Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Education Today...?


When I engaged in substitute teaching, this was exactly the case from 7th grade through high school. There was no point in trying to teach anything, because the students moved their desks into circles and jabbered as if in their own special universes, untouched and untouchable. When I sent the worst miscreants to the principle's office, a great chewing out was received... by me.

Other times I sat in with other "real" teachers, and the situation was identical with them. In a science class, only perhaps 10% of the students watched the teacher's experiments, while the rest pulled into circles or wandered aimlessly or snoozed. It is expected that the students will behave as animals, untouched by education and untouchable by educators. (I found out that a hand on the student's shoulder is assault, and that students WILL scream "assault" if they are touched by a brush of the hand. Also there are a lot of words one may not utter.)

The third and fourth grades were still young enough to respect the teacher, and I enjoyed teaching those grades. But I understand that these days the cultural contamination reaches down into those levels as well.

The Baltimore revelation of institutionalizing the 60% in order to pass everyone including students who never ever attended class might be the norm in many places. Why keep a kid back when s/he's (xir/ir/r) going to just continue to be rogue at a more mature level? Pass them on out of the system - they'll drop out soon anyway.

The photo is intended to reflect the cultural differences between teacher and the multicultural classroom. I'm sure that the photo is staged. Surely kids that young haven't figured out their untouchable status. Have they?

1 comment:

Steven Satak said...

Huh. School sure has changed since I was a kid. I don't remember getting away with ANYTHING in the 1960s and 1970s.