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Teacher Bullying: because this issue wasn't already bad enough.
Niceguyeddie616
All you feed me is PUFFINS!I need NOURISHMENT!Registered User regular
All you feed me is PUFFINS!I need NOURISHMENT!Registered User regular
So the issue of bullying in schools is already a giant mess. Generally, the victims are the ones that get blamed by teachers and lots of people either turn a blind eye or repeat the old "boys will be boys" chant. It's sickening, and aside from certain movies and activists groups there hasn't been much done about it officially.
Knowing this, the following video boils my damn blood,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfkscHt96R0&feature=youtu.be
I've had a few experiences with teacher bullying myself. One time a dude pulled my pants down in class, and when I went to teacher about it, it was apparently my fault for wearing shorts. It was an embarrasing, debilitating experience. However, the fact that a grown ass woman would do this to an autistic child is sickening. She clearly has no idea how this kid is feeling or what he's going through, and she is in charge of a class that teaches kids with special needs. Having needed special needs myself when I was younger, this makes me so fucking angry. It makes me want to hang those teachers and burn that goddamn school to the ground. The worst part is that the teacher received little punishment for her actions, she didnt even get suspended from teaching.
So what should be done about this problem? Should there be stricter regulation by the government? Is it the teacher's responsibility, the parent's? Should it be left up to them? Bullying has become a huge disastrous problem in schools, and it has ruined many lives and will probably continue to, but what should be done when the people you're supposed to trust in are the worst offenders?
Knowing this, the following video boils my damn blood,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfkscHt96R0&feature=youtu.beI've had a few experiences with teacher bullying myself. One time a dude pulled my pants down in class, and when I went to teacher about it, it was apparently my fault for wearing shorts. It was an embarrasing, debilitating experience. However, the fact that a grown ass woman would do this to an autistic child is sickening. She clearly has no idea how this kid is feeling or what he's going through, and she is in charge of a class that teaches kids with special needs. Having needed special needs myself when I was younger, this makes me so fucking angry. It makes me want to hang those teachers and burn that goddamn school to the ground. The worst part is that the teacher received little punishment for her actions, she didnt even get suspended from teaching.
So what should be done about this problem? Should there be stricter regulation by the government? Is it the teacher's responsibility, the parent's? Should it be left up to them? Bullying has become a huge disastrous problem in schools, and it has ruined many lives and will probably continue to, but what should be done when the people you're supposed to trust in are the worst offenders?
Niceguyeddie616 on
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For the private school bully It was an awful experience and luckily my family was relocated and I went back to public schooling. He regularly called on kids just to bully them and make them cry for what I suspect is the gull to try and learn something new. I can't suspect he taught much longer, but I dont know if any of his actions ever came to light with how scared those kids were.
The instructors of the autism class were callous, unprofessional, uncaring drunkards. But it didn’t seem as if they “bullied” they kids.
They mostly just took advantage of their disabilities by ignoring them.
No. Governmental regulation isn't necessary for this kind of issue. Enforcement of the rules that already exist, and peer monitoring could have solved this problem.
I wasn't clear on the structure of this particular educational system, but presumably there is someone in charge whose responsibilities involved monitoring what happened in the classrooms. When teachers are telling autistic kids that they will never see their parents again, and this happens over long periods of time, that's a problem with peer monitoring.
Bullying has been around for nigh-ever. It hasn't "become" a huge disastrous problem. We've just decided to start calling it a huge disastrous problem.
Having the principle, administrators observe classrooms could have solved this problem. And to the inevitable reply of, "Well, then the teachers would have abused the kids when the administrators weren't looking!" it didn't seem like the teachers were tormenting the kids for the sake of tormenting them. They tormented the kids because they were indifferent towards their well-being.
That tendancy could be discerned independent of witnessing these specific events.
Students go to a university, they get an education degree, they do some student teaching and - job market permitting - viola, Teacher!
Now, as someone who works for a University, and was exposed to Education Majors whilst attending a different university, I can tell you that newly graduated teachers have absolutely fucking nothing to offer to the profession or to the kids they will be teaching.
In a decent world, in which teachers made a decent amount of money, one would go out into the world and have a career, learn things in that career, and then become a teacher and pass on that knowledge.
Teaching, as a discipline in and of itself, is like continually studying the concept of building a house while never setting foot in a house, examining an actual house, or even attempting to build one.
Carry on.
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Being ignorant, unknowing, or insensitive to bullying is itself not bullying. It's something, but it isn't bullying.
Now, I'm a former teacher. I loved teaching, but at the high school level (where I taught) and below, the job entails quite a bit more than imparting skills and knowledge. The fact of the matter is I didn't much enjoy the disciplinary and socialization aspects of teaching, and yet those were areas where I received the least oversight or guidance on - the unspoken rule was "the only way to fuck up is by fucking up in such a way that admin has to act to save face:".
I mostly didn't want to deal with the problems that students carry around with them the 23 hours a day they weren't in my classroom (multiplied by the 160 or so students I had), and I especially didn't like the idea of being judged after the fact on an aspect of the job that nobody wanted to tell me how to do. I'm sure I was insensitive to bullied kids when I taught - I only responded to outbursts, probably tossing out both bullies and the bullied after the fact, when I'm sure whatever lead up to those situations was the kind of noxious, slow-burning abuse that I either wasn't there to notice, or wouldn't have noticed in the first place.
I'm not a teacher any more, perhaps to everyone's relief (I wasn't fired or anything, I just left). If, as a society, we really insist to let it fall upon teachers to pick up the slack in children's lives, and to make every teacher a social worker, then we should buck up and make it official. Keep people like me who are happy enough just to teach well away, and/or require the training that is necessary to do the job we're asking.
Education majors are the worst. They learn how to teach things, without ever learning anything, themselves.
Well, yeah, most of them are going to be teaching high school. They learned all the content in high school.
Meanwhile, saying that teachers would be massivly improved by going out and working for ten years is just as asinine as the argument that Romney would be strong on the economy because he worked as a CEO.
Frankly, it HAS become a huge disastrous problem. Because it was a fairly new idea in the 70's and 80's that bullies were really the helpless surrounded victim goaded into it by the people around mercilessly making victims of themselves, and schools started running that way. Not just the Mafia-style law of silence that tattling was as bad as bullying that came up in the 50's, which was bad enough and led to a lot of misery, but literal persecution of the victims for "instigating" their own bullying. Silence enough victims and the ones that are left can be dismissed as isolated incidents. Cure the symptom, cure the disease, right?
That's where school shooting shifted from being mostly single fights escalating into tragedy and crazy tax protests (See Bath, MI massacre) to being mostly the nerdy kid who knew the combination to daddy's gun safe deciding to show them all what for. And of course, school's didn't handle that well, either.
They actually made matters worse with their terrible PSA videos and "Watch out, you never know who might snap and start killing people!" The kids being targeted worst by it were actually being held up as examples of who might just kill you all, and lawmakers went after guns and gun locks to keep the victims from taking spectacular revenge. And because nobody actually addressed the problem and simply disarmed the retaliation, teen suicide started creeping up.
Now, we have two things that have forced the country to actually look at the problem.
1. We have a generation of parents who grew up in this shit - both victims and bullies who managed to grow out of it who don't want their kids to go through it. A lot of those parents also have a good bit of pent up bitterness and a lot are already hovering over every aspect of their kids lives, and they'll sure as hell take the schools to task at the drop of a hat.
2. We also have a generation of students who have the ability to communicate with millions of people instantly and dozens of websites that try to make it trivially easy for them to do so. The victims aren't just being silenced by punishment, they're going home and telling the world about it.
We haven't just "decided" to make this an issue. We've been forced to make it the issue it should have been forty years ago.
Err, are you familiar with the past? Bullying today is bad, but it is NOTHING compared to what was going on in the past both at home and in school. The only way in which it is worse today is that the demands of social networks and always on communication combined with Kids who have never been taught how to manage that communication leads to it being harder to escape from. Seriously, look up the 'word for homosexual men that was used in a really offensive way in the 90s' system in boarding schools. Kids are MEAN, they always have been and always will be. Not because they are bad, but because they haven't learned empathy and control.
Bullying has been an issue for centuries, we have just decided that it should be within our power to stop, and are distressed at how hard it is.
Better late than never.
I was bullied a lot in middle school and high school, and even now, at nearly 24 years old, I'm still suffering from social anxiety caused by being mocked for years. I realize now that a lot of the people who made fun of me were goddamn worthless idiots that I shouldn't have paid attention to, but it doesn't make me feel any better.
I"ll probably regret saying this later, but I almost sympathize with bullied kids who snap and pick up a gun. I'm fairly certain that my high school's administration thought I was the kid most likely to do such a thing, as I was one of the three students picked to attend a special anti-violence talk after another student got beaten on the bus so bad that they collapsed in their front yard and had to be taken to the hospital for intensive care. The other two students were notorious troublemakers, whereas the worst thing I had ever done was change what some of the icons did in a computer class.
The psychological effects of bullying don't end when a kid gets out of school; they can change the rest of a person's life for the worse if they don't get the right help. To me, that's more tragic than death.
I did History and English and to be fair,
I have had to pass content tests to get certified for both of those areas. But thats for high school. The actual education I received had me take several history courses but mostly "education" courses, all but perhaps two were complete bullshit. One was really fantastic and discussed how the pedagogies are really old and not properly studied and things like encouraging group work instead of lecture is actually a terrible idea based on the data we have. I am a new teacher but I'm also one of the few paying attention to how shitty things are, so I like to think I'm not quite as useless as suggested by other posters. I know it wasn't directed at me specifically of course.
The actual field of education isn't a bad one to study. Knowing a shit load about biology but not knowing how to pass that information along still makes you a bad teacher. As does having a great system for teaching but not having any content to teach. But the field of education needs some pretty vast improvements to be as worthwhile as it could be, because currently I had a 400 level course where one week we made fucking pipe cleaner toys. For high school education!
Edit: and yes, the majority of education majors I met were drooling retards.
Teaching is very much a sink or swim kind of experience. Yes, you'll have a mentor, who will have their own 180 students, own way of dealing with things (god forbid you get the bider.... the guy who has a calendar who's biding his time until his pension fills out). As a new teacher, you can expect little to no support from administration. Now, I taught at an inner city school, so maybe your experience at a suburban/wealthy school district may be different, but we had 1 VP for each grade--so 4-- and other than orientation, I never got to speak to any of them. Mostly they were roaming the halls putting out figurative and literal fires.
We don't have enough infrastructure in the public school system to deal with the causes of these issues, only the symptoms. We've basically reduced education to the level of teaching test-takers and college "prep"--i.e. prepping resumes, not students--that of course these socialization issues are getting worse.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, We need to get away from multiple choice tests and work towards a portfolio based education system where the childs whole body of work--including their improvements--are judged.
Should this have happened? Nope.
Is there an underline cause for this? You bet your ass. Teaching used to be about preparing kids for the real world. Now it's incentive based on a stupid fucking test.
here's a test: go to your average college and see how many sections of remedial english they offer to freshmen every year. When I went to college in 99, there were 11 101A, and 2 regular sections of english. You got assigned based on your entrance score.
I did have the undergraduate advisor in my college's education program flat out tell me that I shouldn't major in education in undergrad and instead use that time to learn everything else.
On the topic of teacher bullying, it seems to me like there are a lot of potential causes, ranging from a lack of support networks within schools for both teachers and bullied students, as well as a lack of focus on the psychological aspects of running a classroom.
I was gonna make a joke about loving to discipline high school girls but then I felt weird about it.
We do need to fix the whatchamacallit shuffle (schools have a name for it, I forget what it is) that public schools engage in, where problem teachers are just shuffled around among different schools in the area each year. It's only in recent years that outright sexual/physical abuse is no longer protected this way, but all other problems still are. Kind of like how bad cops are sent to airport or mass transit duty. Send them away so it looks like you took action, and hope that at least some of them decide to change their ways.
Considering that the teacher's aide in this case was immediately fired leads me to assume that the problem is union protection. I'm not totally anti-union, but I do think that any union of government employees has a strong potential to create a particularly nasty imbalance of power in how things are managed.
That's not to say that this entire issue is about unions, of course. But there is a distinct lack of accountability in teaching, and that's not an easy problem to deal with.
But as a parent of kids who are in public school, including one on IEP, and in supposedly some of the best public schools in the U.S., I can say that there is a distinct lack of accountability. There is a bureaucratic process available to navigate that does ultimately put power in the hands of parents and students, but it is political and over-lawyered. Like the Dad in this story, we always feel like we're walking into a trap, where the whole strategy has been figured out ahead of time, and we are only there for them to try to get us to say certain words or agree to certain stipulations that allow the bureacratic process to move forward in the manner the teacher planned for. Any deviation on our part results in silence and stonewalling and empty, confusing statements. And this is from teachers that I generally like and trust.
Case in point I guess? This teacher was demonstrably horrible, calling a special needs child a bastard and telling him to shut his mouth, scheming to skip work, discussing sex and alcohol and parents they don't like, in front of the kids, lying about all of it, and also scheming to tell the parent that all of the child's problems (that the teacher was clearly creating) were coming from his home environment. All on tape. The punishment? Move her to another school.
Good teachers getting in trouble for false sex abuse allegations is a very strange example of proper accountability.
The worst part of it, I think, was near the end, where the kid was told he'd never see his parents again. And then the teachers completely devolved into five year old girls. I can't believe these people were allowed to teach and the school district should be ashamed for letting them. I've seen plenty of bad teachers get reported and fired, so there is a semblance of some sort of system in place, but it's heavily flawed and needs some sort of revamping.
Stay classy!
I'd describe my schooling experience as 'adequate' or perhaps 'meh'. Teachers generally did the best they could, the school itself was hilariously underfunded and class sizes were probably in the acceptable range simply because I lived in a smaller town.
It seems to me that a lot of the issues seen with modern school systems, including bullying and teacher misbehavior, is due to using an old schooling technique that probably worked okay when population sizes were small. Now we have very large population centers, and it appears to be overwhelming what this type of educational system can handle.