Public Schools stopped disciplining kids long ago. Fear of retribution, legal action, and a mountain of headaches from all angles. Why would anyone want to teach these days?
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.
It is super important to keep in mind, though, when thinking about public education that public schools are expected to serve a multitude of functions that are related to education only in the sense that they involve the same children who are our students (nutrition, counseling, social work services, etc.). And that's fine, I guess, if schools are where the social safety net has to catch vulnerable children. But that needs to be acknowledged and factored into how we think about schools.
Other than voting for the right political candidates, what can people do?
And how can we raise the status of teachers - like it is in Finland for example?
What isn't realistic in the short term is to solve poverty, which would help would to improve this situation.
Or they should own at least half a brain
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_i...
Other ways included a time out, suspension or talk to the parents where parents grounded them, or punished them somehow.
All that has been phased out in most places for various reasons. Although nearly half of the US states still allow it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/...
To me it is definitely telling that the US Supreme Court found it constitutional and legal to administer corporal punishment by drawing analogies with prisoners in a jail. As in the pg essay “Why Nerds are Unpopular”, primary school is essentially a prison for the kids, a glorified day care center to keep them out of trouble while parents can work.
But elsewhere in many districts if the parent doesnt care then there are literally no consequences for children who disrupt classes, that don’t backfire badly on those who would try to make those consequences.
Why are teenage boys bigger, fitter and stronger than the teachers? Maybe because ~75% of teachers are women? There's value in the ability of physically-capable adult males to quietly intimidate adolescents. There's value in well-rounded men who can provide classroom instruction but maybe also coach the boxing/powerlifting/wrestling teams. The next time Mr. Smith puts some bass in his voice and tells you to sit down and stop disrupting class, there should be a voice in the back of your head that says "I should do that, because he just might uppercut me into the stratosphere". I suspect that students aren't learning the principle of "Fuck Around and Find Out" from ANY authority figure in their daily lives. Our society as a whole seems to have forgotten the importance of male role models IMO...
On average, men are more likely to aspire to be Thor or Captain Marvel than they are to be Rick Moranis's character in Ghostbusters. They are more likely to take guidance from a larger, stronger, and more assertive man than otherwise. The military has already figured this out, just look at the stereotypical Drill Instructor for an extreme example of the concept. Do you dispute this, or are you simply speaking of what works/doesn't work for you as an individual? A single anecdote doesn't really tell us much about what society-wide initiatives we should pursue.
Also, Andrew Tate is already out of jail and currently under house arrest.
I'm very happy we've moved past the point where you have to have a pair of testicles to be taken seriously as an authority figure. Obviously, some really hide-bound institutions like the military haven't completely internalized that, but then, that could be why militaries underperform. Russia, for example, has a very macho military, and (surprise!) it sucks.
I don't agree with the grandparent: tiny and physically unimposing women are absolutely able to keep the respect of a classroom. What you're missing, though, is the necessity of escalation at the rare times when students try to initiate violence. Having senior teachers around who can drop what they're doing and run into a neighbouring classroom is important, and it's important to have at least some big, burly, and/or male teachers in the mix as a last ditch way to stop a violent student.
Rephrased: maintaining authority is easier with the backing of a system, and that system must make confrontation a losing prospect, otherwise it rewards aggressive and violent students by letting them do whatever they want. This is harder when 25% of the teachers at a school are men and none are near an incident. It's harder when the school bans effective punishment and response. It's harder when there's an established culture of disrespect. It's harder when students are legally required to be there and have no other alternatives.
I think when you've got to the point where your wrestling ability is a relevant criterion as a teacher, the system is already completely dysfunctional, and we need to take a broader look at the problems that young people face.
You can't put a bandaid on that by just trying to recruit muscular specimens, and hoping that they are also decent teachers. I had a physics teacher who was a great rugby player, and I can tell you, it was not good for my understanding of physics.
Sure, that's fair. Not everyone wants to be a bouncer. But nightclubs recognize that they need bouncers, because sometimes patrons get unruly. The school system hasn't grasped that having enforcers on site is a useful symbol to ensuring everyone has a quality experience. I'm saying it's better to have the standby enforcers be of the Sheepdog archetype [1] and serve as regular teachers, than to have security guards fill the role. Now I agree with your next point:
> I think when you've got to the point where your wrestling ability is a relevant criterion as a teacher, the system is already completely dysfunctional, and we need to take a broader look at the problems that young people face.
I'd argue that these problems start in the home/family life of the children. Single-mother households produce a disproportionately high fraction of juvenile delinquents, and we've had a marked increase in those per capita.[2][3] Even asking serious questions about why we have a bunch of single-mother households is outside the Overton window of many mainstream organizations. Usually the only answer put forward is "more government spending".
[1] https://www.mwkworks.com/onsheepwolvesandsheepdogs.html
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258200285_Race_Gend...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/252847/number-of-childre...
If an instructor cannot maintain sufficient control of their charges that facilitate an effective learning environment, I would argue they are not competent. They are failing to accomplish their assigned task.
> Obviously, some really hide-bound institutions like the military haven't completely internalized that, but then, that could be why militaries underperform. Russia, for example, has a very macho military, and (surprise!) it sucks.
The Russian military is underperforming for a ton of reasons beyond machismo. Corruption being the biggest, IMO. And your hypothesis fails when tested against almost any other machismo-laden western military force, in particular the almost-entirely-male and heavily testosterone-fueled US special operations community.
But the sibling comment highlights the nuance that perhaps my post was lacking: respecting the authority of the females in the organization is a worthy objective but it needs SOMEBODY to enforce it when challenged. It's apparent from TFA that isn't happening.
I guess for me it's a question of 'where you fix the problem'. In many machines, social machines included, you have a variety of stages where you can mitigate issues. Most of those 'solutions' are dirty hacks, and there are a few that will achieve results with a minimum of complexity and effort. I think fixing the extreme socialization problems of teenagers by making a significant chunk of teachers in normal schools double up as amateur MMA fighters is the wrong way to go about it.
On the subject of the Russian military, I do kind of agree, but I also think it's worth thinking about how much the extreme hazing culture of the Russian military contributes to the rot. It's been a repeated theme from the Afghanistan war on, that the violent 'toxic masculinity' of Russian military culture leads to tactical paralysis, a culture of hiding problems and mistakes, timidity at all levels of leadership, etc.
An observation that's been occurring to me with increasing frequency in recent years is that machismo is, in very many roles, a very impractical character trait. In roles where physical strength and physical courage are prized, like special operations, I can see the advantages, but most roles today, military or otherwise, are very technical, and so all the nonsense and communication issues that goes along with machismo is pure baggage.