‘There Were Fists Everywhere.’ Violence Against Teachers Is on the Rise

A few apples are committing violent acts but _everyone_ else is filming for social media. No one steps in due to liability or whatever reason.

"when they want to help black people, they want to help those black people who are doing something wrong. That is rioters, ex-convicts, they want to stop schools from disciplining black kids who misbehave in school. I don't hear them concerning themselves with the blacks who are the victims of the people who are doing wrong."

https://youtu.be/bpA3Sf6Ffu4 (6:05)

If I were to Hazard a guess at the primary cause, it would be the normalization of physical violence and property destruction a legitimate mean of protest or expressing one's anger. Despite the enormous gains of the Civil Right Movement, nonviolent protests and Democratic action are now commonly believed to be a futile because they did not result in a completely egalitarian society.

Without faith in shared institutions, there is no Civil Society.

I've also heard from friends in Netherlands who complained about slow decline of the education system.

Now, these are all anecdotal, so maybe it is all middle age people complaining about new generations, but I sort of doubt it. Btw, I don't think the pandemic is a cause of it, to me it's social media. I think pandemic just accelerated how much social media is central to kids' lives.

Is it the case that kids in other countries don’t want to hit teachers because they are raised better, or they would like to hit them, but they know the punishment they’re getting is not talking with Care Solace, “a company that uses an online portal and phone line to link students, parents and staff” but a more severe punishment.

US is a big country with large cities and rural areas. Maybe it got worse in Nevada but better in rural Montana. But reduced violence somewhere makes for an extremely boring headline. So we would not be discussing it at all.

Once people saw that those in power would rather see you die than inconvenience them, an entire generation stopped believing in the social contract. After that things fall apart.

Now let me answer this question more directly. It’s actually worse than a lot of people think. There is an intense and overwhelming amount of utter bullshit that gets rolled down the hill starting with Congress, added to by state legislatures, and further reinforced by local school districts. And of course teachers are at the bottom of the hill. When you focus on that, and all the ways that the system is utterly dysfunctional, and not beneficial for students, it can be defeating.

But when you focus on your job, which is students, it’s the single most rewarding thing you can do, in my judgment. I was a lawyer for 5-6 years before getting into education. I hated every day of my life. Now I wake up excited to see my students and be with them. It’s genuine fulfillment I never thought I would have in my life. So, if you can withstand all the bullshit, and there is a metric shit ton of it for sure, it’s an amazing job. If you can’t stand up for yourself, or if you can’t deal with irrational requirements imposed by people fully out of touch with reality—-if you can’t, in other words, set aside, or ignore to the maximum extent possible, dealing with other adults, you should definitely avoid it.

I can do those things. Becoming a teacher was the single best decision I’ve ever made.

I’m a teacher at an urban Title I school (over 70% of our students qualify for reduced or free school lunches). Yes, there is a lot of paperwork involved when you need to transfer student to alternative school or outright expel them. It’s only an issue though when you don’t document what’s happening along the way. And of course, documentation is not a bad thing. It would be a bad thing if kids were being run out of schools at the whims of tired, overworked, extremely stressed teachers. On the other hand, the really wacky stuff comes when it’s a special education student. You literally cannot suspend them for more than 10 days in a school year. I was the general education teacher in FBA meetings for three of my SpEd students who brought weapons to school (two knives, one taser). The result was to put them all on a functional behavioral plan which requires weekly reports about whether they are meeting FB targets: of not bringing weapons to school. The plan included that when they did meet their targets, they should be rewarded in certain ways, like being given time on a computer or time to speak with their friends or whatever. So, yeah. Rewards for… not bringing weapons. Now that was crazy.