One plausible explanation: school is as bad for teens' mental health as quarantine, so going from one to the other has been a wash.
* When was the last time you had a nightmare about school? * When was the last time you had a nightmare about work?
Regardless of the average age, I would be surprised if you found that work nightmares are more common than school nightmares. The recurrence of school nightmares even seems to be something of a running joke in our society.
However, I've also had plenty of nightmares about my first job. It's never about my performance or my co-workers, mind you, but about my immigration status back then. Currently, in my (virtual) room of co-workers, many are also immigrants; I wouldn't be surprised that they've had similar nightmares.
Not gonna lie, the part about immigration status hit me very strong.
I keep getting those nightmares about once a month, despite all of my actual immigration-related fears in real life being completely gone after becoming a citizen. The nightmare is always about me somehow ending up in my old country (but at the present time, not me back then) without being able to escape. It always starts as just a minor inconvenience situation (e.g., flight got canceled, just gotta reschedule it, no big deal) and rapidly escalates to the most impossible situations to get out of (e.g., got arrested at a random place and stuck in a cell without being able to leave), while my normal life in the US going on as normal, just without me present, and nobody notices my absence.
In addition to that one, the only other one I often get is the very typical one about waking up to me being my college-aged self and realizing it is the final exam day, and it is for a class that i signed up for and completely forgot about until today.
I have never had a work nightmare, but since emigrating some of the school dreams have been replaced by visa-related ones.
Also, students would go to the bathroom and then just not come back and roam the halls and enter random classrooms and say hi to all of their friends in the middle of class.
I'm really happy my mother made sure I knew she'd fight for me if a teacher wouldn't let me use the toilet. I didn't need her to, but my sister did.
Worth noting though: no, I don't think you can deal with it on a case-by-case basis at the level at which this occurs.
What the better teachers seemed to do is find a way to set up a system with students who would lock & unlock the classroom door for students who needed to go to the bathroom. (the door was never locked from the inside, just the outside)
I'm opposed to locked bathroom doors as well: Again, all it takes is one teacher saying, "no", and suddenly, the same student is out of luck.
Or we could be more lenient on students and not worry so much about attendance so long as they hand in their work and get decent enough grades.
I mean, my school tried that - they implemented a hall sweeping program where teachers locked their doors and security would try to catch all the students in the halls. It didn't really prevent it because they couldn't constantly hall sweep all of the halls during the entire school day (and it increased the number of students entering other classrooms randomly to try to hide from the security guards) and it was also super racially biased in its enforcement.
> It can't be that many kids doing it every class and having teachers and staff monitor halls
No, it is quite a few students. You underestimate the dysfunction in the typical inner city school.
> Simple enough to take report that to whoever in the school handles discipline
And do what to discipline them? Kick them out of school?
> not worry so much about attendance so long as they hand in their work and get decent enough grades.
In an urban environment, "not worrying about attendance" translates to a. to very upset parents (esp. among working-class parents who are not at home and view education as a route to success), b. failing low-income students, c. more crime.
Urban schools are hard to fix!
absolutely, agreed.
> saying hello to a friend isn't a moral travesty
I'll be honest: if you didn't grow up in a school like this, you don't understand how disruptive it is for a student to burst into the classroom in the middle of the teacher explaining something and go around high-fiving everyone in the classroom with the teacher powerless to stop them. This was not an infrequent occurrence.
The pledge of allegiance is another one of those things, that were it taking place in a hostile country, would be mocked incessantly - as brainwashing.
a. Because turns out the constantly suspending students is actually not that effective if our goal is to educate those students
b. Because suspending students goes on a school's record and the central office in urban areas wants to keep suspensions low.
c. Because the way they punish the disruption is oftentimes more problematic for ordinary students
ie. My school implemented hall sweeps where all of the teachers would lock the doors to their classroom and security would come through the halls and collect students for detention, but it would oftentimes catch students who were doing things like going from their classroom to the library or something.
It was also pretty clearly racially biased. I remember vividly a black student arriving maybe 10 seconds after the bell for class, getting into the class, and having security guards come into the classroom to take her out of the class because she was late. The security guards knew that the affluent, white student's parents were more likely to throw a fit if their child was treated like that.
This was honestly the most valuable lesson from that school: well-meaning discussion about how to enforce/stop certain behavior in a meeting translates into super unreasonable enforcement actions by school security. I doubt this principle is unique to schools, but I am lucky to be wealthy enough to be shielded from the brunt of the law.
Your school was probably very different from mine.
Pyramids got built for free right?