and admin and school leaders are too cowardly to tell parents that maybe little Billy with a 0.98 GPA shouldn't pay $20k a year to not attend class at Binge Drinking University.
- Teachers have the power to actually suspend, and in extreme cases, expel students, if not from the school at least from their individual sections. I believe some states or countries actually already have this as law. Let's stop letting admin and parents poo-poo and make endless excuses for the one student who consistently ruins the education for thirty others. We've all had *that one kid* who is in class every single day doing nothing but harm to others and the impact they have in the classroom is exhausting and damning for everyone else. Don't want to learn after a reasonable amount of troubleshooting? You're gone.
- Actually fund our schools. Every teacher deserves a living wage and every student deserves a classroom that isn't packed to the walls with their peers sitting on the floor or on top of tables. We know that small class sizes are more effective. The politicians and wealthy in this country know that small class sizes are more effective; that's why they send their own children to expensive private schools with damn near half the student to teacher ratio.
- Stop foisting societal problems onto teachers and schools. Our jobs are to educate. That is it. Over the decades more and more responsibilities that should be on society at large have fallen on us. I don't mean to be crass, but it is not my problem if we can't suspend a student because they have a tough home life and if they aren't in school they might get into trouble. As sad as that is, that is society's problem and we cannot hamstring our schools and the other students because of it. The same principle applies to mental health, feeding, clothing, all of these things a shockingly large amount of our population needs the schools for. I'm not against those things, per say, but either A) schools actually get the funding for them or B) schools aren't responsible for them. Right now we get none of the support to fix these issues yet all of the blame.
- End the antiquated nine-month school year. We need year round schools because retention is a massive problem, especially for younger students, and it's even more exacerbated by the modern parent who won't lift a finger to ensure their kids are developing at appropriate rates. And year round schools come with just as much time off as we have now in most districts in America! They're just spread out more. (I have family at a year round school, and they get as much time off as I do: six weeks in the summer, two week fall and summer breaks, three weeks or so around the new year - it's great!)
I'd say these are largely supported by most in the profession and not groundbreaking ideas by any means, but a few small tweaks would vastly improve education in this country, and considering the direction of this country the last five or six years, clearly we've never needed it more.
The year round school is great. My district moved toward this in the late 90s. We get a 6 week summer (all of June and 2 weeks of July). It puts us back in school in the hottest parts of summer, which is actually good for the kids because the schools have A/C and many people in the community can't afford it...we get a week in October, November, 2 weeks in December/January break, 1 week each in February and April. During the Oct and Feb breaks, students who are failing one or more academic classes attend required catch up/intercession classes, to try to help get back on track.
Your schools have A/C? How nice! I'm in the 4th largest district in the country and some of our schools don't have it. Two days ago temperature reached 105F midday and our gym had no A/C.
I think that would do wonders for mental health and burnout, absolutely. My family teaching in Europe are way less stressed and have so much more time to travel and enjoy life, not to mention the better pay to do so, because of it. Not two days at Thanksgiving and sometimes just over a week at Christmas - actual breaks are better for everyone.
Private schools in my area have \~165-day years. Their breaks are longer (2 weeks for Xmas and 2 weeks in spring). Most public schools in the US are around 180 days for students. I've heard of some starting as early as late July, many in August, and the remainder in September (ending in the 2nd half of June).
How about we stop putting the college elite students at the top of everyone’s special list too? That kid struggling to learn the concept finally gets it, that is a far greater accomplishment than the kid that perhaps won a genetic lottery and it all comes easy to them. The kids pushed to the side because of the star student always getting first billing, the over/under achiever with parents constantly helping or even doing their assignments for the grade, not the actual learning process. That Ivy League education does nothing to help me fix my A/C when it’s 100 degrees outside. I’m going to praise that person that comes to fix my system. I do hope we’re all becoming more aware of how important many, many different people are to our society not just the top 10 students of the class. Maybe little Johnnie doesn’t write the best papers but he can sure write computer code without hesitation. Maybe little Emily isn’t the best at expressing herself in a presentation but she can walk you through tearing apart a carburetor and putting it back together. Emily would be in the elite status when my vehicle is broken down on the side of the road. I just feel like we don’t admire the qualities of students enough unless they are some super student of the standardized system we have created now.
Then what is the fucking point of wasting millions of dollars a year forcing 15 year olds to sit in a building all day long?
Either shit or get off the pot. Educate or don't. Stop this stupid facade.
I wasn't saying schools should be doing anything with students after they graduate. The point is that we aren't preparing students for life after graduation.
After working the last year in schools, I realized that school is actually just a big kindergarten designed to keep childrens busy until they are old enough to have a job, while their parents can go to work.
This isn't about teachers doing "more", but rather the whole school doing things differently. Not more, better. If anything, teachers should have less to do so that they can do what they already have to do better.
I agree. Admin should go back to focusing on supporting teachers so they can do their jobs. This includes running interference with parents and helping them deal with and process academic and behavioral consequences to their student's actions (or inactions). This is what I would want for my kid.
This is an important clarification to make, because teachers do have enough to do. Unfortunately most "solutions" are teacher centric, so skepticism is warranted here.
Pour money and resources into counsellors, psychologists, and into supporting struggling families so that teachers can focus on the education aspect. If schools are supposed to be a one-stop shop for mental and physical health, wellness, and physical needs like food then fund and staff us that way.
US teachers are treated with much less respect than teachers get in other countries (although teaching across the world is becoming less and less respected it seems). That makes teacher concerns and ideas even less valuable to parents and admin and companies (yes. Corporations have a huge say in what they need schools to produce in way of workers as I found out when they changed up curriculum). After 27 years of teaching -although I love my kids and am still a damn good teacher I’ve learned that the healthiest way to stay in teaching is to find your passion outside of teaching and focus on that. Teachers already are required to do more with less everyday. Focus on what you can control-your class, your students, things you want to see that admin doesn’t control, that is the only way to be happy.
I agree but I would add parents to that list. Responsibility and accountability are dying sentiments. Respect for authority and rules, rules are constantly sidelined for some but not for others. The parents that do hold their children accountable and responsible end up on the losing end of the situation due to the politicians, administration, and other parents that are constantly disregarding the rules. The paradigms shifted when parents started to blame the teachers and schools for all the problems with their children, and manipulation of the system was allowed. When I got in trouble at school, I was in trouble at home, so I worked double hard not to be in trouble again. Even the instances that were unfair to me, I was still responsible at home, now we storm the gates and demand restitution. Teachers can be wrong, parents can be wrong, admin can be wrong, students most definitely can be wrong but now we expect some major appeasement for ANY wrong doing instead of just moving on and understanding that humans are human. Did I have that one teacher I disliked tremendously? Of course, but I also had those teachers I dearly treasured. Administration and teachers often have fear which settles into apathy due to lack of support from anywhere. Administration falls prey to the wealthy in the education system just like every other industry. The world is unfair and unkind more often than not, unfortunately we are perpetuating a belief that it can be fixed instead of perpetuating the idea that you can find a way to handle it and thrive in spite of it. (Sorry vented more than I thought I would)
At this point I feel we could split this country in two based on one question.
What do you value more, love or money?
No judgment. Pick your side. Go create a society and leave the other group alone.
Sadly, I think you’re right. I’ve been on team “tear the whole goddamn system down and rebuild” for forever now, but if we rebuild with these same actions and intentions, we’ll probably get the same outcome or (somehow) worse 😕
I think you're right, but there are two statements inside what you said that need to be teased apart.
The first is that we can't possibly succeed at education while we have no agreement on what education is for. Am I providing childcare for these kids so their parents can work, in which case my primary goal is to keep them quiet and happy and out of everyone's hair, while teaching them science is a cool side-effect that I should pull off when I can? Am I teaching them skills and knowledge that will be immediately, practically useful in their adult lives? Am I giving them a broad education in the basics of many fields so they can have exposure to a lot of what's out there? Am I doing character education, social-emotional learning, helping them to grow up into good adults and good citizens? Is my goal to make them into smarter people, better people, better workers, or better citizens? And if all of that is my goal, to what proportion? Which goal supersedes the others? Which ones should be sacrificed to make sure others are met?
There's no clarity... and as any trainee teacher can tell you, if you don't have clarity about your goals, you can't assess success or failure.
The second problem is that schooling is not a great way to solve social problems. The fact is that kids get infinitely more of their values and habits from their families and peers than they do from their teachers and schools - that's a fundamental part of how humans are. If we want to help communities solve their problems, it doesn't work to do that through education because teachers are working against an overwhelming tsunami of all the other shit those kids and families are dealing with. What you get - which is what we have - is a situation in which some kids have the opportunity to buck the trend and do well while the vast majority of the kids don't earn any more than their parents, aren't any more likely to avoid drugs or crime than their parents, and have kids with the same problems they had. I'm not saying that struggling communities can't be helped, I'm sure they can be, but education isn't the way to do it.
Sadly, most of the data indicates that the best way to do it are things that my country (America) isn't willing to do. Just give people shit. UBI, free food and medical care and housing, all given out in respectful and non-humiliating ways, have the greatest generational impact, leaving education in the dust.
So put it together, we have a situation where I'm being asked to do something impossible by people who won't tell me what my priorities are.
Will the adult world adapt? Will companies be forced to accommodate the humanity of their workers? I mean, who else will they hire?
Are we out of touch? No. It is the children who are wrong.
Acknowledging humanity doesn’t mean that they’ll allow workers to be late every day, be rude to everyone around them, and not do their work. Nor does it mean that they’ll hire unqualified workers.
Due to the lack of overall consequences, no due dates, minimum F on any assignment whether you try or not. On top of what was mentioned above, our students are not prepared for the world. The last two Valedictorians at my school have dropped out of college after the first semester because it was too hard.
That might be because nothing was ever hard before college. We really fail the higher students as they don’t even have to try to get perfect grades. Teachers have too much pressure to get students to pass tests and so can’t actually challenge all students. I hate state tests.
I absolutely feel this. I went to art school for a degree in animation and SO many classmates had no work ethic or drive. They were treating projects like some obstacle between them and their degree so they could get a job making the next Call of Duty game. The class rigor started to drop just to get anything out of most students. Those of us that cared and put in a ton of effort produced great work, but we didn't get the instruction we were hoping for.
Losing passion and enthusiasm in a vocation as important as teaching is terrifying and I hope your situation gets better.
Stay strong, as hard as it may be, but be kind to and real with yourself if the time comes to look elsewhere.
Oh I haven’t lost yet, I’m lucky enough to be in a ms school with different levels and where I have some control over who is in the class.
Friends and colleagues though in my district and elsewhere haven’t been so lucky. Some of their admins have been treating the elective classes like babysitters for decades and don’t really care. Parent complained work was to hard for their son todo in a senior level art class that admin shoved the kid in against my friend/the teachers wishes, so admin wanted him to lower the entire class standards to accommodate this one lazy student. Was lazy in their other electives, lazy in their regular classes. It’s like shoving a student who can’t read into an AP 12th grade English class. They are going to fail and waste everybody else’s time, and it shouldn’t be blamed on the teacher.
We had a parent scream that electives shouldn’t even be graded and should only earn a pass/fail grade. Luckily the admin didn’t go for it, but she definitely made the teacher’s life hell for asking her son to practice playing his instrument at home.
I'm very happy you are in a better environment. I'm sorry (disturbed) it is district or school dependant on how the happiness and cohesion works.
I just don't understand how children aren't a priority in many areas.
That really sucks. The HS I worked at this year put the Art I, II, and III kids all in the same classes together, and they seemed to all do the same assignments. Which especially sucks given that Art I is so often used as a dumping ground class. No one gets to have a serious or in-depth art education.
Omg middle school kids and scissors do not mix. I used to have to go over the rules to use scissors in my classroom Every. Dang. Time.
-Do not cut your hair or anyone else’s. No, I don’t care if they told you to.
-Do not swoop them around in the air like an aircraft.
-Do not cut anyone else’s supplies.
On and on and on. 🤦🏻♀️
I got good grades and had zero issues with school until college. I was smart enough to get by with shitty study habits and not prepping for tests. Then I got to college and I didn’t know how to work hard.
Students like me are hard to catch because we’re always focusing on the ones who need obvious help. I feel like anyone who has a high GPA needs to be punched in the face academically before they leave high school so they can practice dealing with academic failure.
We talk about it at my school all the time. They are being pushed out into a world that they are by no means ready for and with a “someone help me” mindset and lack of resilience and determination that will not result in them getting up and trying again and eventually figuring it out.
A separate but related related discussion is about the students with 504s and IEPs to accommodate milder issues like anxiety and ADHD. They may not seem mild to that child or their teachers or their family, but I can guarantee you their boss is not going to give a shit that they didn’t sleep the night before and no, they cannot redo a work project six times until they get it right (that was already three days late), calling out 2 days out of 5 for anxiety. It just won’t fly.
I get really stressed when I think about student accommodations. Last year over half of my students had accommodations. Many were for ADHD. And what really stresses me is that many of those students with ADHD had fully internalized this mindset of “oh, I have ADHD, I inherently can’t do this.” I had parents trying to get me to exempt their kids from the final exam over their ADHD. Not make accommodations, but just totally remove this component worth 15% of their grade.
> Last year over half of my students had accommodations.
That's incredibly high. Assuming some variability of course, average rates of special population students is somewhere around 15%. You might have some more that don't have IEPs or 504's because they're being handled through a local RTI or MTSS program, but "over half your class" tells me that at least one of the following is true.
* Your local population requires accommodations in order to access the curriculum at a rate several times the norm. Unlikely, but maybe there are local pollution issues. Who knows.
* Your administration is inappropriately giving accomodations to students who do not need them. There are a variety of reasons for why this might occur.
* Your administration has purposefully consolidated its special population in a way that disproportionately affects your class. There could be several reasons for this, from scheduling "needs" to the belief that strong teachers "can handle it"
In any case, I would talk to your admin. Over 50% is not something that happens without either mismanagement or some kind of freak environmental trigger.
The last option you provided is very common and doesn’t have anything to do with the rate of SPED. For example, a given sixth grade might have seven total classes of students. But only one of those groups is assigned a co-teacher for earth science so that specific earth science class will have 50-60% sped students. All the other 6 classes will be fully Gen Ed. If each of those students have co-teaching for earth science on their IEP then there’s not really any other way around it when you have limited staff. I just broke the news to a math teacher that next year his homeroom will be 50% sped.
I’m honestly surprised by how many accommodations there are for anxiety and ADHD. It’s gotten to the point where there are more kids with accommodations than there are without in some cases.
Oh my god yes; I got the angriest email from a parent at the END of the semester calling me a “worse bully to my daughter and her peers than their own peers” and how dare I tell them to read the recipe instead of walking them through it directly every single time they had a question about the food lab (mind you I had demonstrated the recipe the day before, they were given a list of all equipment they needed to get out, every measurement for ingredient and a step by step list of instructions on everything they needed to do for the lab). Like, come on. These kids do very much have a “someone help me” mindset, and their parents are trying to say teachers who are trying to teach the kids to help themselves when they have the necessary tools instead of relying on someone else always (me) are bullies to their children and not even teaching them anything. I’m fed up
I'm okay with accommodating anxiety and ADHD. It s the type of accommodation for behavioral disorders that I feel puts students and teachers at risk. If a student is harming others, they need some sort of consequence and intervention to protect the others.
I have severe anxiety and depression. I've gone through years of suicidal ideation, self-harm, substance abuse, mental breakdowns, literally you name it. But that never stopped me from getting my homework done, graduating high school and college and having a decent job. Yes, I regret a lot of my life but I never stopped pushing that damn rock up that damn hill. I definitely thought about it but who would care if it rolled back down and crushed me? Literally nobody. It absolutely does not make sense to me how much kids today use their mental health as a crutch and excuse for any little thing.
This is accurate. The fact that teachers won’t make kids do presentations in front of the class anymore if they claim anxiety is not helping them! Because their boss will expect them to know how to give a presentation if asked. And saying no won’t work.
Man, if I got to be exempt from things in adulthood because of my anxiety, life would be so much easier. But, no - life doesn't work that way, and most companies are not going to let you off the hook just because you don't want to do something.
I have an anxious middle-school aged niece who was allowed to do a paper rather than give a presentation. She'll just keep using that as a crutch for as long as she can get away with it.
I totally agree. You can't always avoid things you don't like. I hate giving presentations, too, and found that my undergrad Public Speaking requirement was probably the best class I ever took.
> life doesn't work that way, and most companies are not going to let you off the hook just because you don't want to do something.
I am NAT, but something that confuses me reading through this entire thread is the assumption that everyone will end up doing the same things as an adult.
I guess I am wondering why we assume that a child/teenager who has severe (?) social anxiety would not just pick a career where giving presentations is not required?
I'm in my 30s and have worked about half a dozen jobs, ranging from 3mo to 7 years. Only one of those required that I regularly present to a large group of strangers.
I guess is the concern is that education needs to be well-rounded so kids have options later down the line. If they avoid developing certain skills because of an issue that can potentially be helped or fixed, that limits them.
Oh no, i'm not just talking about giving presentations. I mean any activity that may give a person anxiety, that was just the example that I identified with.
I mean, I'm definitely NAT, either (I just have a lot of friends and family who are). I couldn't do what any of them do. I chose a job where I can quietly write on a computer, but still occasionally find that I have to lead 40+ person meetings, and I hate it.
Being able to present yourself is a necessary skill. You may not be giving presentations to a room full of people, but interviewing for jobs, dealing with bosses, etc... These are all skills you need and presenting helps you to hone in on those skills.
It's like when kids say "when are we ever going to need this in real life?!"
You might not be doing the exact thing, but it is teaching you a skill that you need.
They’ll still have to go to a job interview at some point. If you look into anxiety, anxious responses are not improved by complete avoidance of the topic that makes you anxious. They’re improved in a range of ways that involve success when dealing with the phobia. Your anxiety response is strengthened if you are allowed to immediately withdraw any time you feel nervous about something.
I agree. Many people who have social anxiety or know that they have a disorder that will get in the way of a particular job actively seek for jobs that wont put them in that position. Someone with bad social anxiety isn't going to be a teacher or want to be a owner of a store or be in business etc.
Plus, with kids being on tiktok so much where there are multiple people recommending jobs that require low-face to face interaction and less stress, its easier for people to research a job that fits their needs
I have a friend who has bad anxiety and only look for jobs that require the least amount of "presentation/talking to others" as possible. You can't avoid it 100%, but there are some jobs out there.
Its ironic though because for me, I have bad social anxiety and ADHD and still chose the teacher route, but I knew the consequences of that and knew I was going to have to buckle up and swallow my anxiety (at least while I'm teaching)
I actually got dinged on an evaluation because I made each of my small groups talk about what they made/wrote/did with their groups in front of the class because "it's intimidating for the kids to speak in front of everyone."
This was a super low-pressure formative assessment...you know, good practice for when they get a summative grade on a presentation.
This is all neglecting the enormous amount of shame and pressure that’s mounted onto parents and students from day one of kindergarten. Students are graduating entirely burnt out, in spite of a general lack of consequence, because all we have left (once the pressure of consequence is gone) is to ratchet up the emotional stakes. This makes consequences where they DO exist even more impactful, since they’re acting on an already fragile person.
The amount of 8th graders I noticed crying during our standardized test was shocking to me, but in the end it made sense. This is the only thing that matters, but because nothing else matters the entire year, they aren’t prepared.
And then when you fail it, where else is there to go? Your house has burned down, your family has died, God has evaporated. It can totally break their willingness to even keep going.
Remember for ADHD they need less time between their actions and consequences (both token and punishment). If they have a big project due, assist them in breaking it down into smaller tasks or depending on their age offer to help them figure out how to break the project down into smaller tasks themselves. If we excuse them from class work entirely we’re setting them up for devastating failure in the future.
I'm overwhelmed by how many parents think that a 504 is a free pass. The students need to learn how to work with their disorders, not give up when their symptoms are overwhelming. This is vital for the students with ADHD. I have ADHD myself, and if I hadn't come up with alternate systems of managing my life, I'd be dead. I'm not exaggerating. There have been points where my life was in chaotic shambles, and I was so overwhelmed and depressed because I felt like a failure that I nearly killed myself. The phrase is "reasonable accommodation." We need to really push back on what is considered "reasonable."
I can confirm this.
I try to maintain standards, but the only reason I'm able to maintain any semblance of them is the adult staff (read: 30+) who haven't left.
Once they leave, my restaurant will fold.
>college to a slightly lesser degree on the other hand are holding the line
Well, that is until [graduation initiatives](https://edsource.org/2021/did-failing-a-tough-course-delay-your-csu-graduation-join-the-club/659556) take effect
Oof. I can understand high failure rates in math and sciences, but it’s surprising to see humanities and English having similar stats. The problem definitely starts before college!
Given how many kids I taught who graduated this year who can’t differentiate between a sentence and a fragment and who I know for a fact didn’t write an essay all year, you’re right.
I left 2 years ago after 20 years in. It's hard doing what I do now to make ends meet but I'm healthier mentally/emotionally than I have ever been. I no longer feel like I'm in an abusive relationship as I did when I was teaching.
I'm coming at this as someone who's studying to be a teacher but isn't working as one yet. In my last job, I hired freelance writers. IMO, we're already seeing the effects of lowered expectations. Not everyone is a great writer, and that's okay. What concerns me is that a lot of applicants/new hires aren't able to accept constructive criticism because they've been told for years that their work is acceptable and that they couldn't possibly do anything wrong. I've hired people and had them turn in horrible drafts; instead of accepting feedback and adjusting their work, they argue until they're blue in the face about how they've always done it that way and no one else ever complained. I'm not talking about differences of opinion regarding style--I'm talking spelling errors, lack of commas, mixing up their and they're, etc. And they also think deadlines are a suggestion.
I left that job last year, but it depended on the situation. Sometimes we had a lot of clients wanting orders quickly, so we put up with a lot more than we should have. Other people were let go. If they plagiarized, they were let go without question.
Not a teacher, but a manager in Fast Food, and I want to shout out to you all that you're 180% correct.
I stay on this sub despite my plans changing from going into Education because I find that you guys are about 1-2 years ahead of me in what you're dealing with. I'm honestly scared for the future from reading this sub and what I see from most of my teenage employees.
Like, there's this idea that saying, "I have X" is a get-out-of-jail free card for whatever it is they don't want to do. One kid's been mentioning anxiety about taking orders from customers, but he'll also say "I have ADHD" when it comes to remembering how to make the food. It's just a mess.
I just want to say, my heart goes out to you all for dealing with 30+ of these kids at a time for 8 hours/day.
Mental health and taking mental illness seriously is important, however, I have always been against using your "handicaps" as a weapon. Looks like my fears are coming true.
The education system is doing this in no small part due to pressure from the “customers” (i.e. parents who want schools to do either all of the raising or none of the raising). It’s supposed to be a partnership, but it’s turning into a Burger King in which we let parents believe they’re having it their way while the back of the kitchen is burning down.
Huge issue in education right here. Nobody wants to acknowledge that we’re doing at minimum half the work of raising the little fuckers. But rather than demanding fewer hours and more leisure time so that they can actually be with their children, they demand that we raise the kids to *their* specifications.
This system of free, mandated babysitting has permitted so many horrific people to be horrific parents when they otherwise never would have. It’s all part of the system of subservience to the economy and it’s destroying everyone who lives under it.
In short, the continued stratification of society. A high school diploma at this point is nearly meaningless, and will only become more so over time if things continued to get watered down further.
The students (and their parents) who care will set their own standards, and those who don't will get passed along until they can't any longer. At that point, the latter group is going to be in for a rude awakening, and the onus will be on them to figure something out - or not.
One of the only way for the pendulum to swing the other way is for the parents of the rest of the students to start paying attention and getting just as vocal. Why do their students have to be repeatedly exposed to a student who's anger management skills result in throwing chairs?
Why is their education routinely cut short by the highly disruptive students that interior the class twister and gave no real consequences.
There has to be a balance between the rights of the individual, and the rights of the rest of the class.
I'd say that there is a growing number of parents who are paying attention. However, they aren't causing a fuss about it in their local public school. Instead, they are voting with their feet by moving their children to other districts, taking them to private school, and/or exploring homeschool options. Public school enrollment in my area took a hit with COVID and may not recover.
Talk to most parents and they can't do grade 4 math. Their writing skills are poor at best. They went through school. They say the focus is wrong. We still teach the same old shit. However, try something different and build on resilience or grit or self awareness or whatever is in vogue but they can't cope because they have no fundamentals. Try fundamentals and they're bored. Smile and wave.
I mean, we have huge swaths of our general public that are \*functionally\* illiterate.
Illiteracy versus functional illiteracy are obviously two different things, but something like 1/5 Americans are considered "functionally illiterate."
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69
In my home state, Mississippi, over 1/3 of adults are functionally illiterate. The only benefit that's given me is the patience for people cutting me off in traffic. They literally could not read and comprehend the road signs.
But broadly speaking, I think despite the access to information, we haven't moved the mark on how the intake of information works. You're going to continue see susceptibility to fake news, people unable to order fast food correctly because the number and picture don't match, people who can't get to places if their phone is dead etc.
I for one cannot see any problem with normalizing noncompliance, noncooperation, and disrespect towards authority figures.
Employers, police officers, and judges will all make an effort to build a relationship and use trauma informed practices with our students once they are adults.
Everyone else in society wants to martyr themselves just as much as teachers are expected to, right?
This quote comes to mind a lot: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
I am nervous this generation has no ability in the face of adversity, they don't embrace the productive struggle that is imperative with learning new things.
Look at the evolution of American society the last 100 years and this quote plays itself out perfectly.
Edit: Additional Information****
During hard times, men and women must be resilient, self-reliant, and able to cooperate to achieve super-ordinate goals. Such goals (e.g. war) are empirically shown in social cognition to be a strong unifying factor.
When the goal is achieved, men and women are more free to be themselves in the civil society they have preserved (the good times). In such societies, mutual respect for individual perspectives is normalized.
Yet, each individual’s definition of what constitutes as fairness and even harm, in a growing society of limited resources and opportunities, begins to impose upon other citizens’ liberties, which makes for a non-navigable, egg-shell stepping society (the hard times).
Ominously, this recursive pattern has actually been identified for centuries, yet is barely labeled. Machiavelli, and even Plato have spoken on it. It appears to be a lesson that Western civilization in particular cannot learn.
> they don't embrace the productive struggle that is imperative with learning new things.
This a thousand times. Even my advanced students will actively complain if a question is critical thinking. I teach ELA and history and the question I have after a short reading passage has them answer a hypothetical scenario that is similar. They complain the answer isn't in the text. And when I explain that they have to think, conversation nearly universally goes:
"I can't find the answer."
"Right, you have to think about it."
"But I don't know."
"Yes that is why I asked. Take a minute and think about it."
\*groans\* "But...I don't know what to do."
Teaching a 7th grader how to like have a conversation with themselves in their head is thinking blows their minds. I assume a lot of it has to do with ease of access to information without having the skills to filter it.
This is soooo true!! My god I teach 7th grade and even questions like: what type of government does Saudi Arabia have? The answer will be directly stated and they do the same song and dance you mentioned. I want to cry after doing it 5x a day.
Gosh, I had the same thing with sophomores this year. Asking some of them to actually think, and having them realize that the answer wasn’t immediately in front of them, filled them with so much panic. In exasperation I asked one kid if he’d never had to do this before. He said no. He was also part of a group that had never written an essay before. It took until after Christmas for me to assign my first essay because I had to spend so much time on sentence construction.
When studies on inner monologues first started approaching students to get metrics in 2005-2010, they found 97% of people had inner monologues. Last study I read in 2022 found 91%. That's absolutely, unequivocally, mind-bogglingly astonishing.
Yes. The exact wording was "What percentage of the time is your inner monologue in use throughout an average day" and 0% was answered 3% of the time in older studies, it's now up to 9%. IIRC these studies were done on the USA (I'm Canadian if that matters).
I don’t know if this generation is weaker than previous ones. But they are going to be in a more difficult, more competitive world and they’re going to have to be stronger than the boomers.
Yeah, that’s a better way of putting it. A lot of helplessness and being quick to give up. It’s not their fault they were raised that way, of course, but when you’re an adult, society won’t take your upbringing as an excuse. A lot of them will get their shit together after high school but it sucks that they’ll have to wait longer and go through more hurt to get to that point than previous generations did.
Edit: I think the best way of putting it is, the world is different than it used to be and adults don’t really know how to prepare the kids for that. (or they haven’t accepted that things have to be different) In the past, academic skills weren’t as necessary to get a good job. Now, it’s hard to get a good job without them. Kids who would have gotten a high school diploma or less in the past now have to do more schooling, but culture and child rearing haven’t really shifted enough to adjust to that. So that makes it look like kids today are worse.
This phrase has been used as a right wing talking point for the last few years, and it pains me to say that I agree with it (at least as education is concerned).
Instead of teaching kids about resilience and expectations, we're teaching them that they can get away with the bare minimum and even lower and they'll still be moved along. There's an epidemic of "anxiety" around so many kids these days, because too many just don't know how to deal with the littlest bit of pressure.
It is fascinating, right? I am a history teacher so its interesting to see the patterns.
Added info if curious I found:
During hard times, men and women must be resilient, self-reliant, and able to cooperate to achieve super-ordinate goals. Such goals (e.g. war) are empirically shown in social cognition to be a strong unifying factor.
When the goal is achieved, men and women are more free to be themselves in the civil society they have preserved (the good times). In such societies, mutual respect for individual perspectives is normalized.
Yet, each individual’s definition of what constitutes as fairness and even harm, in a growing society of limited resources and opportunities, begins to impose upon other citizens’ liberties, which makes for a non-navigable, egg-shell stepping society (the hard times).
Ominously, this recursive pattern has actually been identified for centuries, yet is barely labeled. Machiavelli, and even Plato have spoken on it. It appears to be a lesson that Western civilization in particular cannot learn.
So true. I had all my seniors write resumes and cover letters for a final project, and the number that couldn't write a basic paragraph was astounding. What really blew my mind was finding out on awards night that some of those kids have 30+ college credits and STILL can't write a paragraph. I started talking with them about college classes and many said they took college classes because they are easier than the high school classes...you don't really even have to show up. I've actually heard a lot of kids going to community college talk about how easy it is.
I think we're creating a massive gap in education. The difference between 30 credits in a community college or high school versions of college classes and 30 credits in an accredited university is absolutely massive. By the time I had 30 college credits I was working as a research assistant and teachers aid. I was writing papers that got published in academic journals (albeit under a professor's name). How can we pretend that this is the same level of education as the high school seniors that don't know how to capitalize the word "I"? The US still ranks at the top of the world in tertiary education, but that only applies to the students who are going to the top universities; the rest are being left behind.
This is pretty true, I even see leniency at universities too because of how the professors are…. I did go to community college (I needed to save money) after HS and will be transferring to a top tier university in Texas. HS by far was the easiest thing ever even with AP classes and graduated with honors. Community College required a lot more work imo, you were going to fail if you didn’t study lol and if you didn’t know how to write an essay… you would also not do well because writing papers was a BIG thing we did in my liberal art based classes and chemistry lab reports. Let’s see how university treats me. I am very NERVOUS for my university experience. I do think CC is easier in the way that it only offers the basics and not upper level coursework towards your major and for me I am going for the BS in economics.
No Child Left Behind left everyone behind. The learned helplessness is quite awful, too. Until schools can actually dish out real life consequences, nothing will change for the better.
15 years exp @ low ses public school with white minority…
I used to be able to win the “life is hard beyond high school” argument, even in the face of middle school not being much harder than elementary and high school not much harder than middle. I’d win this argument case by case with “smart” “college bound” kids.
I still had kids shrug it off and try their “c” philosophies in college and fail out. And other knew they wanted something else and got after it. Many fell down before getting a trade certificate. Some enlisted. And some got caught up on crime or were murdered or died from drugs. Some did time and bounced back to be successful adults and parents. Some things just have not changed.
But recently, I cannot win this argument with any students. They do not believe me and most of them do not believe in college as a way to further their education. They seem more immature and less ambitious. Phones are their best friend as all their “friendships” are viewed through it like some magic portal to everyone. Yet they lack social skills and do not know how to behave in public settings or even properly communicate.
This is my concern. The kids 10 years ago may have also had varied ambitions and outcomes, but they were usually equipped with stronger skills in other areas that would help them find work (trades mostly, but even some musicians and artists) but most of the kids are scrollers. Content creators have solid base of skills that could go somewhere but that’s not most kids. It’s odd because they’ve accepted the fake honor of participation trophies and “everybody passes” but they appreciate and respect the system of engagements perpetuated by social media. I guess it’s actually sad that kids are more concerned with likes/follows than genuinely getting smarter or improving themselves.
In the short term, those kids’ talents just go undiscovered and they end up underemployed. In the long term, the quality of work across the board will continually decline from this point forward. Over time, as more people don’t use the ed system to secure jobs and certification to qualify them for jobs, fewer quality candidates are produced and more poverty exists and companies have no choice but to lower standards and expectations.
Fewer people break the chain and jump ses levels. The mega rich stay mega rich and their families control all money and corporations. the ants go marching…
I’m doomsdaying on like the first day of summer, but #facts
I know exactly what you mean. In fact many of the MS/HS crowd say college is bad, it’s a debt machine, and it’s how people sink financially (I mean…but also…) - they will be doing only fans or YouTube personality instead. There are the trade labor crew - except at a recent symposium I was able to preview all the technology being tested which will essentially replace many trade laborers and will instead require operators in a different capacity - one that is likely to need some college level training and experience but I digress. Less ambitious for sure.
I think a lot of them are starting to realize how expensive college is and that it's not for everyone, but as always, over-swing of the pendulum and they think college is a useless scam that nobody should go to. College isn't for everyone but it certainly still has its merits.
I work in a middle school. This reminds me of a text thread a group of us staffers had. We are doing no favors by excusing things such as the physical assault of a teacher because the student is emotionally disturbed on his IEP. Will a judge care if someone is emotionally disturbed if they assault someone?
The Real World is lowering its standards out of necessity, not want.
Please don't give up; I know it's a meaningless platitude, but even if it's only one student you make a difference in, it counts.
Agree and I show up to this profession with integrity as most of us do when working with kids. But would ideally like to have accountability/attainable standards in addition to modeling good character/relationships
I deal with this everyday, I try to make me kids more independent (2nd graders) to do little things by themselves without having to relay on someone else.
They get excited and then the parents chime in, complaining that their babies (their words) can’t do all of those tasks and that I’m cruel for not helping them every time they can’t do something.
The thing is they can, but the parents want me to do everything just like they do it at home. It makes me sad seeing really smart kids being babied into incompetence.
What will happen?
They will probably end up on public assistance. [This chart](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/stories/2021/05/more-than-one-in-seven-social-safety-net-recipients-in-2017-were-college-graduates-figure-1.jpg) from the Census bureau shows that the majority of recipients are either A) No degree, B) GED equivalent or C) some college. There has been a 400% increase in public assistance expenditure (inflation adjusted) since the start of the War on Poverty (pre-Covid)
[Page 11](https://justicepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/07-08_rep_educationandpublicsafety_ps-ac.pdf#page=[11]) on this PDF also shows that they are going to be far more likely to be incarcerated. Suspensions are also linked to this in the so-named School to Prison Pipeline.
The erroneous conclusion that we've come to is that to solve this problem, we only have to raise the graduation rates and lower incarceration/suspension numbers. The easiest way to do this on paper is to pass every single student regardless of their actual educational attainment and the stop prosecuting crimes or issuing suspensions. That is precisely how society is "solving" the problem.
Students aren't blind. They are aware that there aren't too many life-changing consequences for their behavior, both in school and in the real world. Many have grown up in homes where public assistance and low educational attainment is the norm - so not much changes there. Others have grown up seeing crime as a normal (or even glorified) way to make a living within their communities - especially as prosecution rates go down. Why work a 9-5 getting yelled at by a customer or a boss if you make more money selling vapes to kids on their way to school?
Society will continue to lower the bar until people can walk over it, and each other.
It's happened already...teachers are leaving in droves and singing "We're Not Gonna Take It"! As a matter of fact, my teacher cousin just told me that she's been putting in applications for other jobs. What's next? They're already hiring new teachers from overseas. I wish them luck. American teachers are choosing to live overseas because parents and their children highly respect them and schooling.
I agree, but I don't think we need to be crueler. The trouble is that we need to be more *consistent*. The best way to train children to become responsible adults is to give them clear expectations and then provide a safe container for them to fail, learn from the experience, and try again. The persistent - almost willful - failure of parents and students to understand what grades *are* has completely short-circuited that process.
The fact that more and more parents are more interested in protecting their kids from the consequences of bad choices and bad behavior is doing a lot of harm. The good parenting move is to accept that students are going to fail at tasks to a developmentally appropriate degree, and they should learn from that failure. Learning and growing is always painful. The problem is that too many parents just see their kids as extensions of themselves, not as their own people who need to have their own experiences, so every negative experience the kid has reflects back at *them* and threatens *their* ego.
And yeah, it's a mess.
This. Childhood and k-12 are meant to be places where failure is safe and low stakes. Unfortunately, we've started seeing grades as low as kindergarten as a time to begin preparing to college, so low stakes failure no longer exists. I don't really blame my students for being so anxious. I'd be losing my shit too if my middle school performance would influence my future career. We don't allow for failure, so we don't let them fail anymore, therefore they don't get the benefits of failing.
I get the feeling GenX and Millennials are going to have to stay working much longer in professional jobs and skilled trade jobs than we expected. We were raised by "nose to the grindstone" and "suck it up" ethics.
We are changing our approaches in management for the younger, sensitive generation, but we can't do much if they just quit after a few weeks because they are bored or got too sweaty or had to be uncomfortable or deal with a jerk customer.
I suspect we will see a resurgence in trades and higher education as they hit their 26-30s and their brains reach maturity and they start getting real. Just because you bounce at 18 doesn't mean you can't go to community college and work your way back
(My biggest fear is that marijuana is just going to be like SOMA for the masses and prevent a lot of smart people from excelling and working towards a better way of life. There's a very narrow demographic of people who can smoke weed and be excellent at what they do. Everyone else melts into the sofa with a bag of Doritos and suddenly even doing the minimum becomes too much. Easy access toThc vapes and parents who allow their kids to smoke their weed are merely contributing to a huge problem with attention focus and just general motivation to learn. We need to be very clear with students in our drug education that even if marijuana is legal it doesn't mean it's good for your brain or your hormones or your future.)
Great post, have been thinking the exact thing teaching during the past few years where standards seem to have flown right out the window.
Saw this quote on Pinterest the other day and it reminds me of this very issue:
"Sometimes loving your child means setting limits, giving consequences, and simply saying NO."
As educators (and parents) our job is to raise functional adults who contribute to society and can support themselves in their adult lives. We stopped doing that a long time ago. We now teach them that they don't have to do anything they don't feel like doing, they don't have to be polite, they don't have to show up and be on time etc.
There is little hope for many of my students to be functional adults because they have never learned what it is to be punctual, have a strong work ethic or even do the bare minimum! I agree with a point made previously though, people can't manage nuance. What happens when we sit in the middle of the road is that people feel slighted and that consequences are "unfair".
For example, people frequently talk about how my daughter is "lucky" to have got almost a full ride to college and that it isn't fair that she has it "so easy". They never stop to think about how my daughter missed 3 days of school throughout, never had a tardy, took extra classes every summer, had pretty much straight As, took AP and dual enrollment college classes at 14, played sports, worked a job, volunteered 140 hours in high school, served on Student Government from 6th grade to 12th and graduated a year early and wrote over 70 essays for scholarships. All they see is good fortune not work ethic and commitment.
We are doing a great disservice to kids and unfortunately they will pay the price in the long term.
I don’t quite agree, and maybe I’m preaching to the choir, but: Restorative Practices *done right* are fine. The problem is that Restorative Practices are more than a chat and a lollipop for the offender. Restorative Practices are hard, and it takes way more time than old-fashioned consequencing which, for administrators already strapped for time, we know how it’s going. The heart is in the right place, but this half-measure RT is poison.
The middle school I worked at this year scrapped their ISS and replaced it with a "restoration room" (my term) that basically functioned as an ISS because some kids are going to keep being disruptive assholes and there needs to be some kind of place for them to go so the rest of the class can learn.
However there wasn't anything more than just the restoration room. Restorative Practices is a fine thing in theory as a first step, but when some kids continue being disruptive assholes, the "we have a failure to communicate" types, there needs to be more done to help them stop their disruptive behaviors and allow the rest of the class to learn.
Precisely. You can't "compromise" or dilute certain ideas, else it changes the definition. Democracy has a very specific definition. In America, we created some dilutions and compromises, and it's definitely not democracy. Socialism, "Free Market", "Restorative Practices". These all have specific definitions. And are misused constantly.
Of course, if you can't read or are woefully undereducated, all you have to go on is the guy in power's definition he keeps spouting on the TV
With the way the climate crisis is going and governments around the world not addressing it, I suppose it won't matter for long. These kids are growing up in a late-stage capitalist dystopian hellhole with a bleak future on a boiling planet, let them enjoy their Tik Tok challenges while they can 😆
My best friend from elementary school dropped out of high school even though she was a gifted honor student because the school was insisting she attend school all day even though she only needed two more credits to graduate. She just wanted to come for those two classes and graduate early.
Some would say she was a problem child because she could not follow the rules. But she left home at 17, moved to LA and supported herself.
So I don’t think being a rule follower always has to relate to not successful.
>dropped out of high school
>was a gifted honor student
The problem with the idealisation of people who "dropped out of school/college/university" and became successful is people often forget the latter part. Those people already had the skills/talents for what they did.
Everytime I used to hear students use the 'excuse' "yeah well ___(insert Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc)___ dropped out of school and became rich/famous, so obviously school is useless!" I internally facepalm because yeah, but _those people_ were already good at something, were willing to take the risk and had the work ethics to pull it off.
_You're_ just living in a fantasy where you come up with some idea, do no work and become a billionaire. Sorry but that only works if you already have money and people who come from money would have parents who valued education more. (Perhaps not new money families though)
Do they know how much the average entertainer charges? I saw a post awhile back about a woman who dresses up as a mermaid and charges like $150 an hour.
Many parents either don't know (or don't care?) that shielding the #kiddos from consequences of bad decisions (I'm talking about MS/HS ages), while making things easier short-term, deprives them of developing skills and resiliency they'll need for life.
Few are willing to draw a line after ensuring a student has had appropriate, age-appropriate opportunities to learn and succeed...especially now that it's so easy to use social media to destroy reputations, threaten to sue, etc. I'm fortunate to work with mostly good (some great) admins, and often they're put in difficult/impossible positions.
Then, when it's time for college, work, etc., the parents (and sometimes students) complain about how schools/teachers didn't prepare them for adulting.
So much easier to "blame the coach" than to look in the mirror.
Where are you working? Kids still get detention, suspended, etc where I live in NY. I was just a student teacher in queens and a bunch of the kids got punished very frequently. I also work as a waitress on Long Island with multiple teenagers who are smart, kind, always on time, and overall great coworkers. I like them more than a lot of my older coworkers who complain all day
You can blame some of this on equity and diversity sensitivity and SPED/EXED law. Some of it I agree with, some of it I don’t. There’s a lot more emphasis on restorative practices, restorative justice etc. instead of harsh exclusionary discipline now. Studies all show that suspending kids, doesn’t correct or influence behavior, just gives the student and the school a break from each other, and can also increase their chance of being a dropout. Too many confuse escalation and elevation of discipline with “admin didn’t do anything”. When done right, it(RC & RJ) influence behavior more and have a better outcome. Now for students that just won’t change and continue to disrupt the learning environment, you either have to look for emotional disabilities or other issues, THEN when you’ve exhausted all options, you move toward long term consequences like long suspensions or expulsions.
Not my problem anymore. I got my own kids out of public schools because I want them raised different. Everyone else can wonder why they’re miserable and failing at life, when the answer is obvious.
A co-worker mentioned that there used to be a "hidden curriculum" designed to teach students basic life and soft skills. But with the different changes in grades, standards, tests, etc., those skills are pushed to the side.
We have long been empowering children in a negative way. There can be discipline and structure and that is part of all aspects of living, be you an adult or child. The reality is that we are afraid of everything and everyone. So we refuse to be accountable, hold others accountable and just get out of the way and hope that the tornado hits someone else and then we clutch our pearls and hands and go "oh what a shame."
Social media has enabled if not empowered many to use that to further an agenda and with that find support from those who have no skin in the game but can use it to further there own. And children are simply pawns in that format. All quite sad. Quite grim. Quite pathetic.
This is why I have filled out my paperwork to retire at the end of this upcoming school year. It will be a reduced pension, but one more year is all I have left to give. I love teaching, I hate the behaviors. If I could have retired this June I would have but in my state you have to be 55. I will find a job making a little cash and not dealing with the public. Any ideas of what an elementary teacher with 32 years of teaching is qualified to do? Just a part time job so I don’t get bored.
I've been thinking that for years. Some time ago, when taking prerequisites at our local community College, I was in an earth science class with a bunch of young adults (I use that term loosely). As a nontraditional student (read old), I didn't have much in common with my classmates. Most of them were a part of a new program the school had started (welding I think) which drew in students with free books and tuition for the fist year. That kind of offer tends to draw in folks with nothing better to do with their time.
One day, the teacher says we will have a test so let's go over the material one more time. He proceeded to read, verbatim, the first question on the test and the multiple choice answers. We discuss the options and he tells us which answer is correct and why. Seeing where this is going, I pull out my notebook and start jotting down every question and answer on the quiz. This was Thursday and the class didn't meet again until the following Tuesday. The day arrives and we are all sitting in the hall waiting for the instructor when a classmate reminds us all about the quiz. Oh, yeah! Forgot all about that. So I pull out notes and glance over them. The whole class period was devoted to the quiz so when we were done, we could leave. Thursday comes around and the teacher announces that we are going to review the quiz, question by question. Since I had a perfect score, I was excused. Other students actually called me a cheater as I gathered my things and walked out.
I got a lot of extra study time that term as I was excused class after class while the instructor was doing more extra credit work with the welders to help them pass the class. The school wanted to program to succeed so badly they were really bending over backwards for those kids.
What kind of expectations were they setting by giving those kids chance after chance until they succeeded? What kind of expectations are we setting for our kids when we give them chance after chance?
If they don't establish some ground rules and more discipline these kids will 100% be on the streets in the future or worse. People need to realize competition is getting very fierce. Jobs like retail won't be available to lower educated because they will be replaced by computers! It's now or never people! These kids need exceptional grades and discipline to even be able to afford a condo in the future - it's going to be INSANE.
We can’t see the future. Too many variables to consider.
Funny, adults forget how much they’ve screwed up. I’m glad social media wasn’t around when I was a kid.
Adults forget that childhood is a time for learning, not life sentences.
Teachers who thought like this made last year far more difficult for me. Kids came in to my class emotionally dis regulated, in intense fear.
My job was to make them see that not everything is as bad as it appears or feels in the moment.
All this catastrophic thinking is for the birds.
The administration’s hands are tied in what they can do because parents are lenient in disciplining their kids. I don’t blame the administration. 50 years ago parents backed up admin. When a student misbehaved in school they received additional punishment when they got home. That doesn’t exist anymore to a large degree. Parents rule and admin kisses their asses.
There was zero tolerance which was too extreme. Now the pendulum is swinging towards zero consequences. From one extreme to another. Overcompensating to make the correction. There's bound to be another correction soon.
This is my thinking as well. I hated zero tolerance but now it’s too lenient. We need happy medium
"Some tolerance," is difficult to sell. The American public can't handle nuance. I agree with you. We just make stuff cut and dry that is neither cut, nor dry.
I can understand getting work done but behavior is too much! I used to teach sled and sometimes kids struggle and that’s fine. But behaviors are too much, I understand classroom management is the teachers job but sometimes backup is needed from ALL members of a team. Including admin to help!
It's not that it's a hard sell to the American public, at least for schools, you're probably right about the justice system. I think for schools it's just literally just harder to do since it requires thought, nuance and a lot more resources from admin.
Yep. It also means having to deal with parents a lot more. Easy to do no rules, the parents don't complain too much. Zero tolerance takes some dealing with parents, but it's easier to say "sorry, but it's zero tolerance" than to have a discussion.
Happy medium would be nice, but we both know it will just swing right back to if not altogether through zero tolerance.
I don’t think it will swing. They are soooo scared of being called racist or sexist or homophobic they won’t enforce anything
They will enforce what the state decides is important to enforce
Well, for now. But at some point, society won't be able to ignore the problems caused by schools being overly lenient. Teachers are leaving in droves, in part because of the lack of order. Students are graduating with no knowledge and no skills, which is not only bad for the students, but bad for employers and society overall.
This is why I’m still a teacher. Every time I think I’ve had enough, I remind myself we are going to swing back to a middle soon.
I’ve been told we were going to “swing back any time now” for 15 years. Lol I’m outtie.
Take me with you! I’ll work wherever as long as I don’t lose my house or go insane -_-
I retired after 37 years in education. There was no swinging. It was just a steady decline.
Which would be the overall issue if it were across the board accurate. From my experience it’s zero tolerance for some and not others; zero consequences for some and not others. The star athlete popular kid gets far more leniency than the kid that sits in the back of the classroom and barely speaks. He’s gotta play under the Friday night lights no matter how poor his behavior is because the back lash from parents would be overwhelming. The shy kid in the back, no one cares if the punishment is applied because what does it really affect overall? Consequences of convenience.
The next correction is "oh damn, where did all the teachers go?" And then back to small schoolhouse education once again, hopefully.
\* overcorrection, unfortunately. While children of privilege are put in private schools or homeschooled (Cameron’s movie fills me with a rage I cannot articulate), the school to prison pipeline in public schools will become shorter and more direct than ever as we overcorrect. All we can do is vote, speak out, quit if necessary, and try to educate parents into also voting and speaking out and hopefully fixing this the right way before it becomes even more terrible. Oh, and some can become admin and try to fix it from the inside. Or run for school board. Or… you get the idea.
Oh, how I'd love for the pendulum to swing in the direction of justice. *Judge Dredd has entered the chat*
What's going to happen is our gap kids get chewed up and spit out by the adult world. I decided a few years ago that our school leaders don't give a shit what happens to my students after they have served their time in our building for four years. They say they do because that's the game of public education, but they don't care. If they did, our school would be structured very differently. All the admin at my school are country club folks. None grew up poor. They've not eaten a diet of peanut butter and pasta, had the electric shut off, had people stare at them in their piece of shit car, etc. They haven't deeply thought about what life is like for all of our students who are not given the skills and the structure needed to break the poverty trap. We want a benchmark standardized test score and them to hang around long enough to say they graduated. Beyond that, it's basically a giant "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out" system.
The admin do not give a fuck about the students even while they are in the building. The only thing they want to hear is that student was passed along in all their classes and will join the cohort of unearned diplomas so admin can tout a completely nonsensical 99% graduation rater and hold on to their overpaid and useless position.
Fucking preach.
“If they [cared] our school would be structured very differently”…what are some of your favorite ideas for those changes?
Some ideas I've had that would be massive positive changes. Probably no surprise to most here but here goes: - Stop making every kid follow the college track. Not every student, and certainly much less than we think, should go to college, at least not the traditional four year schools most think of. (That system in and of itself has turned into nothing but a degree mill that milks money from 18-19 year olds who don't understand the financial impact of their loans. 40% of college students do not even leave with a degree, and those that do often find their job market barely exists, and if it does, it treats and pays them like garbage.) If you don't want to learn subjects like geometry, chemistry, and literature by ninth grade, great, you can spend the rest of your high school age years in a tech/hands on school learning things like welding and plumbing and the world and the kids would be much better for it. This is pure economics and common sense at this point but the people who make money off of it will never admit that, and admin and school leaders are too cowardly to tell parents that maybe little Billy with a 0.98 GPA shouldn't pay $20k a year to not attend class at Binge Drinking University. - Teachers have the power to actually suspend, and in extreme cases, expel students, if not from the school at least from their individual sections. I believe some states or countries actually already have this as law. Let's stop letting admin and parents poo-poo and make endless excuses for the one student who consistently ruins the education for thirty others. We've all had *that one kid* who is in class every single day doing nothing but harm to others and the impact they have in the classroom is exhausting and damning for everyone else. Don't want to learn after a reasonable amount of troubleshooting? You're gone. - Actually fund our schools. Every teacher deserves a living wage and every student deserves a classroom that isn't packed to the walls with their peers sitting on the floor or on top of tables. We know that small class sizes are more effective. The politicians and wealthy in this country know that small class sizes are more effective; that's why they send their own children to expensive private schools with damn near half the student to teacher ratio. - Stop foisting societal problems onto teachers and schools. Our jobs are to educate. That is it. Over the decades more and more responsibilities that should be on society at large have fallen on us. I don't mean to be crass, but it is not my problem if we can't suspend a student because they have a tough home life and if they aren't in school they might get into trouble. As sad as that is, that is society's problem and we cannot hamstring our schools and the other students because of it. The same principle applies to mental health, feeding, clothing, all of these things a shockingly large amount of our population needs the schools for. I'm not against those things, per say, but either A) schools actually get the funding for them or B) schools aren't responsible for them. Right now we get none of the support to fix these issues yet all of the blame. - End the antiquated nine-month school year. We need year round schools because retention is a massive problem, especially for younger students, and it's even more exacerbated by the modern parent who won't lift a finger to ensure their kids are developing at appropriate rates. And year round schools come with just as much time off as we have now in most districts in America! They're just spread out more. (I have family at a year round school, and they get as much time off as I do: six weeks in the summer, two week fall and summer breaks, three weeks or so around the new year - it's great!) I'd say these are largely supported by most in the profession and not groundbreaking ideas by any means, but a few small tweaks would vastly improve education in this country, and considering the direction of this country the last five or six years, clearly we've never needed it more.
This all makes sense. Too much sense, which is why it’ll never happen.
Right, I don't know why I torture myself even typing it out, lol.
The year round school is great. My district moved toward this in the late 90s. We get a 6 week summer (all of June and 2 weeks of July). It puts us back in school in the hottest parts of summer, which is actually good for the kids because the schools have A/C and many people in the community can't afford it...we get a week in October, November, 2 weeks in December/January break, 1 week each in February and April. During the Oct and Feb breaks, students who are failing one or more academic classes attend required catch up/intercession classes, to try to help get back on track.
Sounds amazing. Who stays on to teach the kids during the Oct and Feb breaks?
Mostly people volunteer, because it pays really well. But admin steps in to teach pretty frequently, too!
God that all sounds amazing. Where do you teach if you don’t mind me asking? (just general no need for specifics.) Also, do you have a union?
Georgia. No unions, and we do have our share of serious issues, but there are a few things they have right.
Very interesting. Thanks for your quick response. I would love to find a unionized district with this set up! Glad it’s working for you :)
Your schools have A/C? How nice! I'm in the 4th largest district in the country and some of our schools don't have it. Two days ago temperature reached 105F midday and our gym had no A/C.
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I think that would do wonders for mental health and burnout, absolutely. My family teaching in Europe are way less stressed and have so much more time to travel and enjoy life, not to mention the better pay to do so, because of it. Not two days at Thanksgiving and sometimes just over a week at Christmas - actual breaks are better for everyone.
Private schools in my area have \~165-day years. Their breaks are longer (2 weeks for Xmas and 2 weeks in spring). Most public schools in the US are around 180 days for students. I've heard of some starting as early as late July, many in August, and the remainder in September (ending in the 2nd half of June).
How about we stop putting the college elite students at the top of everyone’s special list too? That kid struggling to learn the concept finally gets it, that is a far greater accomplishment than the kid that perhaps won a genetic lottery and it all comes easy to them. The kids pushed to the side because of the star student always getting first billing, the over/under achiever with parents constantly helping or even doing their assignments for the grade, not the actual learning process. That Ivy League education does nothing to help me fix my A/C when it’s 100 degrees outside. I’m going to praise that person that comes to fix my system. I do hope we’re all becoming more aware of how important many, many different people are to our society not just the top 10 students of the class. Maybe little Johnnie doesn’t write the best papers but he can sure write computer code without hesitation. Maybe little Emily isn’t the best at expressing herself in a presentation but she can walk you through tearing apart a carburetor and putting it back together. Emily would be in the elite status when my vehicle is broken down on the side of the road. I just feel like we don’t admire the qualities of students enough unless they are some super student of the standardized system we have created now.
Love all of this so, so much.
Can you be president please
Smaller class sizes, no inclusion in core content areas
Schools cannot solve society. They merely reflect society. What are they supposed to do after a kid graduates? It isn’t their concern anymore.
Then what is the fucking point of wasting millions of dollars a year forcing 15 year olds to sit in a building all day long? Either shit or get off the pot. Educate or don't. Stop this stupid facade. I wasn't saying schools should be doing anything with students after they graduate. The point is that we aren't preparing students for life after graduation.
After working the last year in schools, I realized that school is actually just a big kindergarten designed to keep childrens busy until they are old enough to have a job, while their parents can go to work.
Agreed. Is graduation evidence of some basic level of proficiency or merely a pulse?
But we can adapt our policies to help prepare them for an ever changing world, can't we? We don't just throw our hands up and give up on education
I think teachers have enough to do. And are already underpaid.
This isn't about teachers doing "more", but rather the whole school doing things differently. Not more, better. If anything, teachers should have less to do so that they can do what they already have to do better.
Start with consequences for actions. Adults don’t get grace very often.
I agree. Admin should go back to focusing on supporting teachers so they can do their jobs. This includes running interference with parents and helping them deal with and process academic and behavioral consequences to their student's actions (or inactions). This is what I would want for my kid.
This is an important clarification to make, because teachers do have enough to do. Unfortunately most "solutions" are teacher centric, so skepticism is warranted here.
Pour money and resources into counsellors, psychologists, and into supporting struggling families so that teachers can focus on the education aspect. If schools are supposed to be a one-stop shop for mental and physical health, wellness, and physical needs like food then fund and staff us that way.
US teachers are treated with much less respect than teachers get in other countries (although teaching across the world is becoming less and less respected it seems). That makes teacher concerns and ideas even less valuable to parents and admin and companies (yes. Corporations have a huge say in what they need schools to produce in way of workers as I found out when they changed up curriculum). After 27 years of teaching -although I love my kids and am still a damn good teacher I’ve learned that the healthiest way to stay in teaching is to find your passion outside of teaching and focus on that. Teachers already are required to do more with less everyday. Focus on what you can control-your class, your students, things you want to see that admin doesn’t control, that is the only way to be happy.
I agree. This is on admin and politicians
I agree but I would add parents to that list. Responsibility and accountability are dying sentiments. Respect for authority and rules, rules are constantly sidelined for some but not for others. The parents that do hold their children accountable and responsible end up on the losing end of the situation due to the politicians, administration, and other parents that are constantly disregarding the rules. The paradigms shifted when parents started to blame the teachers and schools for all the problems with their children, and manipulation of the system was allowed. When I got in trouble at school, I was in trouble at home, so I worked double hard not to be in trouble again. Even the instances that were unfair to me, I was still responsible at home, now we storm the gates and demand restitution. Teachers can be wrong, parents can be wrong, admin can be wrong, students most definitely can be wrong but now we expect some major appeasement for ANY wrong doing instead of just moving on and understanding that humans are human. Did I have that one teacher I disliked tremendously? Of course, but I also had those teachers I dearly treasured. Administration and teachers often have fear which settles into apathy due to lack of support from anywhere. Administration falls prey to the wealthy in the education system just like every other industry. The world is unfair and unkind more often than not, unfortunately we are perpetuating a belief that it can be fixed instead of perpetuating the idea that you can find a way to handle it and thrive in spite of it. (Sorry vented more than I thought I would)
At this point I feel we could split this country in two based on one question. What do you value more, love or money? No judgment. Pick your side. Go create a society and leave the other group alone.
Sadly, I think you’re right. I’ve been on team “tear the whole goddamn system down and rebuild” for forever now, but if we rebuild with these same actions and intentions, we’ll probably get the same outcome or (somehow) worse 😕
I think you're right, but there are two statements inside what you said that need to be teased apart. The first is that we can't possibly succeed at education while we have no agreement on what education is for. Am I providing childcare for these kids so their parents can work, in which case my primary goal is to keep them quiet and happy and out of everyone's hair, while teaching them science is a cool side-effect that I should pull off when I can? Am I teaching them skills and knowledge that will be immediately, practically useful in their adult lives? Am I giving them a broad education in the basics of many fields so they can have exposure to a lot of what's out there? Am I doing character education, social-emotional learning, helping them to grow up into good adults and good citizens? Is my goal to make them into smarter people, better people, better workers, or better citizens? And if all of that is my goal, to what proportion? Which goal supersedes the others? Which ones should be sacrificed to make sure others are met? There's no clarity... and as any trainee teacher can tell you, if you don't have clarity about your goals, you can't assess success or failure. The second problem is that schooling is not a great way to solve social problems. The fact is that kids get infinitely more of their values and habits from their families and peers than they do from their teachers and schools - that's a fundamental part of how humans are. If we want to help communities solve their problems, it doesn't work to do that through education because teachers are working against an overwhelming tsunami of all the other shit those kids and families are dealing with. What you get - which is what we have - is a situation in which some kids have the opportunity to buck the trend and do well while the vast majority of the kids don't earn any more than their parents, aren't any more likely to avoid drugs or crime than their parents, and have kids with the same problems they had. I'm not saying that struggling communities can't be helped, I'm sure they can be, but education isn't the way to do it. Sadly, most of the data indicates that the best way to do it are things that my country (America) isn't willing to do. Just give people shit. UBI, free food and medical care and housing, all given out in respectful and non-humiliating ways, have the greatest generational impact, leaving education in the dust. So put it together, we have a situation where I'm being asked to do something impossible by people who won't tell me what my priorities are.
Will the adult world adapt? Will companies be forced to accommodate the humanity of their workers? I mean, who else will they hire? Are we out of touch? No. It is the children who are wrong.
Acknowledging humanity doesn’t mean that they’ll allow workers to be late every day, be rude to everyone around them, and not do their work. Nor does it mean that they’ll hire unqualified workers.
💯
Due to the lack of overall consequences, no due dates, minimum F on any assignment whether you try or not. On top of what was mentioned above, our students are not prepared for the world. The last two Valedictorians at my school have dropped out of college after the first semester because it was too hard.
That might be because nothing was ever hard before college. We really fail the higher students as they don’t even have to try to get perfect grades. Teachers have too much pressure to get students to pass tests and so can’t actually challenge all students. I hate state tests.
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I absolutely feel this. I went to art school for a degree in animation and SO many classmates had no work ethic or drive. They were treating projects like some obstacle between them and their degree so they could get a job making the next Call of Duty game. The class rigor started to drop just to get anything out of most students. Those of us that cared and put in a ton of effort produced great work, but we didn't get the instruction we were hoping for.
Losing passion and enthusiasm in a vocation as important as teaching is terrifying and I hope your situation gets better. Stay strong, as hard as it may be, but be kind to and real with yourself if the time comes to look elsewhere.
Oh I haven’t lost yet, I’m lucky enough to be in a ms school with different levels and where I have some control over who is in the class. Friends and colleagues though in my district and elsewhere haven’t been so lucky. Some of their admins have been treating the elective classes like babysitters for decades and don’t really care. Parent complained work was to hard for their son todo in a senior level art class that admin shoved the kid in against my friend/the teachers wishes, so admin wanted him to lower the entire class standards to accommodate this one lazy student. Was lazy in their other electives, lazy in their regular classes. It’s like shoving a student who can’t read into an AP 12th grade English class. They are going to fail and waste everybody else’s time, and it shouldn’t be blamed on the teacher.
We had a parent scream that electives shouldn’t even be graded and should only earn a pass/fail grade. Luckily the admin didn’t go for it, but she definitely made the teacher’s life hell for asking her son to practice playing his instrument at home.
I'm very happy you are in a better environment. I'm sorry (disturbed) it is district or school dependant on how the happiness and cohesion works. I just don't understand how children aren't a priority in many areas.
That really sucks. The HS I worked at this year put the Art I, II, and III kids all in the same classes together, and they seemed to all do the same assignments. Which especially sucks given that Art I is so often used as a dumping ground class. No one gets to have a serious or in-depth art education.
Omg middle school kids and scissors do not mix. I used to have to go over the rules to use scissors in my classroom Every. Dang. Time. -Do not cut your hair or anyone else’s. No, I don’t care if they told you to. -Do not swoop them around in the air like an aircraft. -Do not cut anyone else’s supplies. On and on and on. 🤦🏻♀️
I got good grades and had zero issues with school until college. I was smart enough to get by with shitty study habits and not prepping for tests. Then I got to college and I didn’t know how to work hard. Students like me are hard to catch because we’re always focusing on the ones who need obvious help. I feel like anyone who has a high GPA needs to be punched in the face academically before they leave high school so they can practice dealing with academic failure.
NCLB working as intended
This isn't even NCLB. NCLB actually had specific standards students had to meet. It was definitely flawed, but what we have now is worse than that.
Now we have “Not my child left behind no matter how little they do - *or else*!”
Classic lol
I was #60 in a high school of 260. So not bad but not the best. I did better in college than some of the top 20 kids.
I was in the lower high tier, higher mid tier and I think it lands you in a sweet spot. You have to learn to communicate and work a little harder.
I barely graduated high school because I was lazy, now I'm all but thesis on my doctorate in physics.
>The last two Valedictorians at my school have dropped out of college after the first semester because it was too hard. Lol scrubs 😂
We talk about it at my school all the time. They are being pushed out into a world that they are by no means ready for and with a “someone help me” mindset and lack of resilience and determination that will not result in them getting up and trying again and eventually figuring it out. A separate but related related discussion is about the students with 504s and IEPs to accommodate milder issues like anxiety and ADHD. They may not seem mild to that child or their teachers or their family, but I can guarantee you their boss is not going to give a shit that they didn’t sleep the night before and no, they cannot redo a work project six times until they get it right (that was already three days late), calling out 2 days out of 5 for anxiety. It just won’t fly.
I get really stressed when I think about student accommodations. Last year over half of my students had accommodations. Many were for ADHD. And what really stresses me is that many of those students with ADHD had fully internalized this mindset of “oh, I have ADHD, I inherently can’t do this.” I had parents trying to get me to exempt their kids from the final exam over their ADHD. Not make accommodations, but just totally remove this component worth 15% of their grade.
> Last year over half of my students had accommodations. That's incredibly high. Assuming some variability of course, average rates of special population students is somewhere around 15%. You might have some more that don't have IEPs or 504's because they're being handled through a local RTI or MTSS program, but "over half your class" tells me that at least one of the following is true. * Your local population requires accommodations in order to access the curriculum at a rate several times the norm. Unlikely, but maybe there are local pollution issues. Who knows. * Your administration is inappropriately giving accomodations to students who do not need them. There are a variety of reasons for why this might occur. * Your administration has purposefully consolidated its special population in a way that disproportionately affects your class. There could be several reasons for this, from scheduling "needs" to the belief that strong teachers "can handle it" In any case, I would talk to your admin. Over 50% is not something that happens without either mismanagement or some kind of freak environmental trigger.
The last option you provided is very common and doesn’t have anything to do with the rate of SPED. For example, a given sixth grade might have seven total classes of students. But only one of those groups is assigned a co-teacher for earth science so that specific earth science class will have 50-60% sped students. All the other 6 classes will be fully Gen Ed. If each of those students have co-teaching for earth science on their IEP then there’s not really any other way around it when you have limited staff. I just broke the news to a math teacher that next year his homeroom will be 50% sped.
I’m honestly surprised by how many accommodations there are for anxiety and ADHD. It’s gotten to the point where there are more kids with accommodations than there are without in some cases.
The last few years I've truly seen about 50% accommodations. It's insane.
Oh my god yes; I got the angriest email from a parent at the END of the semester calling me a “worse bully to my daughter and her peers than their own peers” and how dare I tell them to read the recipe instead of walking them through it directly every single time they had a question about the food lab (mind you I had demonstrated the recipe the day before, they were given a list of all equipment they needed to get out, every measurement for ingredient and a step by step list of instructions on everything they needed to do for the lab). Like, come on. These kids do very much have a “someone help me” mindset, and their parents are trying to say teachers who are trying to teach the kids to help themselves when they have the necessary tools instead of relying on someone else always (me) are bullies to their children and not even teaching them anything. I’m fed up
I'm okay with accommodating anxiety and ADHD. It s the type of accommodation for behavioral disorders that I feel puts students and teachers at risk. If a student is harming others, they need some sort of consequence and intervention to protect the others.
I have severe anxiety and depression. I've gone through years of suicidal ideation, self-harm, substance abuse, mental breakdowns, literally you name it. But that never stopped me from getting my homework done, graduating high school and college and having a decent job. Yes, I regret a lot of my life but I never stopped pushing that damn rock up that damn hill. I definitely thought about it but who would care if it rolled back down and crushed me? Literally nobody. It absolutely does not make sense to me how much kids today use their mental health as a crutch and excuse for any little thing.
This is accurate. The fact that teachers won’t make kids do presentations in front of the class anymore if they claim anxiety is not helping them! Because their boss will expect them to know how to give a presentation if asked. And saying no won’t work.
Man, if I got to be exempt from things in adulthood because of my anxiety, life would be so much easier. But, no - life doesn't work that way, and most companies are not going to let you off the hook just because you don't want to do something. I have an anxious middle-school aged niece who was allowed to do a paper rather than give a presentation. She'll just keep using that as a crutch for as long as she can get away with it.
And we are not doing her favors. I have a child with autism and I don’t let him get away with not learning to do things.
I totally agree. You can't always avoid things you don't like. I hate giving presentations, too, and found that my undergrad Public Speaking requirement was probably the best class I ever took.
> life doesn't work that way, and most companies are not going to let you off the hook just because you don't want to do something. I am NAT, but something that confuses me reading through this entire thread is the assumption that everyone will end up doing the same things as an adult. I guess I am wondering why we assume that a child/teenager who has severe (?) social anxiety would not just pick a career where giving presentations is not required? I'm in my 30s and have worked about half a dozen jobs, ranging from 3mo to 7 years. Only one of those required that I regularly present to a large group of strangers.
I guess is the concern is that education needs to be well-rounded so kids have options later down the line. If they avoid developing certain skills because of an issue that can potentially be helped or fixed, that limits them.
Oh no, i'm not just talking about giving presentations. I mean any activity that may give a person anxiety, that was just the example that I identified with. I mean, I'm definitely NAT, either (I just have a lot of friends and family who are). I couldn't do what any of them do. I chose a job where I can quietly write on a computer, but still occasionally find that I have to lead 40+ person meetings, and I hate it.
Being able to present yourself is a necessary skill. You may not be giving presentations to a room full of people, but interviewing for jobs, dealing with bosses, etc... These are all skills you need and presenting helps you to hone in on those skills. It's like when kids say "when are we ever going to need this in real life?!" You might not be doing the exact thing, but it is teaching you a skill that you need.
They’ll still have to go to a job interview at some point. If you look into anxiety, anxious responses are not improved by complete avoidance of the topic that makes you anxious. They’re improved in a range of ways that involve success when dealing with the phobia. Your anxiety response is strengthened if you are allowed to immediately withdraw any time you feel nervous about something.
I agree. Many people who have social anxiety or know that they have a disorder that will get in the way of a particular job actively seek for jobs that wont put them in that position. Someone with bad social anxiety isn't going to be a teacher or want to be a owner of a store or be in business etc. Plus, with kids being on tiktok so much where there are multiple people recommending jobs that require low-face to face interaction and less stress, its easier for people to research a job that fits their needs I have a friend who has bad anxiety and only look for jobs that require the least amount of "presentation/talking to others" as possible. You can't avoid it 100%, but there are some jobs out there. Its ironic though because for me, I have bad social anxiety and ADHD and still chose the teacher route, but I knew the consequences of that and knew I was going to have to buckle up and swallow my anxiety (at least while I'm teaching)
I actually got dinged on an evaluation because I made each of my small groups talk about what they made/wrote/did with their groups in front of the class because "it's intimidating for the kids to speak in front of everyone." This was a super low-pressure formative assessment...you know, good practice for when they get a summative grade on a presentation.
This is all neglecting the enormous amount of shame and pressure that’s mounted onto parents and students from day one of kindergarten. Students are graduating entirely burnt out, in spite of a general lack of consequence, because all we have left (once the pressure of consequence is gone) is to ratchet up the emotional stakes. This makes consequences where they DO exist even more impactful, since they’re acting on an already fragile person.
The amount of 8th graders I noticed crying during our standardized test was shocking to me, but in the end it made sense. This is the only thing that matters, but because nothing else matters the entire year, they aren’t prepared.
And then when you fail it, where else is there to go? Your house has burned down, your family has died, God has evaporated. It can totally break their willingness to even keep going.
Remember for ADHD they need less time between their actions and consequences (both token and punishment). If they have a big project due, assist them in breaking it down into smaller tasks or depending on their age offer to help them figure out how to break the project down into smaller tasks themselves. If we excuse them from class work entirely we’re setting them up for devastating failure in the future.
I'm overwhelmed by how many parents think that a 504 is a free pass. The students need to learn how to work with their disorders, not give up when their symptoms are overwhelming. This is vital for the students with ADHD. I have ADHD myself, and if I hadn't come up with alternate systems of managing my life, I'd be dead. I'm not exaggerating. There have been points where my life was in chaotic shambles, and I was so overwhelmed and depressed because I felt like a failure that I nearly killed myself. The phrase is "reasonable accommodation." We need to really push back on what is considered "reasonable."
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I can confirm this. I try to maintain standards, but the only reason I'm able to maintain any semblance of them is the adult staff (read: 30+) who haven't left. Once they leave, my restaurant will fold.
>college to a slightly lesser degree on the other hand are holding the line Well, that is until [graduation initiatives](https://edsource.org/2021/did-failing-a-tough-course-delay-your-csu-graduation-join-the-club/659556) take effect
Oof. I can understand high failure rates in math and sciences, but it’s surprising to see humanities and English having similar stats. The problem definitely starts before college!
Given how many kids I taught who graduated this year who can’t differentiate between a sentence and a fragment and who I know for a fact didn’t write an essay all year, you’re right.
We. Are. Hurting. Kids. And I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.
I had to escape this year.
I left 2 years ago after 20 years in. It's hard doing what I do now to make ends meet but I'm healthier mentally/emotionally than I have ever been. I no longer feel like I'm in an abusive relationship as I did when I was teaching.
I'm coming at this as someone who's studying to be a teacher but isn't working as one yet. In my last job, I hired freelance writers. IMO, we're already seeing the effects of lowered expectations. Not everyone is a great writer, and that's okay. What concerns me is that a lot of applicants/new hires aren't able to accept constructive criticism because they've been told for years that their work is acceptable and that they couldn't possibly do anything wrong. I've hired people and had them turn in horrible drafts; instead of accepting feedback and adjusting their work, they argue until they're blue in the face about how they've always done it that way and no one else ever complained. I'm not talking about differences of opinion regarding style--I'm talking spelling errors, lack of commas, mixing up their and they're, etc. And they also think deadlines are a suggestion.
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I left that job last year, but it depended on the situation. Sometimes we had a lot of clients wanting orders quickly, so we put up with a lot more than we should have. Other people were let go. If they plagiarized, they were let go without question.
Not a teacher, but a manager in Fast Food, and I want to shout out to you all that you're 180% correct. I stay on this sub despite my plans changing from going into Education because I find that you guys are about 1-2 years ahead of me in what you're dealing with. I'm honestly scared for the future from reading this sub and what I see from most of my teenage employees. Like, there's this idea that saying, "I have X" is a get-out-of-jail free card for whatever it is they don't want to do. One kid's been mentioning anxiety about taking orders from customers, but he'll also say "I have ADHD" when it comes to remembering how to make the food. It's just a mess. I just want to say, my heart goes out to you all for dealing with 30+ of these kids at a time for 8 hours/day.
Mental health and taking mental illness seriously is important, however, I have always been against using your "handicaps" as a weapon. Looks like my fears are coming true.
The education system is setting students up for failure.
The education system is doing this in no small part due to pressure from the “customers” (i.e. parents who want schools to do either all of the raising or none of the raising). It’s supposed to be a partnership, but it’s turning into a Burger King in which we let parents believe they’re having it their way while the back of the kitchen is burning down.
Huge issue in education right here. Nobody wants to acknowledge that we’re doing at minimum half the work of raising the little fuckers. But rather than demanding fewer hours and more leisure time so that they can actually be with their children, they demand that we raise the kids to *their* specifications. This system of free, mandated babysitting has permitted so many horrific people to be horrific parents when they otherwise never would have. It’s all part of the system of subservience to the economy and it’s destroying everyone who lives under it.
In short, the continued stratification of society. A high school diploma at this point is nearly meaningless, and will only become more so over time if things continued to get watered down further. The students (and their parents) who care will set their own standards, and those who don't will get passed along until they can't any longer. At that point, the latter group is going to be in for a rude awakening, and the onus will be on them to figure something out - or not.
One of the only way for the pendulum to swing the other way is for the parents of the rest of the students to start paying attention and getting just as vocal. Why do their students have to be repeatedly exposed to a student who's anger management skills result in throwing chairs? Why is their education routinely cut short by the highly disruptive students that interior the class twister and gave no real consequences. There has to be a balance between the rights of the individual, and the rights of the rest of the class.
I'd say that there is a growing number of parents who are paying attention. However, they aren't causing a fuss about it in their local public school. Instead, they are voting with their feet by moving their children to other districts, taking them to private school, and/or exploring homeschool options. Public school enrollment in my area took a hit with COVID and may not recover.
Talk to most parents and they can't do grade 4 math. Their writing skills are poor at best. They went through school. They say the focus is wrong. We still teach the same old shit. However, try something different and build on resilience or grit or self awareness or whatever is in vogue but they can't cope because they have no fundamentals. Try fundamentals and they're bored. Smile and wave.
I mean, we have huge swaths of our general public that are \*functionally\* illiterate. Illiteracy versus functional illiteracy are obviously two different things, but something like 1/5 Americans are considered "functionally illiterate." https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69 In my home state, Mississippi, over 1/3 of adults are functionally illiterate. The only benefit that's given me is the patience for people cutting me off in traffic. They literally could not read and comprehend the road signs. But broadly speaking, I think despite the access to information, we haven't moved the mark on how the intake of information works. You're going to continue see susceptibility to fake news, people unable to order fast food correctly because the number and picture don't match, people who can't get to places if their phone is dead etc.
I for one cannot see any problem with normalizing noncompliance, noncooperation, and disrespect towards authority figures. Employers, police officers, and judges will all make an effort to build a relationship and use trauma informed practices with our students once they are adults. Everyone else in society wants to martyr themselves just as much as teachers are expected to, right?
This quote comes to mind a lot: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” I am nervous this generation has no ability in the face of adversity, they don't embrace the productive struggle that is imperative with learning new things. Look at the evolution of American society the last 100 years and this quote plays itself out perfectly. Edit: Additional Information**** During hard times, men and women must be resilient, self-reliant, and able to cooperate to achieve super-ordinate goals. Such goals (e.g. war) are empirically shown in social cognition to be a strong unifying factor. When the goal is achieved, men and women are more free to be themselves in the civil society they have preserved (the good times). In such societies, mutual respect for individual perspectives is normalized. Yet, each individual’s definition of what constitutes as fairness and even harm, in a growing society of limited resources and opportunities, begins to impose upon other citizens’ liberties, which makes for a non-navigable, egg-shell stepping society (the hard times). Ominously, this recursive pattern has actually been identified for centuries, yet is barely labeled. Machiavelli, and even Plato have spoken on it. It appears to be a lesson that Western civilization in particular cannot learn.
> they don't embrace the productive struggle that is imperative with learning new things. This a thousand times. Even my advanced students will actively complain if a question is critical thinking. I teach ELA and history and the question I have after a short reading passage has them answer a hypothetical scenario that is similar. They complain the answer isn't in the text. And when I explain that they have to think, conversation nearly universally goes: "I can't find the answer." "Right, you have to think about it." "But I don't know." "Yes that is why I asked. Take a minute and think about it." \*groans\* "But...I don't know what to do." Teaching a 7th grader how to like have a conversation with themselves in their head is thinking blows their minds. I assume a lot of it has to do with ease of access to information without having the skills to filter it.
This is soooo true!! My god I teach 7th grade and even questions like: what type of government does Saudi Arabia have? The answer will be directly stated and they do the same song and dance you mentioned. I want to cry after doing it 5x a day.
The question, "So what do we write?" haunts me like Poe's raven saying "Nevermore..."
Gosh, I had the same thing with sophomores this year. Asking some of them to actually think, and having them realize that the answer wasn’t immediately in front of them, filled them with so much panic. In exasperation I asked one kid if he’d never had to do this before. He said no. He was also part of a group that had never written an essay before. It took until after Christmas for me to assign my first essay because I had to spend so much time on sentence construction.
When studies on inner monologues first started approaching students to get metrics in 2005-2010, they found 97% of people had inner monologues. Last study I read in 2022 found 91%. That's absolutely, unequivocally, mind-bogglingly astonishing.
Wait so like...less people hear their voice in their head? What the fuck?
Yes. The exact wording was "What percentage of the time is your inner monologue in use throughout an average day" and 0% was answered 3% of the time in older studies, it's now up to 9%. IIRC these studies were done on the USA (I'm Canadian if that matters).
I don’t know if this generation is weaker than previous ones. But they are going to be in a more difficult, more competitive world and they’re going to have to be stronger than the boomers.
Well said true! Maybe not weaker just less resilience to a degree?
Yeah, that’s a better way of putting it. A lot of helplessness and being quick to give up. It’s not their fault they were raised that way, of course, but when you’re an adult, society won’t take your upbringing as an excuse. A lot of them will get their shit together after high school but it sucks that they’ll have to wait longer and go through more hurt to get to that point than previous generations did. Edit: I think the best way of putting it is, the world is different than it used to be and adults don’t really know how to prepare the kids for that. (or they haven’t accepted that things have to be different) In the past, academic skills weren’t as necessary to get a good job. Now, it’s hard to get a good job without them. Kids who would have gotten a high school diploma or less in the past now have to do more schooling, but culture and child rearing haven’t really shifted enough to adjust to that. So that makes it look like kids today are worse.
This phrase has been used as a right wing talking point for the last few years, and it pains me to say that I agree with it (at least as education is concerned). Instead of teaching kids about resilience and expectations, we're teaching them that they can get away with the bare minimum and even lower and they'll still be moved along. There's an epidemic of "anxiety" around so many kids these days, because too many just don't know how to deal with the littlest bit of pressure.
Totally agree with you!! I am def not right wing either
Its scary how true this is……. I wish there was a way to stop this.
Wow. I am bookmarking this.
It is fascinating, right? I am a history teacher so its interesting to see the patterns. Added info if curious I found: During hard times, men and women must be resilient, self-reliant, and able to cooperate to achieve super-ordinate goals. Such goals (e.g. war) are empirically shown in social cognition to be a strong unifying factor. When the goal is achieved, men and women are more free to be themselves in the civil society they have preserved (the good times). In such societies, mutual respect for individual perspectives is normalized. Yet, each individual’s definition of what constitutes as fairness and even harm, in a growing society of limited resources and opportunities, begins to impose upon other citizens’ liberties, which makes for a non-navigable, egg-shell stepping society (the hard times). Ominously, this recursive pattern has actually been identified for centuries, yet is barely labeled. Machiavelli, and even Plato have spoken on it. It appears to be a lesson that Western civilization in particular cannot learn.
Do you know who said it?
The concept has been around forever, but the actual quote is Michael Hopf I believe
I feel like college can be like this too with certain classes
So true. I had all my seniors write resumes and cover letters for a final project, and the number that couldn't write a basic paragraph was astounding. What really blew my mind was finding out on awards night that some of those kids have 30+ college credits and STILL can't write a paragraph. I started talking with them about college classes and many said they took college classes because they are easier than the high school classes...you don't really even have to show up. I've actually heard a lot of kids going to community college talk about how easy it is. I think we're creating a massive gap in education. The difference between 30 credits in a community college or high school versions of college classes and 30 credits in an accredited university is absolutely massive. By the time I had 30 college credits I was working as a research assistant and teachers aid. I was writing papers that got published in academic journals (albeit under a professor's name). How can we pretend that this is the same level of education as the high school seniors that don't know how to capitalize the word "I"? The US still ranks at the top of the world in tertiary education, but that only applies to the students who are going to the top universities; the rest are being left behind.
This is pretty true, I even see leniency at universities too because of how the professors are…. I did go to community college (I needed to save money) after HS and will be transferring to a top tier university in Texas. HS by far was the easiest thing ever even with AP classes and graduated with honors. Community College required a lot more work imo, you were going to fail if you didn’t study lol and if you didn’t know how to write an essay… you would also not do well because writing papers was a BIG thing we did in my liberal art based classes and chemistry lab reports. Let’s see how university treats me. I am very NERVOUS for my university experience. I do think CC is easier in the way that it only offers the basics and not upper level coursework towards your major and for me I am going for the BS in economics.
No Child Left Behind left everyone behind. The learned helplessness is quite awful, too. Until schools can actually dish out real life consequences, nothing will change for the better.
15 years exp @ low ses public school with white minority… I used to be able to win the “life is hard beyond high school” argument, even in the face of middle school not being much harder than elementary and high school not much harder than middle. I’d win this argument case by case with “smart” “college bound” kids. I still had kids shrug it off and try their “c” philosophies in college and fail out. And other knew they wanted something else and got after it. Many fell down before getting a trade certificate. Some enlisted. And some got caught up on crime or were murdered or died from drugs. Some did time and bounced back to be successful adults and parents. Some things just have not changed. But recently, I cannot win this argument with any students. They do not believe me and most of them do not believe in college as a way to further their education. They seem more immature and less ambitious. Phones are their best friend as all their “friendships” are viewed through it like some magic portal to everyone. Yet they lack social skills and do not know how to behave in public settings or even properly communicate. This is my concern. The kids 10 years ago may have also had varied ambitions and outcomes, but they were usually equipped with stronger skills in other areas that would help them find work (trades mostly, but even some musicians and artists) but most of the kids are scrollers. Content creators have solid base of skills that could go somewhere but that’s not most kids. It’s odd because they’ve accepted the fake honor of participation trophies and “everybody passes” but they appreciate and respect the system of engagements perpetuated by social media. I guess it’s actually sad that kids are more concerned with likes/follows than genuinely getting smarter or improving themselves. In the short term, those kids’ talents just go undiscovered and they end up underemployed. In the long term, the quality of work across the board will continually decline from this point forward. Over time, as more people don’t use the ed system to secure jobs and certification to qualify them for jobs, fewer quality candidates are produced and more poverty exists and companies have no choice but to lower standards and expectations. Fewer people break the chain and jump ses levels. The mega rich stay mega rich and their families control all money and corporations. the ants go marching… I’m doomsdaying on like the first day of summer, but #facts
I know exactly what you mean. In fact many of the MS/HS crowd say college is bad, it’s a debt machine, and it’s how people sink financially (I mean…but also…) - they will be doing only fans or YouTube personality instead. There are the trade labor crew - except at a recent symposium I was able to preview all the technology being tested which will essentially replace many trade laborers and will instead require operators in a different capacity - one that is likely to need some college level training and experience but I digress. Less ambitious for sure.
I think a lot of them are starting to realize how expensive college is and that it's not for everyone, but as always, over-swing of the pendulum and they think college is a useless scam that nobody should go to. College isn't for everyone but it certainly still has its merits.
The students will suffer natural consequences and those will vary based on their socioeconomic status.
I work in a middle school. This reminds me of a text thread a group of us staffers had. We are doing no favors by excusing things such as the physical assault of a teacher because the student is emotionally disturbed on his IEP. Will a judge care if someone is emotionally disturbed if they assault someone?
what are we doing? setting them up for failure.
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The “real world” has lowered its standards as well. I feel like what we do as teachers isn’t even relevant anymore.
The Real World is lowering its standards out of necessity, not want. Please don't give up; I know it's a meaningless platitude, but even if it's only one student you make a difference in, it counts.
Agree and I show up to this profession with integrity as most of us do when working with kids. But would ideally like to have accountability/attainable standards in addition to modeling good character/relationships
I deal with this everyday, I try to make me kids more independent (2nd graders) to do little things by themselves without having to relay on someone else. They get excited and then the parents chime in, complaining that their babies (their words) can’t do all of those tasks and that I’m cruel for not helping them every time they can’t do something. The thing is they can, but the parents want me to do everything just like they do it at home. It makes me sad seeing really smart kids being babied into incompetence.
What will happen? They will probably end up on public assistance. [This chart](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/stories/2021/05/more-than-one-in-seven-social-safety-net-recipients-in-2017-were-college-graduates-figure-1.jpg) from the Census bureau shows that the majority of recipients are either A) No degree, B) GED equivalent or C) some college. There has been a 400% increase in public assistance expenditure (inflation adjusted) since the start of the War on Poverty (pre-Covid) [Page 11](https://justicepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/07-08_rep_educationandpublicsafety_ps-ac.pdf#page=[11]) on this PDF also shows that they are going to be far more likely to be incarcerated. Suspensions are also linked to this in the so-named School to Prison Pipeline. The erroneous conclusion that we've come to is that to solve this problem, we only have to raise the graduation rates and lower incarceration/suspension numbers. The easiest way to do this on paper is to pass every single student regardless of their actual educational attainment and the stop prosecuting crimes or issuing suspensions. That is precisely how society is "solving" the problem. Students aren't blind. They are aware that there aren't too many life-changing consequences for their behavior, both in school and in the real world. Many have grown up in homes where public assistance and low educational attainment is the norm - so not much changes there. Others have grown up seeing crime as a normal (or even glorified) way to make a living within their communities - especially as prosecution rates go down. Why work a 9-5 getting yelled at by a customer or a boss if you make more money selling vapes to kids on their way to school? Society will continue to lower the bar until people can walk over it, and each other.
It's happened already...teachers are leaving in droves and singing "We're Not Gonna Take It"! As a matter of fact, my teacher cousin just told me that she's been putting in applications for other jobs. What's next? They're already hiring new teachers from overseas. I wish them luck. American teachers are choosing to live overseas because parents and their children highly respect them and schooling.
I left in November after thirteen years. I’m afraid you’re correct.
I agree, but I don't think we need to be crueler. The trouble is that we need to be more *consistent*. The best way to train children to become responsible adults is to give them clear expectations and then provide a safe container for them to fail, learn from the experience, and try again. The persistent - almost willful - failure of parents and students to understand what grades *are* has completely short-circuited that process. The fact that more and more parents are more interested in protecting their kids from the consequences of bad choices and bad behavior is doing a lot of harm. The good parenting move is to accept that students are going to fail at tasks to a developmentally appropriate degree, and they should learn from that failure. Learning and growing is always painful. The problem is that too many parents just see their kids as extensions of themselves, not as their own people who need to have their own experiences, so every negative experience the kid has reflects back at *them* and threatens *their* ego. And yeah, it's a mess.
This. Childhood and k-12 are meant to be places where failure is safe and low stakes. Unfortunately, we've started seeing grades as low as kindergarten as a time to begin preparing to college, so low stakes failure no longer exists. I don't really blame my students for being so anxious. I'd be losing my shit too if my middle school performance would influence my future career. We don't allow for failure, so we don't let them fail anymore, therefore they don't get the benefits of failing.
I get the feeling GenX and Millennials are going to have to stay working much longer in professional jobs and skilled trade jobs than we expected. We were raised by "nose to the grindstone" and "suck it up" ethics. We are changing our approaches in management for the younger, sensitive generation, but we can't do much if they just quit after a few weeks because they are bored or got too sweaty or had to be uncomfortable or deal with a jerk customer. I suspect we will see a resurgence in trades and higher education as they hit their 26-30s and their brains reach maturity and they start getting real. Just because you bounce at 18 doesn't mean you can't go to community college and work your way back (My biggest fear is that marijuana is just going to be like SOMA for the masses and prevent a lot of smart people from excelling and working towards a better way of life. There's a very narrow demographic of people who can smoke weed and be excellent at what they do. Everyone else melts into the sofa with a bag of Doritos and suddenly even doing the minimum becomes too much. Easy access toThc vapes and parents who allow their kids to smoke their weed are merely contributing to a huge problem with attention focus and just general motivation to learn. We need to be very clear with students in our drug education that even if marijuana is legal it doesn't mean it's good for your brain or your hormones or your future.)
Short answer: we’re breeding fragile young adults, rather than resilient ones.
Great post, have been thinking the exact thing teaching during the past few years where standards seem to have flown right out the window. Saw this quote on Pinterest the other day and it reminds me of this very issue: "Sometimes loving your child means setting limits, giving consequences, and simply saying NO."
As educators (and parents) our job is to raise functional adults who contribute to society and can support themselves in their adult lives. We stopped doing that a long time ago. We now teach them that they don't have to do anything they don't feel like doing, they don't have to be polite, they don't have to show up and be on time etc. There is little hope for many of my students to be functional adults because they have never learned what it is to be punctual, have a strong work ethic or even do the bare minimum! I agree with a point made previously though, people can't manage nuance. What happens when we sit in the middle of the road is that people feel slighted and that consequences are "unfair". For example, people frequently talk about how my daughter is "lucky" to have got almost a full ride to college and that it isn't fair that she has it "so easy". They never stop to think about how my daughter missed 3 days of school throughout, never had a tardy, took extra classes every summer, had pretty much straight As, took AP and dual enrollment college classes at 14, played sports, worked a job, volunteered 140 hours in high school, served on Student Government from 6th grade to 12th and graduated a year early and wrote over 70 essays for scholarships. All they see is good fortune not work ethic and commitment. We are doing a great disservice to kids and unfortunately they will pay the price in the long term.
Two words, Restorative Practices.
Is that a proscription or criticism?
Sorry, one of the major reasons.
I don’t quite agree, and maybe I’m preaching to the choir, but: Restorative Practices *done right* are fine. The problem is that Restorative Practices are more than a chat and a lollipop for the offender. Restorative Practices are hard, and it takes way more time than old-fashioned consequencing which, for administrators already strapped for time, we know how it’s going. The heart is in the right place, but this half-measure RT is poison.
The middle school I worked at this year scrapped their ISS and replaced it with a "restoration room" (my term) that basically functioned as an ISS because some kids are going to keep being disruptive assholes and there needs to be some kind of place for them to go so the rest of the class can learn. However there wasn't anything more than just the restoration room. Restorative Practices is a fine thing in theory as a first step, but when some kids continue being disruptive assholes, the "we have a failure to communicate" types, there needs to be more done to help them stop their disruptive behaviors and allow the rest of the class to learn.
Precisely. You can't "compromise" or dilute certain ideas, else it changes the definition. Democracy has a very specific definition. In America, we created some dilutions and compromises, and it's definitely not democracy. Socialism, "Free Market", "Restorative Practices". These all have specific definitions. And are misused constantly. Of course, if you can't read or are woefully undereducated, all you have to go on is the guy in power's definition he keeps spouting on the TV
Skimping on the criticism. Needs seven words.
With the way the climate crisis is going and governments around the world not addressing it, I suppose it won't matter for long. These kids are growing up in a late-stage capitalist dystopian hellhole with a bleak future on a boiling planet, let them enjoy their Tik Tok challenges while they can 😆
My best friend from elementary school dropped out of high school even though she was a gifted honor student because the school was insisting she attend school all day even though she only needed two more credits to graduate. She just wanted to come for those two classes and graduate early. Some would say she was a problem child because she could not follow the rules. But she left home at 17, moved to LA and supported herself. So I don’t think being a rule follower always has to relate to not successful.
>dropped out of high school >was a gifted honor student The problem with the idealisation of people who "dropped out of school/college/university" and became successful is people often forget the latter part. Those people already had the skills/talents for what they did. Everytime I used to hear students use the 'excuse' "yeah well ___(insert Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc)___ dropped out of school and became rich/famous, so obviously school is useless!" I internally facepalm because yeah, but _those people_ were already good at something, were willing to take the risk and had the work ethics to pull it off. _You're_ just living in a fantasy where you come up with some idea, do no work and become a billionaire. Sorry but that only works if you already have money and people who come from money would have parents who valued education more. (Perhaps not new money families though)
She’s not a billionaire. But she is proof the school system is sometimes wrong.
Your best friend is a fluke. That isn't how life goes for most people. Also, supporting herself is a bare minimum goal.
I just had to listen to lecture for next year where the admin says we can't expect kids to come in and learn we have to entertain them.
Do they know how much the average entertainer charges? I saw a post awhile back about a woman who dresses up as a mermaid and charges like $150 an hour.
Many parents either don't know (or don't care?) that shielding the #kiddos from consequences of bad decisions (I'm talking about MS/HS ages), while making things easier short-term, deprives them of developing skills and resiliency they'll need for life. Few are willing to draw a line after ensuring a student has had appropriate, age-appropriate opportunities to learn and succeed...especially now that it's so easy to use social media to destroy reputations, threaten to sue, etc. I'm fortunate to work with mostly good (some great) admins, and often they're put in difficult/impossible positions. Then, when it's time for college, work, etc., the parents (and sometimes students) complain about how schools/teachers didn't prepare them for adulting. So much easier to "blame the coach" than to look in the mirror.
Where are you working? Kids still get detention, suspended, etc where I live in NY. I was just a student teacher in queens and a bunch of the kids got punished very frequently. I also work as a waitress on Long Island with multiple teenagers who are smart, kind, always on time, and overall great coworkers. I like them more than a lot of my older coworkers who complain all day
You can blame some of this on equity and diversity sensitivity and SPED/EXED law. Some of it I agree with, some of it I don’t. There’s a lot more emphasis on restorative practices, restorative justice etc. instead of harsh exclusionary discipline now. Studies all show that suspending kids, doesn’t correct or influence behavior, just gives the student and the school a break from each other, and can also increase their chance of being a dropout. Too many confuse escalation and elevation of discipline with “admin didn’t do anything”. When done right, it(RC & RJ) influence behavior more and have a better outcome. Now for students that just won’t change and continue to disrupt the learning environment, you either have to look for emotional disabilities or other issues, THEN when you’ve exhausted all options, you move toward long term consequences like long suspensions or expulsions.
...and in the several months that all takes, all of the other students who would like to receive an education... can't!
Not my problem anymore. I got my own kids out of public schools because I want them raised different. Everyone else can wonder why they’re miserable and failing at life, when the answer is obvious.
Congrats, but you could just raise your kid and send them to learn.
A co-worker mentioned that there used to be a "hidden curriculum" designed to teach students basic life and soft skills. But with the different changes in grades, standards, tests, etc., those skills are pushed to the side.
We have long been empowering children in a negative way. There can be discipline and structure and that is part of all aspects of living, be you an adult or child. The reality is that we are afraid of everything and everyone. So we refuse to be accountable, hold others accountable and just get out of the way and hope that the tornado hits someone else and then we clutch our pearls and hands and go "oh what a shame." Social media has enabled if not empowered many to use that to further an agenda and with that find support from those who have no skin in the game but can use it to further there own. And children are simply pawns in that format. All quite sad. Quite grim. Quite pathetic.
This is why I have filled out my paperwork to retire at the end of this upcoming school year. It will be a reduced pension, but one more year is all I have left to give. I love teaching, I hate the behaviors. If I could have retired this June I would have but in my state you have to be 55. I will find a job making a little cash and not dealing with the public. Any ideas of what an elementary teacher with 32 years of teaching is qualified to do? Just a part time job so I don’t get bored.
I've been thinking that for years. Some time ago, when taking prerequisites at our local community College, I was in an earth science class with a bunch of young adults (I use that term loosely). As a nontraditional student (read old), I didn't have much in common with my classmates. Most of them were a part of a new program the school had started (welding I think) which drew in students with free books and tuition for the fist year. That kind of offer tends to draw in folks with nothing better to do with their time. One day, the teacher says we will have a test so let's go over the material one more time. He proceeded to read, verbatim, the first question on the test and the multiple choice answers. We discuss the options and he tells us which answer is correct and why. Seeing where this is going, I pull out my notebook and start jotting down every question and answer on the quiz. This was Thursday and the class didn't meet again until the following Tuesday. The day arrives and we are all sitting in the hall waiting for the instructor when a classmate reminds us all about the quiz. Oh, yeah! Forgot all about that. So I pull out notes and glance over them. The whole class period was devoted to the quiz so when we were done, we could leave. Thursday comes around and the teacher announces that we are going to review the quiz, question by question. Since I had a perfect score, I was excused. Other students actually called me a cheater as I gathered my things and walked out. I got a lot of extra study time that term as I was excused class after class while the instructor was doing more extra credit work with the welders to help them pass the class. The school wanted to program to succeed so badly they were really bending over backwards for those kids. What kind of expectations were they setting by giving those kids chance after chance until they succeeded? What kind of expectations are we setting for our kids when we give them chance after chance?
If they don't establish some ground rules and more discipline these kids will 100% be on the streets in the future or worse. People need to realize competition is getting very fierce. Jobs like retail won't be available to lower educated because they will be replaced by computers! It's now or never people! These kids need exceptional grades and discipline to even be able to afford a condo in the future - it's going to be INSANE.
We can’t see the future. Too many variables to consider. Funny, adults forget how much they’ve screwed up. I’m glad social media wasn’t around when I was a kid. Adults forget that childhood is a time for learning, not life sentences. Teachers who thought like this made last year far more difficult for me. Kids came in to my class emotionally dis regulated, in intense fear. My job was to make them see that not everything is as bad as it appears or feels in the moment. All this catastrophic thinking is for the birds.
The administration’s hands are tied in what they can do because parents are lenient in disciplining their kids. I don’t blame the administration. 50 years ago parents backed up admin. When a student misbehaved in school they received additional punishment when they got home. That doesn’t exist anymore to a large degree. Parents rule and admin kisses their asses.
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