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I recently read the book "The War Against Boys" by Christina Hoff Sommers, and she suggests that it happened because of a series of Supreme Court rulings that favored students' rights.
Our seniors have figured this out and are currently cutting classes with impunity. They know that the district is putting pressure on teachers to pass students who don't even show up.
My school doesn't play around with truancy because of state law. In Missouri, even if a student has an A in class, the student has to attend a certain percentage of classes. One of my students last year missed class at least once per week. The only way she was able to save her whole academic year was by attending detention weekly to make up the missed time.
The school was very close to calling child services because of academic neglect.
Talked with my son yesterday. He's so tired of the kids having next to no responsibility for their own learning. NO homework in his school can be graded. He can assign homework, but if they refuse to do it, which for many in his classes is always, he is powerless to force them.
ALL grades come from the tests. The students can retake their tests 2 times if they didn't like their initial test grade. They used to be able to retake the tests as many times as they wanted to which I guess is a step in the right direction. Every time a student DEMANDS a test retake, he has to produce a new test. With this testing policy, guess what a majority of the students do? They barely study for the first test and use it as a trial run for the retake.
With all the retakes going on and a large group of students still taking a retake, it makes it doubly hard on him AND the rest of the class to advance to the newer material. Teaching to the bottom at it's best.
Needless to say, if after they don't do well on their test and retakes, it's all his fault. What's wrong with him that he can't force the knowledge in their heads while he's "entertaining" them. He gets heat from students, parents, and then of course, administration for not making his classes more fun. It doesn't matter that on the required state/federal tests, his students all do better than those in other classes that are more like a stand up comedy club.
Talked with my son yesterday. He's so tired of the kids having next to no responsibility for their own learning. NO homework in his school can be graded. He can assign homework, but if they refuse to do it, which for many in his classes is always, he is powerless to force them.
ALL grades come from the tests. The students can retake their tests 2 times if they didn't like their initial test grade. They used to be able to retake the tests as many times as they wanted to which I guess is a step in the right direction. Every time a student DEMANDS a test retake, he has to produce a new test. With this testing policy, guess what a majority of the students do? They barely study for the first test and use it as a trial run for the retake.
With all the retakes going on and a large group of students still taking a retake, it makes it doubly hard on him AND the rest of the class to advance to the newer material. Teaching to the bottom at it's best.
Needless to say, if after they don't do well on their test and retakes, it's all his fault. What's wrong with him that he can't force the knowledge in their heads while he's "entertaining" them. He gets heat from students, parents, and then of course, administration for not making his classes more fun. It doesn't matter that on the required state/federal tests, his students all do better than those in other classes that are more like a stand up comedy club.
This is the main reason I'm hoping that this will be my last year teaching. I love teaching, but I'm tired of a child's education falling 100% on my shoulders. It's THEIR education, THEY should be responsible for it. They will take the knowledge with them for the rest of their lives.
Sometimes I feel like I'm teaching a class of SPED kids because of all of the babying and spoon feeding I have to do.
I'd like to know when all responsibility shifted from the parents and student to the teacher.
1970s - from the principal to the parent: Your child was misbehaving in Mr. So and so's class. This behavior needs to stop immediately.
Today - from the principal to the teacher: Why was this child allowed to misbehave in your class.
Ummm, these kids are 14-18. By this age, they are pretty much going to do what they want to do anyways. There is only so much behavior coaching a teacher can do.
There was a shift from "student participation" to "student engagement." The term class participation has become outdated and you cannot use it any more. It used to be that students got a grade for class participation. It placed the responsibility on the student to be pro-active and initiate participation through making comments or completing a classroom task. Engagement puts the responsibility on the shoulders of the teacher. The teacher is supposed to lure the students through some sort of entertainment that makes the student want to participate, as if participation is some sort of option in the learning process.
We no longer have class discussions in school. Now we have "dialogs" and we "have conversations" as in "you and I need to have a conversation," as opposed to "let's discuss this."
...with a cookie and a reprimand for the teacher for sending them in the first place...
If I had my first year in my current school to do over again I would NEVER have sent a student to the office. The students knew that I'd be the one in trouble and that just served to empower them to up the ante and act even worse next time. Pop quizzes work so much better. THAT gets their peers mad at them.
You're allowed to have unscheduled pop quizzes? Doesn't that lead to low self-esteem for the students that do badly?
You're allowed to have unscheduled pop quizzes? Doesn't that lead to low self-esteem for the students that do badly?
This is actually one area I don't really get push back on. My defense is that the kids had no questions and weren't using the work time to work so I assumed they knew the work and were ready for the quiz. I only have to do it once or twice and they start policing each other. I only make the quizzes a couple of points but it seems to work.
The "best" urban charter schools don't even mess with the worst-behaved students. Imagine how inner-city schools in this country could improve if they, too, had the ability to get rid of 10-15% of the biggest trouble-makers. I don't know where they'd go, but those remaining would have a much better chance at succeeding. It's time for lawmakers, judges, etc. to see this from the educator's point of view and stop catering to the bottom at the expense of everyone else.
I think I should be extremely grateful for where I work, then. It's a juvenile detention center for students who run away from home, break curfew, get kicked out of alternative schools, and commit other crimes of varying degrees. The students are practically in jail, so we get to call most of the shots; I've sent students to their rooms plenty of times just for talking without asking for permission. They can write complaints on us, but, from what I've seen, those complaints don't have a lot of power if the student genuinely isn't being mistreated. Mistreatment, of course, involves much more than just trying to get a student to comply and humanely punishing him or her when he or she doesn't do so. I've heard from all of the teachers at the detention center, mostly retired teachers who used to work at the outside schools, that it's not worth it to be a teacher on the outside anymore. The only reason I'm considering it is I'm not sure how long this job will last, and I want to move into something more permanent. Had I known everything I know now, I don't think I would have gone into Education at all, but we all live and learn, I guess.
I where I am now. I just wish I could get on the same page with the computer program.
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I only have to do it once or twice and they start policing each other. I only make the quizzes a couple of points but it seems to work.
