I can tell you right now (as someone that actually went to the mentioned Brazosport school) that if they had more stricter rules and monitoring "in my day", I probably wouldn't be here right now (as in being part of the HN community). I'd probably be in prison or working a minimum wage job.
I was not interested in going to high school. Perhaps because there were no classes that interested me (another issue). I cut class a lot (missed more than 20% of days), hung with the wrong crowd, ran from the school cop on several instances. And plenty of other unmentionables.
If there was more surveillance, I would have just gotten kicked out more or would have been pushed to just drop out. The only reason I graduated was due to the lack of surveillance.
So if "surveillance" is meant to help those that are impoverished or disenfranchised, and by my own account would have lead to a worse end in my life, then what are we helping?
Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education. You fell through the cracks, that's hardly an optimal outcome.
>and led to more positive interventions in your education
You mean actions that are arguably beneficial on paper but in practice amount to the school telling the at-risk student to <cartman>respect my authority</cartman>?
That stuff never works in practice when the party the at-risk person doesn't respect/care about is the same party or has sufficient/control or incentive alignment with the party doing the intervention.
So you're saying you were beyond all influence so they just should have left you alone? At that point they should have expelled you- did you ever think of the damage you were doing to the rest of the school population by your actions?
edit- did not realize you were not parent poster, though I think this holds true.
That is an interesting point. "Get rid of the bad so the good can flourish". Which is opposite of the "equity" doctrine so popular over the last year.
I don't know what 'expelled' means in your definition. I was kicked out of the normal high school and sent to an 'alternative placement center' full of troubled youth several times. That was part of the reason I never failed a grade in high school.
The alternative center had very few teachers and had students from 6th grade through 12th. In the math and english classes, they were combined with students from high school and middle school. So when I'd get sent there, I'd have failing grades in math and english, but then in the alternative center, I was given 6th grade level work which I got all A's on and saved me for the year.
If you got kicked out of the alternative center, there was some kind of bootcamp type place you'd go to. Most of the kids I know that got sent there just ended up dropping out of school completely.
But all this is a contradiction. Many here are against homeschooling, yet when push comes to shove, no one wants trouble makers in the public school. But if homeschooling is bad and they can't go to public school, then what is left?
Oh yeah, nobody who is an educator would ever say such a thing. But as the spouse of one you can only hear so many stories of behavior before you start asking what the other students were learning while one kid goes on a 15 minute meltdown. But it's really dangerous where that thinking leads- so much of school performance/behavior is tied to family situations that it can go to some dark places if you replace the compassion most teachers have with simple pragmatism.
Homeschooling gets a bad rap here because of it's association with the right, but unfortunately for society as a whole it's a step in the wrong direction. It makes the quality of your education wholly dependent on your parents, which pretty much just accelerates the cycle.
Overall I think most towns have to accept it takes more resources to educate a kid on average than the public has been willing to allocate- it really is an 80-20 or 95-5 situation. But schools get decreasing budgets and increasing responsibilities, and react by cutting 'extraneous' activities that caught some of the marginal kids in the past (shop, art, etc) or by restricting things to a certain grade average (sports, activities), further disassociating those on the edges. The main thing I've notice at my kid's high school that is different from 30 years ago is the total lack of community- kids are told they need to excel and excel fast, which leads to a every man for himself kind of mentality. If you haven't found your niche by 14 you may as well pack it in, and that niche better be computers, nursing, or football or you're just wasting everyone's time.
But I can guarantee that most teachers/ administrators/ districts would rather do almost anything than deal with social media monitoring crap they barely understand- unfortunately the only thing worse than helping set up the police state is to have to explain to a news crew how you missed so many warning signs while EMTs are wheeling out bodies in the background.
>You can only hear so many stories of behavior before you start asking what the other students were learning while one kid goes on a 15 minute meltdown.
They're learning how to deal with people which is more important than the crap on the whiteboard.
I hear so much about how our schools are held back by accomidating problem students. Yet in my experience it was the students always disrupting the lesson plan and the class that caused me to learn shit. The teacher left to their own devices will merely teach kids how to get great marks in academic subjects which is a horrible waste of everybodies time. It only teaches people how to open doors.
That's a separate problem- students play dumb so class is easy as the teacher struggles to figure out how the kids made it so far. Then they get dinged when kids do miserably on standardized tests. And they don't dare just flunk them, or the parents will be in demanding the teachers head for disparaging their little genius.
>but unfortunately for society as a whole it's a step in the wrong direction. It makes the quality of your education wholly dependent on your parents, which pretty much just accelerates the cycle.
I'm still trying to figure out why everyone is against homeschooling. Everyone is negative, and if any reason it is given it is of the "won't get socialized correctly" type. But you mention "cycle". What cycle?
The cycle I see (and have seen personally), is a troubled youth floats through the public school system. Ends up working a minimum wage job for the rest of their life. And in the process of that, has children which then go through the public school system with no involvement from the parent. Then rinse wash and repeat.
So what is the "cycle" with homeschooling? In most cases you are already dealing with someone that is middle class or above (after all, homeschooling books cost lots of money) and someone that is involved with their child's education (otherwise why would you be homeschooling?). And to be middle class, you have to have a good trade or career path. Certainly something worth showing your kids. Public school seems to teach very little of the local government and small business world. After all, if you were good at small business, why would you be a teacher? The point I make is that with homeschooling, there are many more opportunities to give your children a diverse learning experience. Overall it mostly seems healthier mentally to the child as well. The pressures of hanging with the right crowd mostly go away as well as the depression associated when one feels like they are going to a prison everyday (and the cutting and self harm that comes with that).
Of course that's the best case scenario. I can use my own mother-in-law as one of the bad cases. She home schooled her kids without any input from the father. He was rarely home anyway. The boys started hanging out with the wrong crowd once they were teenagers. But it wasn't some rogue group of socially misfit home schooled children they joined up with. It was a group of socially misfit public school children from the wrong side of town. This is where I don't follow the "homeschool causes social issues" argument as in this case, the boys would have had the same friends whether they were home schooled or in public school. They only way to change that would have been to move.
But back to the question. Where's the "cycle"? In my mother-in-law's case, she was public schooled, then home schooled her daughter and boys single handily. The boys, well they're not doing too well. I'm sure they'll have kids of their own and I highly doubt they'll home school them. And statistically, if a parent performs poorly in school, so will the children. So the only cycle I see is one of under performers in school (regardless of whether public or private), produce children that are under performers.
But there is one saving grace. That mother of the home schooled boys had a daughter that saw the folly in her brother's ways. And as she was home schooled, she was not pressured into acting any one certain way, and chose to act maturely in all her ways. I then married her at my age of 28, having spent nearly 10 years looking for the "right" one. I think that has some merit.
For an individual family homeschooling may make sense, assuming they really are committed to it. The socialization issues are minor, and I agree that keeping them away from the 'bad' element is a huge plus.
But for society as a whole, it's better that the lower performers be exposed to a larger world than their dysfunctional situation. The odds are against them, but many are exposed to enough to improve their situation. That's the theory, anyway, and as someone raised on Egalitarian principles it seems to me the only way for a free society to function. But that seems to have fallen by the wayside in favor of lower taxes and an I've got mine mentality.
>Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education.
I've honestly thought about that a lot. You know, "what if someone took me under their wing and showed me how to truly fit in with society and be a great person". I doubt that would have worked. I saw most adults as idiots at the time and was not inclined to listen to anyone. For one, the advice I did get never helped or lined up with reality.
My parents told me to graduate high school, even though they hadn't. The counselors told me not to do drugs, even though the grapevine told me they themselves had (doesn't matter if that was true or not, as a teenager you make up your own "facts"). And my brain told me I had it all figured out and was part of the elite, and the rap music I blared that spoke of killing cops, beating women, and "making millions" justified my own thoughts. I was beyond help. It was only through basically getting kicked of my parents house and going all the way to the bottom did I then realized that I knew nothing.
Of course, perhaps if there was some counselor or authority that I could have repected at school, maybe then I would have listened. But finding someone to mesh with my mentality would have been difficult and would have required a lot of thought, care, and time on their part. And in my general experience, most counselors seem to get pretty burned out after 5+ years of dealing with unruly children and they then revert to not trying much and just occupying a desk chair. Most of my high school's faculty was like that. Most had had the same position for the last 20 years.
It’s funny, in 1994 the most popular Usenet channel for me was alt.destroy.the.earth (second was alt.food.tacobell). People just theorizing about blowing stuff up as thought experiments. I was a minor so what is the appropriate action from the school if they had some tool like this back then?
It’s hard to tell what’s dangerous speech vs kids exploring the world and stretching their brains. The gifted class loves the anarchist cookbook because it was weird stuff.
We need to figure out what sensitivity and specificity we want for these types of surveillance. I think there are some who think knocking on 1000 doors to prevent one shooting is acceptable.
> You can have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment, without 100 surveillance
You absolutely, positively, cannot have that. Bullying is an all day every day thing with children. Especially boys. The only way you prevent it all the time is to never leave boys alone in a group with no monitoring or supervision.
Edit: If you are downvoting or disagreeing with this, you are part of the absurdly unreasonable expectations we have for our children. Especially boys. And are likely part of the reason 1 in 6 boys are diagnosed with ADHD for not meeting these insane ideals.
>Bullying is an all day every day thing with children.
Kids tease each other, they call each other names, they occasionally get into fist-fights, but that's not necessarily bullying. Bullying is systematic and targeted harassment; it is entirely right and proper that we should not tolerate it.
If a kid is a bully, he's an asshole. He shouldn't necessarily be expelled or even necessarily suspended, but someone needs to make it crystal clear to him that his behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, otherwise he'll grow up to be an asshole and raise his kids to be assholes.
Don't drag ADHD or insane ideals into this and don't suggest it's some sort of modern mollycoddling. Internet surveillance and helicopter parenting is no substitute for moral leadership and the teaching of values. The idea that kids need constant monitoring is symptomatic of a profound societal cowardice, an abnegation of responsibility for teaching children to be decent human beings.
The solution to bullying isn't constant surveillance of children, it's teaching children how to stand up for themselves and instilling them with a sense of duty to stand up for their peers. It's creating a school community in which bullying isn't something to be swept under the carpet, but something to be fought vigorously. It's leading by example, taking the time to listen to children and treating them with the same respect that you expect them to show others. That's not easy, but it's our duty.
> If a kid is a bully, he's an asshole. He shouldn't necessarily be expelled or even necessarily suspended, but someone needs to make it crystal clear to him that his behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, otherwise he'll grow up to be an asshole and raise his kids to be assholes.
It's not entirely clear that this is true all the time.
I was reading a reddit thread the other day where the subject turned to bullying, people who were bullied, and people who were bullies.
There were several there who seemed sincere in that they claimed they had been bullies, but as they grew up, they grew out of it (some were "young bullies" - aged 8-10 or so, and grew out of it as teens, others were teens and worked it out as they became adults) - but were remorseful about their former actions. Many expressed the wish that they could apologize to those they tormented or hurt. Others noted that they had been able to do that; or noted that they had their bullies apologize to them. Some said it helped, others said that while they appreciated it to an extent, they still kept those people at arms length, as they didn't trust them. Others still mentioned becoming friends (in one case, their bully became their best man at their wedding!).
Yes, this is all anecdotal, and should be taken with a grain simply because "internet/reddit". At the same time, I don't think we can paint these people with a broad brush in either direction.
My words were slightly carelessly chosen, but I think it's reasonable to say "...otherwise he's highly likely to grow up to be an asshole and raise his kids to be assholes". Some people do grow out of it, some people do learn decent behaviour of their own volition, but that's far from guaranteed. I do wonder what proportion of those people who "grew out" of being a bully actually got away scot-free and just changed their ways ex nihilo, and what proportion realised that they were gradually becoming a pariah and decided to sort their act out.
Conversely, I can't think of many people who were genuinely kind and decent children but grew up to become nasty thugs; the only examples that spring to mind involve severe trauma or brain injuries.
> but someone needs to make it crystal clear to him that his behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerate
We've been working with the school following 'proper channels' for some ongoing incidents, and it hasn't been effective even though the school acknowledges the problem and that it is with the other kid involved.
All this focus on bullying is great - but it feels a lot like lip service. They spend huge amounts of time talking about how bullying is not acceptable - but little preventing it from occurring. If it's not acceptable, the school needs to treat it that way.
If they're not (and honestly, I don't think they can - they have limited people, and their primary goal is teaching), then it's up to the students to make clear to their peers that the behavior is not acceptable.
> The solution to bullying isn't constant surveillance of
> children, it's teaching children how to stand up for themselves
> and instilling them with the sense of duty to stand up for their peers
We recently told our son that he's welcome to hit back when someone starts bullying him physically - he may get in trouble at school, but we'll support him at home. When 'proper channels' don't work, there's not a lot of options remaining.
>We've been working with the school following 'proper channels' for some ongoing incidents, and it hasn't been effective even though the school acknowledges the problem and that it is with the other kid involved.
All this focus on bullying is great - but it feels a lot like lip service.
Claiming that you don't tolerate bullying is very different to making it clear to the bully that you don't tolerate bullying. A lot of "zero tolerance" policies are really zero tolerance for the appearance of a bullying problem - we'll do literally anything to cover it up, including forcing the victim out of school, but we don't really care whether it's happening.
> We recently told our son that he's welcome to hit back when someone starts bullying him physically - he may get in trouble at school, but we'll support him at home. When 'proper channels' don't work, there's not a lot of options remaining.
Fair and reasonable. A lot of school administrators won't see it that way, but there's a valuable lesson to be had in the value of self-respect and the questionable integrity of many authority figures.
>If they're not (and honestly, I don't think they can - they have limited people, and their primary goal is teaching)
Anecdotally, I think it's a problem of willpower more than manpower. A lot of teachers (and particularly administrators) are far too willing to take the easy option. I was taught by many people who would go out of their way to intervene when they suspected bullying, but many who were all too willing to turn a blind eye if it earned them a quiet lesson or a quiet lunch break. Not all teachers are heroes and I don't expect them to be, but there's a fundamental issue of leadership and culture. If the principal cares more about standardised test results than the wellbeing of his students, that will poison the entire culture of the school.
This is a highly sexist view. Girls are just as merciless, often moreso, but will often stick more to psychological abuse. You can ignore this bullying all you want, but it is the new tactic for a few decades now.
The bully doesn't have to touch their target. They just need to psychologically abuse them until they get a physical reaction out of their target. Then zero tolerance comes in and the target is punished. The bully gets off free and the message is pounded home: You are not allowed to question or react to the bullies cruelty. That is the consequence of their "zero tolerance" and of your sexist viewpoint toward the bullying requiring physical acts.
It is a zero tolerance for victims alone and high tolerance for psychological abuse that is favored by girls.
You can teach your kid to resist psychological abuse. Physical abuse is more challenging - often the only real option is to push back in self-defense, which can be quite problematic.
> Resisting mental violence doesn't work. It seeps trough defenses.
What? It absolutely does, especially compared to the alternative of not doing it. Your kid must simply internalize the fact that they're trying to get a reaction out of him/her, and that's the only motive behind what they're saying. Oh, and that people who act like that are very unlikely to ever be friendly to you; and in particular, trying to cater to them or to appeal to their humaneness is the worst approach one could take. These things are not obvious to the average kid; they absolutely need to be taught.
Bullying seems to be such a massively larger problem these days, compared to when I was in grade school a couple decades ago. Or at least people are hyper-aware of it. I suppose part of it is that it's not really acceptable to turn around and punch somebody in the mouth if they are being an obnoxious shit anymore. If it is just allowed to slide, the harassment escalates over time, especially in an environment like a school where you can't escape forced association. There's much to be said for short, sharp, action to set boundaries.
I think zero tolerance on both parties plays a large part into this.
I was mercilessly bullied in elementary school until I attacked my bully at recess in 6th grade. I’m almost 40 now and it still stands out as a pivotal moment in my growth into an adult. That one action stopped the behavior for good and I wasn’t severely punished for it. It also settled down the kid who bullied me.
I know now that schools can punish victims as severely as the bully, and I think it exacerbates the problem instead of fixing it. The bullies incentives don’t change, but the victim of it has substantially more to fear. Not only from the bully, but the institution itself if they fight back or get goaded into the confrontation.
Frankly, let the children fight it out and allow an environment to develop where children don’t tolerate the behavior and work on conflict resolution themselves.
Overt surveillance by adults isn’t a fix for it, nor is allowing it to develop to a point where a kid brings a gun to school to fix it themselves.
We’ve lost healthy conflict resolution in this country, and yes, physical fighting can be a healthy outlet to solve it.
Parents can probably help here. School is unlikely to punish the bullied for self-defense if a parent threatens a VERY PUBLIC VERY EXPENSIVE LAWSUIT for his kid being punished for self-defense. Actual lawsuit not needed, the treat will likely be enough.
If our legal system provides for self-defense, schools should fall in line.
Yes, I know that enforcing this and finding out who hit whom first is hard, well, nobody said law (or rule) enforcement is easy!
Schools need to back off the punishment and let the children sort it out and keep eyes on them afterwards. If it continues after the altercation, step in to help mediate, but otherwise we need to be teaching children healthy and constructive conflict resolution so it carries into their adulthood.
Like I said, sometimes this may involve a physical confrontation, but for two children this is healthy in my opinion. I’ve never touched a human being in that manner since, and neither has the person who bullied me, but that fight resolved a littany of issues for both of us.
I understand this isn’t always the case that it can resolve as cleanly, but the way we handle it now with children is plain awful and a disservice to them. Zero tolerance creates an extremely unsafe environment for them. Take it case by case, let them resolve it, help them move on.
There was a case recently where 2 nine year old girls fought in a classroom and the substitute didn’t stop it in time. One girl sustained a head injury that later killed her. There is no way to sanction physical violence in a school setting. Restorative justice is a better solution and teaches kids real problem solving but that requires resources and training.
Again with the dichotomies. Understand that in one microcosm (school) it may have been like that. But in others it might have worked differently. So from one viewpoint, that's the 'only way' things can work. In my experience, it can work differently. I had 3 boys in public school.
> Its popular to create false dichotomies. Like this one.
It's not a false dichotomy, it's a practical issue.
eg
> Kids tease each other, they call each other names, they occasionally get into fist-fights, but that's not necessarily bullying
There's no nuance between dominance behavior and bullying. It looks like bullying, regardless if you call it teasing or horsing around. Laws and policies are, in large, black or white. It's not practical to pretend that, because there is a subjective element, that it will be legislated that way.
How about: monitor them sometimes and train them into good behavior patterns, so as to create a population of civil citizens
You can have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment, without 100 surveillance. Like any civil society.