Afterward he never refused any request I made for anything.
The idea that you can do this to students without some biohazard cleanup is absurd. It's also just another way America deals with education issues by dealing with everything but the issue. If the issue is students falling behind, it's not because half of the high school class is going to vape in the bathroom. It's because school starts too damn early, kids don't retain info over the summer, and their home lives don't permit the best possible out-of-class education situation.
We could deal with those things, but that would mean the sports teams have to practice later, get over the idea that kids don't help their families plant in the summer, and deal with socioeconomic factors, respectively.
And that's, like, hard, man.
> If the issue is students falling behind, it's ... because school starts too damn early,
Yes.
> kids don't retain info over the summer,
Yes.
> and their home lives don't permit the best possible out-of-class education situation.
Yes. Fully compounded by the utter lack of access to brain building, adultless, free range time+area.
source: father of five
The entrance exam was populated with HS grads and me. I was from the final generation with constant access to adult-free + free range hours. Everyone else was in the early wave of kids with locked-down, 24/7 adulted childhoods.
Their education was comparable to mine - in quality, behavior etc (my kids attended their schools).
I was one of a handful that didn't have to start off with remedial classes.
Schools have to make kids do stuff that just isn't fun, without paying them or offering any real incentives (other than grades, which only count in the last year), so they need to make sure kids don't have excuses to shirk.
[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-water-and-san...
Hall monitors did this for generations.
The majority of US schools report struggling to hire paraprofessionals.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/how-bad-are-school-staffin...
> That would be the labor I'm referring to.
The generations of hall monitors were students. They're free.
Do you really think other students are best equipped to deal with students having sex, doing drugs, or devious licks in the bathrooms?
And in any case, the hall monitors are probably better off in class instead of being unpaid labor.
Dumb parallel: Some people litter or jaywalk! We could probably address this by implanting GPS trackers in everybody, but... should we?
Learning isn't fun doesn't really relate to the fact that bodily functions exist. If a kid is well but going to the restroom for 30 minutes every class period and on their phone etc just skipping.... I guess punish that as if it were skipping? You can't just assume negative intent across the entire student body when it comes to checks notes pooping in a toilet like a person?
No. That is not the function of schools!
Kids are full of energy and interest. A good teacher, combined with a well-designed syllabus and a good teaching plan, will then engage the kids. Of course, the lessons have to match the students' abilities.
A HUGE mistake is to compel students to do work that they haven't learned how to do. This mistake was inflicted on me by my maths teacher at a good private school - nominally a very good maths teacher, author or contributor to a number of school maths textbooks. I routinely had my homework returned as "wrong", but I wasn't taught how to do it right. As a consequence, I suffered a 5-year-long mental block in maths.
It sounds like Fresno schools are being run by concentration-camp commandants.
[Edit] OK, so some kids aren't wide-eyed and keen to engage, whether because of earlier school experiences or because of other experiences. Why compel those kids to go to school at all? You can't force kids to study (no, not even with apps!), so why force them to go to school?
I think that at least here in the UK, it's to do with keeping a lid on the numbers of unemployed; and with relieving working parents of childcare duties, so they can do jobs to pay their taxes.
If school's about compelling students to do what they don't want to do, then obviously schools have to engage in coercive measures, like tracking apps and metal detectors. But why stop there? Why not go ahead and shackle them to their desks?
Many US schools already have 20ft-high fences around them, like prisons. How is being imprisoned conducive to learning?
Am I downvoted because people really think students are feral monsters, that need to be locked up whether they're learning or not? Is it possible that imprisoning schoolkids makes them more interested in escaping than learning? What kind of parent would send their kids to prison?
I also know that there was a large group of kids, generally poorer performing students, who used "bathroom break" as a get-out-of-class-for-10-or-20-minutes each period as a freebie that they will always use.
The teachers aren't dumb. They know which kids are abusing the system. And they know these kids will shamelessly look you in the eyes and say "I have to take a shit, I must go to the bathroom" and then go fuck around for 10 or 20 minutes.
Little Johnny's parents say, you are unfairly targeting our child. Allege discrimination.
That is how you get here.
Students will often abuse this privilege (assumption of good faith) to go to the bathroom to escape the strict classroom environment, to socialize with their peers, or do whatever they want. The school sees this as a challenge to their authority so they crack down as in TFA.
(Never mind the fact that schools are making a smelly room with toilets and a sink a more attractive place to be than the classroom for some students is itself sickening to the core.)
Edit: I'm not one to complain about downvotes, but this time I don't get it. Am I wrong? These are things I've observed in a variety of schools, and in relatively well-off areas at that. I'd imagine the problems are far more acute in areas of lower socioeconomic status.