45 Pennsylvania Teachers Quit Due to Violent Students

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

The problem with funding to help is that funding itself is no solution. If it were, our schools would be awesome!

Giving people who already have issues with their behaviors money doesn't fix the behaviors that led them to not have money in the first place, and those behaviors are the ones that also lead to them having childlren who are little monsters.

And you get it about the state level fix. CPS is already a huge cluster cluck almost everywhere. It finds all kinds of regular people to victimize while somehow missing people who have locked their kids in the attic for years or simply murdered them and packed them in a freezer.

a reply to: Autorico

You're not wrong, if not wholly right. Nature vs nurture arguments are as old as well nature and nurturing...

I know of one or two people who were, seemingly, born bad, not just bad, evil. Something was missing from them, and their parents were good parents, if the sibs were anything to go by. Great people. But not those two...one is on death row in Cali, last I heard, and the other I've no idea where he is...and that worries me when I think about it.

Most often I think it is nurturing that tells the final tale. But not always.

a reply to: seagull

Yeah, perhaps I should have said "most people". There definitely are some people born sans emotions.

‘I have been kicked, punched, hit, scratched. I’ve had a student physically restraining me in front of my other students,’ first-grade teacher Amanda Shaeffer told board members, according to Penn Live

A FIRST GRADE teacher can't control the kids in her class? That's not on them, that's on you.

You let a 5 year old "physically restrain" you ? What's wrong with you?

a reply to: babybunnies

Simple question for you.

Certainly the teacher was physically capable of tossing the student away... Of course, she was.

What happens after that, however? Lawsuit? Getting fired so the school district doesn't get sued? Not because she can't, but because she's worried about her future.

Given the "sue at the drop of a hat" nature of America today? Can't hardly blame her.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan

I never spanked the oldest boy. The youngest never got spanked after he turned about 8 or 9. It was a tool to reset his behavior and gain his attention, nothing more, and was not intended to transfer pain.

For both my boys I stopped once they were out of diapers and then it was just a quick swat on the backside.

At school, however....

You cannot trust parents to be engaged enough to support the school, so the school has to mete out punishment on the fly. The cost of a single disruptive student can be the performance of the entire classroom, so its not like the schools (who are performing a tax payer funded service) can wait for parents to decide to avail themselves of the need for their child to not be a wild animal. In school, paddling is a highly effective deterrant.

My kids are lucky they have had a stay at home mom their whole life...We didn't start having kids until out late 30s when we could afford them and appreciate them more. School have become so Woosyfied in many ways...no grades until 6th grade...don't want to upset anyone, can't play tag...

One bad side is the No Child Left Behind...great idea, but no funds put towards it and so you have kids with emotional/mental issues in the main classrooms with no support staff to help the teacher.

When I was a kid my dad would spank me until he realized that beating on me didn't change my behavior. I can take physical pain longer than you can dish it out with a belt or switch. When he made that transition into treating me like a man instead of a child, he would talk to me and use reason.

Of course, I was larger and stronger than him by my freshman year. My stepdad wasn't a very big man, and strong arm doesn't work on someone bigger and stronger than you, and full of more testosterone.

I'm a very imposing man so my voice works well. At 6'5" and 280 my kids kind of know who the alpha male is...lol

a reply to: Xtrozero

LOL, the big booming voice doesn't hurt, either.

My youngest is just (JUST) like me. An ass whooping won't do much to scare him. The only way "in" is with reason.

And he's huge. Although I did a lot of weight training in my younger day, and am still much stronger than him....the effort of spanking him just wasn't worth it by the time he was 8.

a reply to: ClovenSky

That does not indicate a lack of ability so much as a cultural lack.

It is also common in some places for the meeting to not begin until everyone shows up not matter what time the original meeting was set at.

So, for example, they could all say the meeting will begin at noon, but really, it won't start until everyone who is supposed to be there is there, and that may not happen until 2:00pm.

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
a reply to: infolurker
A school shouldn't be allowed to punish a kid unless their parents sign off on it. If they refuse to sign off on it and their kid keeps acting up then let the parents discipline them as they see fit, suspend them until they straighten up.

The kids who (i) have parents that would effectively discipline them, and (ii) would see suspension as a penalty to be avoided... well, they're not the kids causing the problems.

I agree that we shouldn't be leaving it up to schools to discipline our kids. What we should have, however, is a concerted effort. If one of my children was put in detention for breaking a school rule, then they would be disciplined at home as well - taking into account what happened, and allowing some time-served for the detention itself.

It's about the parents and the school sharing, and mutually reinforcing, the boundaries that are expected.

Oh well, lesson learned. Talking about the elephant is not allowed.

a reply to: ClovenSky

I think it's because you assigned the lack to race. It's not a racial thing but a cultural one.

Think about it this way:

Do you think the Inuit have a cultural concept or words for camels or sandstorms? Likely not. But that doesn't mean they are incapable because of being ethnic lack of capacity to deal with or learn about those things and adapt should they find themselves in an environment where they suddenly need to develop an understanding for them.

Or you can look at American English which is peppered with words and phrases from other languages and cultures ... adopted when we ran into concepts where our own culture and language was lacking. We adopted the words to suit.

Raccoon is a Native American word so is opossum. Both are for animals English had no word or concept for. The settlers simply adopted the word as they learned the concept from the people already here.

So never having had a need for words to describe those things is not the same as not being capable of understanding them. Clearly from the anecdote, they seemed to catch on very quickly to what you were after. Likely they knew it already and just hadn't connected that to the idea their own tongues had no words for it.

a reply to: ketsuko

No problem at all. I completely agree with the angle of cultural differences. It is a very good theory.

Maybe even asking the question is wrong. I am just trying to figure out why it is wrong to bring it out for discussion. I could very well lack the facility to discover the secret. Time to find some tact and search for that line.

It is just these darn correlations that popup from time to time.

Perhaps the problem lies with media supersaturation and the rise in various attention deficit disorders?

Not cutting the parents slack here, it's up to them to monitor and regulate how much media a child consumes (and what type) on a regular basis.

Something is definitely affecting the children, I'm sure a two working parent household might have something to do with it, as well as hyperactivity, but the aggressive nature of children this young cannot be overlooked or discounted. Media is full of violent and combative imagery, even in childrens programming and cartoons designed for older children, whom a lot of parents mistake for the age demographic of their own younger kids.

Even when I was in grade school there were disruptive children.

I was taken out of a regular advanced mathematics class for a minor infraction yawning and placed in a remedial classroom for two weeks where the kids were screaming, running over desks, urinating in the corner and fighting with one another in full view of the teacher, who sat resigned to defeat at his desk with his head in his hands.

That was in the fifth grade in 1984, and I had no idea kids could behave so wildly up until then, as I was always a quiet and attentive student.

Corporal punishment had no effect on those kids either.

It strikes me that more and more behavioral issues are coming to light with younger and younger kids, and I firmly believe that media saturation and parental abandonment are at the root of the problem. There might be a genetic component as well, seeing as how schools have gotten markedly more violent over the past thirty years.

What can be done?

It seems the only solution is having specialized classes and hardline draconian policies to combat this issue.

Thus reaffirming the "school is a prison" mentality.

Would homeschooling disruptive kids be an option for an already overburdened household?

Maybe online classes at home, instead of traditional environments?

I'm really at a loss here.

Every solution seems to pose more problems.

a reply to: ClovenSky

The subject itself is touchy enough, especially when your source was a WS site, but to attribute it to, as ketsuko says, to cultural differences, lends a differing complexion to it.

Still touchy to many, but not third rail touchy...

a reply to: GENERAL EYES

Every solution seems to pose more problems.

There isn't any one one size fits all sort of solution to this. There can't be, because every child is different.

The vast majority of children have no issues, or any issues aren't effecting those around them. Those children just need to be taught how to learn, then leave 'em alone and let 'em rock out. They'll take care of themselves for the most part.

It's that small minority that needs the attention.

We need to stop acting as though there is one all encompassing solution. There isn't now, there wasn't in the "good ol' days", and the same sorts of problems will present themselves in the future. It can only be done by addressing the issue, what ever it is, head on. If it's a discipline problem...find the root cause, and address it. If it's something else, such as a learning problem, find the problem and address it, there is a solution, it may not be a perfect one, but it'll be better than tossing the kid aside like unwanted bathwater.

My education problem was shyness brought on by my speech impediment, that shyness also left me vulnerable to bullying...that my speech impediment was a result of a cleft palet only made the bullying problem worse. But once the speech impediment was addressed by intensive therapy for about a school year and a half--give or take--that shyness disappeared for the most part. I developed friends, and when one has friends, the bullies find other targets.

I'm not saying all the problems will be as straight forward as mine was to solve--I'll never call it easy, that therapy was some of the hardest work, in its own way, that I've ever done--before or since. But addressing them is the only way a solution will be found.

After my stepfather lost his oilfield job back home, we moved to Oklahoma for a new job. I ended up getting bussed to a school that was, to say the least, rough. It was the 80's and there was a lot of racial tension at the time. Natives, whites and PoC like three points of a very nasty triangle.

Teachers got no respect. None. I remember one of them simply sat at his desk and basically did nothing because the students refused to listen. He tried, but all he got was yelled at and threatened. He'd try to send them to the office and they'd just ignore him, or just leave the classroom to go who knows where.

There was always a fear of getting knifed, or jumped and beaten up if you went outside for lunch. I stayed in the gym. There was no way I was becoming a statistic in the 6th grade. I can definitely relate to what these teachers must be going through. Horrible situation and I don't blame the teachers for quitting. They don't get paid enough, nor protected enough, to put their lives in danger.

Another media-induced trance/belief that it's local
government's responsibility to instruct children.

That responsibility lies with parents.

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt in her remarkable work,
The Deliberate Dumbing Down of Americain presented
evidence in the year 1901 America's 6th graders were
taught 12th grade curriculum of present day education.

The answer is educating your kids at Home.

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
a reply to: infolurker

Awesome, not only are we allowing our kids to be raised by people we barely know, we want them to punish them for us too! A school shouldn't be allowed to punish a kid unless their parents sign off on it. If they refuse to sign off on it and their kid keeps acting up then let the parents discipline them as they see fit, suspend them until they straighten up.

I find it disturbing that we are so gung-ho about letting strangers discipline children when it should be the parents responsibility. But I guess in a society that encourages children to be raised by the state and government this is to be expected.

It's the "it takes a village" BS.

The only thing you're gonna get are village idiots.

Destroying the family and having the govt as parents, will collapse western civilization.

originally posted by: MrBlaq
Another media-induced trance/belief that it's local
government's responsibility to instruct children.

That responsibility lies with parents.

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt in her remarkable work,
The Deliberate Dumbing Down of Americain presented
evidence in the year 1901 America's 6th graders were
taught 12th grade curriculum of present day education.

The answer is educating your kids at Home.

Yep, Harrisburg is a giant s hole. Not surprised kids aren't taught respect by their parents.