to clarify in my area, sleeping with a teacher is not new, what is new is when it becomes criminal and the teacher has charges and does jail time- that now is NEW
in the past 10 years several teachers (mostly female) have been given probation (and must register as a sex offended) and some have gotten jail time because of the age of the student
As for handguns in schools - this is advice I recieved and it has served me well in life. Leave the area immediately and tell an adult. Don't talk to the person (kid, adult) who has it. Don't engage at all. Ditto if it is an unattended weapon. Basically treat it like "I smell a gas leak" Don't investigate. Leave the area immediately, and tell an adult. Period. [snip - extraneous]
Along these lines, the NRA has some good comic book type of handouts about gun safety and even my DH, who is very anti-NRA, thought they were great as DS really got the safety message. We picked up ours at a country fair but I would think you could get it on-line. Same idea, don't touch, leave the area, tell an adult.
Concerning teachess and students - I grew up in a rural area, small school, type of place where everybody knew everybody and teachers sleeping with or otherwise having criminal or inappropriate relationships with student was a big problem. In a high school with less than 400 students in 9-12th grade, there were at least 4 male teachers that were known to have an eye for the female students. No one did anything about it.
It certainly isn't a new problem but I think the reason we hear more about arrests now a days is because of social media and cell phones/text messages. There has been a rash of arrests lately in my area and every one was made due to parents (or other concerned adults like parents of the student's friend) finding evidence on Facebook or by looking at student's text messages. Sort of hard to deny it when there is evidence of over 3,000 sexually explicit messages sent to a student like in one case I read about in the paper. 20 years ago, it would hav been the student's word against the teacher, KWIM?
Have you ever read "Farmer Boy?"
That scene in which the "Big Boys" plan to beat the teacher and "break up the school" was fairly common occurrence in the 1850s and 1860s in rural New England. I wish I could find the article I once stumbled across on a history archive library that summarized a bunch of primary reports from people who witnessed them back then.
It wasn't just schools -- it was all of society. Read "Wisconsin Death Trip" for 1890s newspaper articles about social issues, random neighbor killings, servants killing bosses, bosses raping servants, farmhands drowning each other in the well.
None of what we read in the paper or see on TV today is new. The only difference is that the modern news cycle shows us ALL of it, from every state, and it has hundreds of thousands more people in the population to do things that the news can cover.
The stories that I hear about the *good* public high schools in town are so diverse that I've come to the conclusion that the same high school can be a completely different place for 2 different kids. For one, it is a tough place of fighting or drugs, and for another, it's a great opportunity to do amazing things. The experience that a child has at a specific school has a lot to do with the child and the choices they make.
I completely agree with the above. The choices, activities and groups that a kid is a part of will influence their experience to a large degree. We have had a fairly positive social and academic experience at our local middle school, and my child has great teachers and a good peer group. Nothing is perfect, but it works for her. I do hear stories of other kids having difficulty, and some serious issues, but they haven't touched my dd's school life.
I would dig a little deeper to see if there are positive pieces you might find. Also, kids develop emotionally, socially, and accumulate a toolbox of coping skills that allow them to be in situations that we wouldn't even consider when they are elementary ages. For instance, I was convinced that one of my kids needed a very small, very low key environment, and to a degree this was true at a young age. But by middle school she thrived in a larger environment, more choices, and frankly, more chaos. She learned to manage, and grew. Now that's different than your question of safety issues, but I just wanted to say that it's worth digging a little and knowing that our kids become strong and capable as they grow.
Good luck with your decision making.
Really? so now it's just how we "treat" is-right? http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/bethlehem/index.ssf/2012/04/freedom_high_school_student_sh.html
I think the way things are NOW is different- we use to not treat hungry students with stun guns but that's me and what I thought the OP was talking about.
Really? so now it's just how we "treat" is-right? http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/bethlehem/index.ssf/2012/04/freedom_high_school_student_sh.html
I think the way things are NOW is different- we use to not treat hungry students with stun guns but that's me and what I thought the OP was talking about.
I think the point others are making is that violence and immoral behaviour have been around for generations, but the form they take, the higher propensity of victims to report, and the tendency of contemporary media to instantly inform the entire population about such reports has changed.
Miranda
I think the way things are NOW is different- we use to not treat hungry students with stun guns but that's me and what I thought the OP was talking about.
hmm...I've read a fair bit of Depression era stuff, and a kid stealing an apple (similar to not paying for lunch) out of hunger could end up in a poor house or orphanage that was basically a prison. They wouldn't even have to hit the adult who caught them, as happened in the article you linked to.
One of my personal pet peeves is "good old days" syndrome. We have a tendency to whitewash the past and make it prettier than now, and our ability to immerse ourselves in the day-to-day tragedies, scandals, "shocking" stories, etc. aggravates that tendency.
In 1963 (hey - the good old days!), my mother was beaten up by her ex-husband - a bloody nose at one point, and a cracked rib (while pregnant) at another. A friend of her husband's was there the first time he hit her, and said friend excused himself and went home - not his business. When she called her own brother to pick her up on another occasion, he talked her into staying, because it was her husband, and it was up to her to make it work. I'd have to double-check (laws varied from place to place, of course), but I think what he did to her was legal at that time.
Someone else already mentioned the horrifying violence in Farmer Boy.
Look up Gille de Rais (if you have a strong stomach), born in 1404. There have been crimes of violence throughout history, including serial killers, crimes against children, etc.
Sorry - off on a tangent. Back to school...I graduated in 1986. When I started school, the principal still had a paddle in his office. Corporal punishment was banned when I was still really litlte, and I never received it, but I think my older brother might have, once (he has ADHD, and people didn't understant it very well back then). My husband, who is American and seven years younger than me, had a note from his mother, specifying that the school was not to use corporal punishment on him. Without it, he could have still been paddled. In grade six and seven, I was routinely molested by the elementary school janitor (we don't have middle school in our system), as was at least one of my friends. We had a teacher in high school wh would almost certainly be fired for sexual harrassment in the here and now. His behaviour with pretty well all of his female students was completely inappropriate. (I don't know if he ever had sex with anybody, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.) We had students buying and selling pot in classrooms, right under the eyes of the teachers. There were fights and bullying going on quite a lot. (Thanks to the rumour mill making things up out of whole hog, I once had approximately 300 people - many of whom didn't even attend our school show up after school - with the intent to beat the crap out of my friends. My ex fortunately only took one completely unprovoked punch in the stomach before a teacher showed up.) There were kids smoking pot in my 6th and 7th grade class. I saw students in class while high on acid and cocaine (and I showed up high on pot more times than I can count - and drunk twice, the first time at the end of 9th grade). Someone keyed up the principal's car for kicks. I knew people at other schools who bought drugs from their teachers.
Things have been ugly throughout history, and they've been ugly in schools (at least intermittently), all along, as well. The high school I attended had a good rep, and most of the students were kids from professional families (lots of doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, successful business owners, etc.). The schools several of my friends (from less affluent parts of Vancouver) attended had more serious issues, and more incidents of many of the things - fights, drug deals, etc. - that were happening at my school.
I really dislike a lot of things about the way children are treated in our society, and especially in a lot of schools. But, historically, they've been treated a lot worse than they are now - a lot worse. The "new normal" sucks sometimes, but the "old normal" could be pretty bad, too.
Yep, I graduated in 1987. In junior high, two (male) teachers had paddles hanging on the wall next to the chalkboard. The paddles had names.
And they weren't decorative. I remember coming back from a doctors appointment and walking down the hall during class and seeing someone being paddled.
Everyone hit kids. All the time. As a matter of course. It was considered not just okay, but necessary. Teachers, parents, neighbors, principals -- everyone was paddling and spanking and whipping them on their butts and backs and hands. Parents who didnt' were soft. They were even going against Gods Will.
It started with them as babies. Old-fashioned parenting manuals can be horrific. I still remember the victorian one I found on an university archive that recommended whipping babies as young as 15 months if they refused to eat to food they were served. IT was how you prevented picky eaters -- you beat them for refusing, and didn't feed them anything else until they ate the offending food.
Overall, we treat children today with far less violence than we did in the past, and violence is much, much less acceptable. Most kids, on average, experience abuse at a much lower level than they did 100 years ago or even 50 or 40 or 30 years ago.
One of my personal pet peeves is "good old days" syndrome. We have a tendency to whitewash the past and make it prettier than now, and our ability to immerse ourselves in the day-to-day tragedies, scandals, "shocking" stories, etc. aggravates that tendency.
Absolutely, I very much remember my grandparents talking about their lives growing up during the Depression. One painted a rosy picture of sharing rides to town, not enough gas for tires so they stay at home and sang songs, having to wear their brothers hand me downs, etc., the other had memories of true hunger, children suffering because the parents couldn't afford basic medical care, sending young girls away to serve as farm hands at a farm.
My mother was pregnant and married at 17 and my grandfather said, 35 years later, how horrible it was to see how she and I lived when I was a child, how he wanted to put me in the car and take me out of that house but that "just wasn't done back then, you didn't interfere in someone else's family's business."
I remember special needs kids being taped to chairs in 1st grade and if they really "acted up" the teacher paddling them in front of the class. Horrible memories.
I teach at what is considered a good high school. It is in a small town on the outskirts of a big city. We have a uniformed armed police officer on campus. I think most schools do. At my school, if two students get into a fight, they are arrested, taken in handcuffs to jail. The parents have to bail them out. They go to court school from that point forward. Since this policy has been adapted, we have 1 or 2 fights a year. 16 years ago when I started teaching, we had 1-2 fights a DAY.
If a student is causing problems in the class and I ask him to go go the office, he must go. If not, he can be arrested. We have a teacher's bill of rights and the kids know it. I have very little trouble with kids being disrepectful. I actually have a great rapport with my kids and only fill out a couple of referrals a year.
Do kids come to school high? Yes. Not a thing we can do about it. If I call a parent and tell him/her that Johnny came to school high, I can be sued. We can't drug test. We have the drug dogs come to school twice a month. Last year we caught six kids with drugs (I am not talking Advil). They were allowed back in this year by the school board. We have random search in the mornings; that's the best we can do. No metal detectors.
Do kids sell drugs at school? I am sure it happens, most likely in the bathroom. The drug dealing kids all have doctor's notes that allow them to go to the bathroom whenever they want because of bladder issues. I know some kids truly have these. But the kids are very open about drugs. They talk about meeting Reggie- that means selling weed. Anything I can do, like tell the resource officer, is after the fact and the kids are smarter than that.
Want to know why they can't have water bottles? Three kids were caught with vodka in the Dasani bottle this year. Sigh.
I have 3 kids of my own in school. Since I live in an area where the schools are NOT good, they go to religious schools. I know they have issues as well, but there the administration can fire bad teachers, do drug tests and kick problem kids out of school. My biggest problem at my school is when I have 2-3 kids in the class whose sole purpose is to make sure no teaching or learning is happening. They walk around, mess with other kids, talk trash to me and others, refuse to work, etc. I don't have many of them, and I have pretty good classroom management, but when you have 30 kids in a class, 2-3 problem kids can destroy the learning environment. Sadly, some of those kids respond best to straight bookwork- not what we teachers want to assign. We want the intereactive, critical thinking, debating, hands on learning. Some students just do not have the social skills for that type of learning. It's not the brains/smarts they lack, it's how to interact appropriately with others.
I LOVE teaching; I love my sophomores. I do what I can to teach a love of learning and, yes, pass that state test at the same time. We have issues, as all schools, do, but in the larger sense most of our students like the school and have found their place.
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