Tuesday, February 17, 2009

why I'm for spanking

This lying piece of garbage exemplifies one of the reasons why I stopped teaching high schoolers. While I never had to deal with this specific problem back when I was a French teacher (in 1992, cell phones weren't nearly as small or as ubiquitous as they are today), I was daily confronted with similar problems, all of which involved students who lied with perfectly straight faces.

That's why I often envy PE teachers: it's hard to bullshit your way through a 600-yard run. Whatever story you're concocting usually has to involve a doctor's note, and that's easier for a teacher to verify than some of the intricate fantasies woven by students in non-PE classes.

Teaching your kids discipline early in life keeps them from messing up in major ways later on. I don't think all kids respond the same way to all forms of discipline, so please don't lump me in with the "beat 'em with a stick" crowd. But parents do teachers a favor when they actually take the time to parent. Ideally, school shouldn't be a surrogate day care center, and teachers shouldn't be saddled with the burden of coping with their students' psychological baggage. It's too bad that reality rarely matches the ideal.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

kevin,
Go see Doubt! ( date or no date!) it was superb..of course that is from a Catholic who is also an "insider"...

Anonymous said...

Monday’s “House” was an excellent rebuttal to “Doubt.” I just don’t know what, or who, to believe anymore. The more I experience it; I think life is pretty rough all around. But at least I’m not a caveman scrounging around for my sustenance and dealing with all that filth and lack of modern conveniences.

As for dealing with lying students (at least here I don’t have to deal with the parents), my best teaching friend back in my Texas junior high had his life destroyed when the lazy overweight students in his P.E. class decided to teach him a lesson for making them run, so they accused him of molestation. These were some of the same boys I had in my class, and they told me that if I gave them to much homework that I might have the same thing happen to me. I went straight to the principal and demanded that they put a camera in my class, but she cited some b.s. about students’ privacy rights. I already had a situation develop earlier in the year with a combative parent who somehow made it past security and into a class I was teaching, so I decided that I didn’t need any more of this crap. I was a kindergarten teacher who was being forced into higher and higher class levels because of the lack of men in the profession and enjoying it less and less the higher up I was pushed.

As for my friend, he ended up losing his family and home over this overt lie, while the kids escaped scot-free to continue their lives of delinquency and hooliganism before their eventual incarceration. My colleague was eventually exonerated, but has left the profession.

Right now, I teach in a class with a camera. At first I was a bit apprehensive about the intrusion, but now I sleep so much easier at night knowing that I have an eye-witness that can back me up in those times when a kid (or is it really God) decides to test me. The cameras really came in handy after the accident that claimed a student’s life. I don’t know how much worse things would have gotten had it not been pointed out to the attacking family members that they were being filmed. They did take the owner out of the camera’s view and nearly beat him to death in the stairwell. Luckily, the police were finally called, and they noticed them arriving through the window and left at that time.

John from Daejeon