Education / Teaching thread

I’m on the fence. I mean I was in K-5 education for 25 years. Suspending younger kids for defiance was usually a situation where the teacher had lost control or was on a power trip. Most of the time, there were a few times where even with me situations would escalate. But as a whole k-5 I agreed with it.

Now that I’m in 6th I’m more undecided. I mean I can control just about anything just because it’s extremely hard to get me irritated, and it’s really hard to find that point to have a kid challenge me with defiance. But, it’s happened more this year than ever.

Let me say this. Lots of teachers I see suck. They are on their power trip, and rather than trying to bond with the kids and work with them, they go all high and mighty and end up with situations that do nothing but go downhill. Out of the 22 teachers in my school there are 4 of us that can pretty much handle anything. But that leaves 18. Some are young and just don’t have the skins on the wall, but a good half of those teachers even the kids say don’t like kids and they have no respect for. So they act out and challenge them.

I mean there should be training for teachers on how to phrase and word things so that they avoid the us vs them thing. There are a lot of things that can be done on the teacher side to limit these things from happening.

On the other side there is a sizable number of kids who seem to relish in their defiance attitude. Some kids that you let get away with things because they beat you down and do you want to deal with their stuff day after day. Student X you know who I’m referring to. But here’s the thing, are you going to suspend them every day? Every class period? What do you do with kids like this? And to many there are no real repercussions, and sadly while it may make that teacher happy, suspension doesn’t work, although it does get them out of your hair for a day. Although to this same subset, you have limited buy-in from parents, and most of the time the apple doesn’t fall far if you get the drift. So to go after their little darling for defiance probably means you get that same attitude from the parents sadly.

Sometimes the answer is hauling in parents, as at least California Ed code allows you to require parents to sit with their kids. Sometimes it’s the calls home, heck even in front of their classmates, though that can be tricky.

So there’s a lot of things that should also be done, and need to be done as suspension doesn’t work, and doesn’t solve anything. But, to just completely get rid of it 6-12. Yeah I dunno if I’d go that far.

But then there was the day I was pissed off and joked to my VP, why don’t you just give them their damn vape pens back and make my life easier?