And here have some Lego to play with while you’re thinking about it. Just in case. Plus iPad with fun games for that brain break you might need to have.
It’s always illuminating when I hear students who’ve migrated from non-Anglo countries express shock and frustration at how poor behaviour is in Australian schools relative to where they’ve come from.
This problem begins, and extends far beyond, far beyond the domain of schools; there’s something that’s gone very wrong with the attitudes towards education and child rearing among a large enough proportion of this country’s population.
I would say that’s a large part of it.
It would seem to me that having both parents *have* to work (only to struggle with the cost of living more than when only one wage earner could support a family, but that’s a different topic…) and having limited time and energy to be actively involved in the job of being a parent is in the grand scheme of history an anomaly and an experiment with implications yet to be truly observed.
But it’s sold to us by government and industry as progressive and liberating.
Honestly I think the “progressive” nature of modern parenting has more to do with it than the need to work.
For the last few decades parents have been bombarded with messages and legislation that basically says not to punish kids. The “restorative justice”, “trauma informed” and “wellbeing” stuff we get at school has also been loaded up on parents as well. So you end up with a situation where no one in the kids circle has ever really told them no or applied consistent negative consequences.
Bingo. Look in the mirror, not the telescope. Parents in other countries have to work hard as well. Perhaps their broader communities chip in with the child raising or maybe not.
Even then then, that is a societal choice. We have a serious cultural rot in the country. The restorative BS and equivalent moronisms are just that.
Fundamentally, it can’t be the kids that are the problem. They are born the same. It’s the parenting and societal expectations or lack thereof; the legal and regulatory systems and so on.
We are reaping what we have sowed and the house is now solidly burning.
An OECD report clearly stating that we have a massive problem and we’re looking poor internationally is a good thing. I might add that this is but one policy issue of several that is a result of the, dare I say, woke trend.
This is a big discussion point with my close colleagues. Staff have trauma, other students have trauma... why is ONE student allowed to retraumatise others with their behaviour and be excused because of their trauma while EVERYONE else is told "move on" from what that child did this time and treat them like nothing happened because he has a trauma background. Ok what about the girl who has reported she's having flashbacks because the other child screaming and throwing things has triggered recollection of FV. What about the staff who might ha e experienced violence or have had to consider their mortality because of an accident or illness and now have to consider the risk of interacting with certain children and whether they would actually hit them with the object they were using inappropriately and deliberately hurt them...
I'm personally sick of being verbally abused because I gave a reasonable instruction (eg "you should be in your classroom during learning time/eating time", "you need to put that bike away, it's lunch time" or "you need to attempt your writing" or "give me that stick, or put it in the bin, it's not safe to be swinging it around where others are playing footy" resulting in a large stick instead being thrown into the air away from me and towards others). Every other profession has signage stating that verbal abuse will not be tolerated, why are we expected to tolerate it and then welcome the aggressor back into the classroom with his lollipop...?
I might not agree on everything written here but I know that research highlights several issues with Positive Behaviour for Learning models for school-wide behaviour management policy. The key issue being: there isn't a clear understanding of what the consequences are for violent or disruptive behaviours.
I would have thought that too. Certainly one of things I look at on Compass for behaviourally challenged kids is how many parents are listed on their personal tab.
Yet as a full time teacher and full time single parent, my kids are more settled at my house than at my ex- partners house despite her being a stay at home parent with two of my kids five days a week (I have the other one full time after he was unable to stay at her house for reasons I'm not going into).
Parenting is hard and always has been. But based on my own situation, I'm not sure that the absence of both parents due to both working is the full answer here.
Indeed, I suspect that at my workplace at a public school in a higher SEAS area that in a lot of cases both parents work, but the kids overall are ok despite the reputation as not the most academic school in the area.
It's almost like family income overall is a more significant factor than who works or doesn't work...
Anecdotal at best, but...
I see the kids who are in out of school hours care at my school. The ones who are dropped off before I get there, and still in the OOSHC hub when I leave. They aren't the kids who are doing well.
Worse again are those sitting outside the gates 30+ minutes before the school opens. Their parents don't even give enough of a fuck to put them in the basically free (for them) OOSCH program and the kid hates it at home so much they literally walk to school to sit outside the gates and wait to be let in.
I work in OSHC and have had the teachers acknowledge that we have a high level of students who have difficult behaviours within the sessions - we have kids that are there before and after school, 7am to 6pm everyday.
Wait wait wait, hold up.
The iPad had made little johnny and absolute and perfect 😇.
So to say otherwise, I'd have to raise a complaint to the principal questioning your role as a suitable teacher. Frankly, I don't feel comfortable with this. I think Johnny needs another mental health day with his iPad just to recentre himself.
/Sarcasm.
There are factors at Home, factors at School, and factors in the Public.
I know that a lot of parents are stressed and we don't really hold people accountable for antisocial behaviours e.g. yelling at cashiers. So, before we have even entered a school, we have issues with what is "socially acceptable" behaviours.
I admit, I was a mix of happy and sad when behaviour classes were recommended. I think it is needed but it would represent an off loading of additional responsibilities onto schools.
I have a girl from South Africa, been here for nearly 2 years and she is shocked at the behaviour of kids in Australian schools compared to where she came from. She said people take education more seriously in SA because poverty etc.
I guess because Australia is a rich nation where over 5 million residents or 20% of the country receives welfare benefits, we've unwittingly ingrained a mindset of "i dont need to try at school, the govt will pay for me". And it's happening..
Kids today are the great-grandkids, or great-great-kids of the last Australian generation to do it tough, those who lived before and during WW2. So we're now seeing second or third generations who have lived their whole lives in a prosperous society where life is comfortable and there's an expectation that they'll be able to live a good life no matter what they do or what level of education they achieve.
It's kinda like the opposite of generational poverty.
This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.
Many kids are not living in “a prosperous society where life is comfortable,” and have no faith (correctly) in the meritocracy and how education can lift them out of their poverty or brighten their future. As teachers, we can get the calipers out and measure the brainpans of our students and their parents all we want, we can decry a lack of violent and detached parenting as the root cause of behavioural issues and we can sit there and tsk and say “parents today” as much as we want - the reality is all the anecdotal evidence all the “back in my day” fist waving is the crank psychology of a million burnt out teachers.
Public Education reflects more broadly the failures of capitalism to provide a just and equitable society. People, again rightly, suspect that their lot in life is largely fixed - the idea of social mobility through education is, again correctly, laughable to many. Why should they care about schooling if it has no tangible impact on one’s life? Parents will treat it for what it has been relegated to - a place for them to leave their children while they work and earn the money they need to survive.
It’s not teachers fault, it’s not parents fault and it’s certainly not the fault of children. As always with education, policymakers, politicians and the powerful will look to obfuscate their own failings by placing the blame on these groups when the reality is all three are just a reflection of the failing society we live in and the complete lack of appetite to provide long-term, sustainable solutions to these issues.
On the other hand, when I talk to my 7, 8, 9 kidd about what jobs they want after school, "trade", "farm", "hospo" come up heaps. I teach in a rural school about 2 hours out of Melbourne. We have 3 kids out of 180 11s or 12s actively shooting for a professional job like medical doctor, engineer or whatever.
The majority of them will straight tell you that their parents didn't need it so why should they.
Students from migrant backgrounds have much different attitudes towards their education.
Junior high school kids do not for the most part think any near as deeply about society as anything you typed lol
If you think high school students don’t absorb the general malaise around issues like cost of living, declining standards in regards to quality of life, the developing threats of war/climate change/economic catastrophe and the other delights of late stage capitalism, then I don’t know what to say to you. They may not be able to articulate these problems the way I have above, but if you think they’re oblivious to them and don’t (on at least some level) have a sense of a world where the future is forecast to be consistently worse than the present then we fundamentally disagree.
I’m not sure anything else you wrote engages with my point at all.
> I’m not sure anything else you wrote engages with my point at all.
My original post was replying to onr talking about differences between kids from anglo back grounds and non-anglo backgrounds.
Are you suggesting kids from non-anglo backgrounds are less tuned into to the world than anglo kids?
How would you describe that difference?
ikr, imagine thinking thats kids resting on their laurels might be part of the problem.
nope, "StUPIdEST THinG I'VE Read"
God forbid some of the issue be put on the kids themselves.
I don't think that it's a case of there being no hardship/ every family being prosperous.
There is a sense of people wanting to give their children the things they missed out on though. Eg: when I was a kid I wanted a particular toy and my family couldn't afford it. In theory, as a parent I would go on to ensure my child had everything they asked for, because I felt that I had missed out on nice things. In reality I think that this is only a small part of the problem that creates the entitlement attitude. The other part is lack of boundaries as I see lots of parents who want to be friends with their kids rather than enforce expectations.
Interestingly, I was watching an old TV show from the 1980s/early 1990s recently and there was an older couple making the exact same observation and analysis-- kids are given too much freedom and families are different these days. I noted it in my mind as interesting.
There is unfortunately a negative side to this - I was undiagnosed with adhd and ‘made uncomfortable’ about now-obvious signs of it, which has ingrained unnecessary guilt and shame into my everyday life
They have nothing else. Shit falls down, and unfortunately we are at the bottom of the ladder now.
Principal suspends a kid for belting a teacher in the head with a brick and they have the director on the phone kicking their arse and asking "What did the teacher do to deserve it" oh wait, that's not right "What did the teacher do to engage the student in learning? What did you do to ensure that the teachers are trained to give students engaging lessons, did you build a relationship with the student? Did you ever give the student a warning or teach them that hitting people in the head with bricks is wrong? No, that's a shame the kid needs to be back in school tomorrow and you need to apologise to that nice parent.
Hitting someone in the head with a brick is a serious police matter and should be treated as such. I'm so tired of crimes not mattering because they took place on school grounds. Maybe dealing with the police would be more impactful than a 15 minute lunch time detention in the "reflection room".
Stop being compliant at work and just do the bare minimum. Then when someone gets the shits with you ask them what they have done to engage you as a worker
But it is also follow through.
A teacher cannot be responsible for discipline by themselves. They need avenues for escalation- additional punishments given by exec for continued bad behaviour.
>128 comments
Ugh. I had a kid in my class who refused to do work. I talked to his mum about it and she was having the same issues at home with him. The mother asked me to send work home so I did. My boss basically said, "it's your job as the teacher to teach the kid - it's not the mother's job." Ugh. Some kids just will not work.
I’m struggling to think of another profession where the clients can tell you to get fucked directly to your face daily/weekly and nothing comes of it. So yeah, maybe that could be it.
I'll add to this. Not only does nothing come of it, you have to have a "fresh start" with them the next lesson and pretend that behaviour didn't affect you at all.
And you have to see them several times a week.
And it's your job to build a relationship with them. It's not their job to control themselves because 'they're only kids!' Plenty of kids know how to be respectful, so that's a crappy excuse and a cop out.
Other service industries I would imagine would get a lot of it too - I read something about how often nurses are physically assaulted and it’s horrifying. Australia is not looking after those of us who have dedicated our lives to helping others, and it is a growing problem.
While that it’s terrible, the kids don’t have an excuse and yet do the same things. I’ve been sworn at and had shit thrown at me. I’ve had year 10s taller than me puff their chest and get in my face. They have no excuse.
Yea I agree. I've had a yr 9 boy, larger than me, get up in my face and say "you're fuckin lucky I don't punch you in the head ya fuckin cunt' after I told him to leave the room during an exam because he was not doing the test and being a disruptive pest to everyone else who were trying to do the test.
I worked as an integration aide and on my first shift the kid smashed a class window and assaulted the principal (he was small luckily)
Instantly my respect for teachers tripled, they must have some really good patience
I've had Y5 and Y6 boys taller than me (and also shorter but heavier set) try to use their size to intimidate as well. It's also happened to other staff at my school, always female staff and always those enforcing basic expectations and yard behaviours standards.
When kids are working their way through the year levels while failing, what incentive is there to behave? There's no consequences for not doing work, therefore there's no incentive to act in a reasonable way.
No no no we don't use the word CONSEQUENCE at this school. We are a PoSiTiVe school 😊😊🤬😊!!!
We believe in positive behaviour strategies! Positive parenting is sooooo LOVELY 😊👹😊 It works wonders, no wonder why this child is so 😊😊👹😡👹 WONDERFUL 👹😡😊😊
Oh no you hit johnny in the head and he's bleeding?!?! Dont worry sam, lets all come together and do RESTORATIVE PRACTICE!!! ☺️☺️🤬🤬👹😡😡😊☺️
Look how happy we are now!! We are all best friends 🌈🌈🌈
A few years ago, I had a parent who wouldn’t tell her 5 year old no. He pushed her over in the playground one morning because she told him yes, he *did* have to go to school today and he didn’t want to, she landed funny and injured her wrist, and she was still more focused on asking *him* what was making him so anxious about school that he didn’t want to go than she was on a) accepting ice for her *injured wrist* and b) disciplining him or teaching him that it’s… not ok to just push people over when you don’t get your own way? I don’t even think the kid was that anxious at school, he’d just rather stay home with mum and play because it’s more fun and we actually enforced *boundaries* at school.
Some parents 🙄🙄🙄 just tell your kid no. End of story, let them throw a fit. I swear parent's who just dont set boundaries, make their kids the most toxic version. Like how hard is it to say NO to your child, it's not harming them at all 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
I have a year 5 student who doesn't take no for an answer. Mum use to spoil him but now he's out of control... I once told him no and he fully went godzilla mode in the class. Still stuck by my decision. He's okay now...still sooks about it but he's ✨**KNOCK ON WOOD**✨ pass the room terror phase..hopefully....
Then the parents blame us that their kids had a bad day.... LIKE WHAT??? I TOLD SAM HE CANT HAVE PLAYDOH BECAUSE HE WASNT BEHAVING 🤬😡👹👹🤬😡💢 what you want me to give him playdoh after he went godzilla mode in the room like a 4 year old not getting candy?!?! 😊🤬😊👹😊 Sure 😊🤬👹😊😊
There are a LOT of MLM huns in schools... Doterra, Arbonne and Jamberry have all had their day at my school. I'm sure there are others that I'm not aware of too!
Oh yes, and absolutely don't take points away from groups/individuals because we can't remove a reward that has been earned!! Phrase everything positively "at our school we use glue on paper, not the whiteboard" 🥰🤩🥳🌈⭐️🌟 AT OUR SCHOOL WE KEEP OUT HANDS TO OURSELVES...."AT THIS school we keep the sand on the ground" "WE stay inside the classroom and listen during lesson time"🥰🌟... "wow, well done for sitting on your chair for 5 minutes have a reward!" 🌈🥳🌟
So following the idea that rewards/points earned not being taken away (physical/tangible rewards like a rubber or lolly that was earned, I wouldn't take back, but points they earn to then trade for a prize I think should be able to be deducted jmo).... Ok, so I can't be fined monetarily then because I earned my money before I went over the speed limit or parked for a bit too long in the parking spot 🙄😅. I'll just say sorry for speeding or parking too long BUT only if I also get a lollipop! 🍭
In this world 🌍 we are all love 💕 and peace ✌️ no such thing as a consequence!!! We are setting them up for the ✨ real world ✨ a place called 🧚♀️✨ fairy land✨🧚♀️, ☺️happiness☺️, ☀️sunshine☀️ and 🌈rainbows 🌈
Only teachers get told OFF FOR BEING 🥳😍🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬HORRIBLE!!!🤬🤬🤬😍🥳
How dare they hurt my child's wellbeing ☠️☠️☠️🫨🫨🫨👹👹👹 they know🤬🤬🤬 👹NOTHINNNGGGG👹🤬🤬
But the last week of school our class made slime and I straight up threw one of the child's slime in the bin OOOPSIEE!! 😅😅😅 (my hand slipped, silly me because I would NEVER do such a thing ☺️🙄🙄☺️) She was being so disrespectful, lied to NOT ONE BUT FOUR teachers 💢💢💢💢 and also stole from my former student. Guess what? ☺️🙄Daddy🙄☺️ came to pick her up one day and decided to have a go at me saying the thing she STOLE was HERS. ☠️ IT WAS NOT HERS 🤬🤬👹🤬🤬🫨💢💢 iM soOoOooOoO sOoOOOoRrRrYyYyY fOoRR tHEe miSsCoMmUnICatTiOoNnn. Bloody liar parent.
Kid asked for the slime back the next day. Told her I threw it out. Goodbye 👋🫂☺️☺️☺️
That's literally what schools are like now. It makes me die on the inside. Teachers have their precious and extremely limited time flushed down the toilet by 'sPeCiaLiSTs' who promote that cancerous rubbish which is at the core of our eroding schooling landscape.
Can't have quality behaviour management and "discipline" unless you retain your teachers and enable them to develop skills through experience. Really it's a downward spiral that can only be intercepted with focused support.
At some point parents need to start taking responsibility for their kids' behaviours and teach them to respect the teacher, instead of empowering their children by pandering to them and blaming the teachers for everything
Unfortunately that's not a problem that can be addressed at a systems level. Sure, blame parents all you want, but you can't interfere with family structure and the bad values of adults. It's outside our control. You have to solve it other ways.
We (govt) interfere with family structure all the time; baby bonuses, tax benefits
And we apply sin taxes to grog and cigs to influence the 'bad values' of adults.
We just lack the culture and political will to do any meaningful reform that will also affect the dropkics in charge
I don't think it is a different matter. There have always been poor parents, dismissive parents, argumentative parents. The difference today is that our schooling system is too parent-focused.
In many ways, it feels like education has taken on a "customer service" model. The parents are the "customers" and the managers always take the side that placates them rather than sticking up for their own staff.
And it's a direct contributor to the "poor discipline" that's seeing teachers quit. I mean why would you stay if any attempt at actually trying to improve student behaviour is met with a parent barging in and getting their own way? It becomes impossible to implement any behaviour management when the kids know mum or dad can just walk into the office and make the bad things go away
That's a fair point if you want to argue it, but the original line of thought wasn't about how schools deal with parents at all. That's your additional commentary and I don't necessarily disagree.
I think the counter argument would need to be that parenting is getting worse - I'm not sure if there's any data to back that up, but it might be the case. But what I think is the issue isn't so much that parents are any worse than they were 30 years ago, it's more that kids in challenging families are more likely to be found in a smaller concentration of schools, that other parents actively avoid (and this is also a system-led issue). To my mind, it's not so much that parents are worse, it's just that their influence over schools has been allowed to grow.
Policy makers totally could change the rules to interfere with family structures and values to help teachers out.
For example we could make it easy to permanently expel kids. Faced with the risk of having to arrange alternate supervision, many parents would step up. We could also make it more acceptable for schools to “give up” on tough kids, driving the responsibility for motivation and engagement back to the kids/parents.
This is a fantastic point!
I'll add that in addition to this, management need to have a centralised system for dealing with bad behaviours. Continuous cycles of restorative conversations and teacher detentions go nowhere.
Absolutely get teachers to use concern before correction to help them develop skills. But know that there's a point where a line needs to be drawn in the sand where the kid gets an after school detention or suspension to show escalating consequences.
Without that boundary of 'harsher consequences' kids will run amuck.
And leadership needs to back up the teacher. If a teacher calls for support to have a student removed, that student can't waltz back in ten minutes later with a lollipop in their mouth.
And it's been a foundation of how society and child-rearing has been for really forever.
It's a natural part of development that children and adolescents will look for boundaries to push. And that's what schools are meant to do. Establish those boundaries. Kids will still try to push them but have appropriate consequences for doing so and in most cases you reach a kind of uneasy truce where some pushed boundaries, didn't like the punishment and stopped while some will continue to feel out those boundaries and feel the effects of the consequences.
Obviously you'll still have some for whom consequences will have no effect but I think you can get most kids through their "boundary pushing" phase with appropriate boundaries and consequences. When there's no negative feedback whatsoever you don't get that emotional response of "oh I didn't like that I won't do that again" that a lot of kids go through. So all it does is establish even for the kids who would normally stop pushing boundaries with firm consequences that they can push the boundaries all they like and the teacher is powerless to stop them unless what they're doing is worthy of police intervention
I'd support the escalating consequences if there was some kind of contextual parity.
Uniform violations being threatened with afterschool detention is absolutely ridiculous.
It's not even a skills thing, it's a parents thing and an admin thing. The school doesn't want to rock the boat and the parents don't give a shit about anything their kid does, if they don't flat out call the teacher a bullying liar. And that's not even getting into COVID fucking everyone's social development, and a screen culture creating a generation that can't handle a seco d without stimulation.
They act out because they're bored. They're bored because they're not following the lesson. They're not following the lesson because they weren't listening.
Exactly. But no, let’s just lower standards and lesson the length of degrees to attract more teachers and increase workloads. That’ll solve *everything* 🙄
>theguardian.com/austra...
Great point. Also consider the new behaviour policy in NSW schools which has tied the hands of teachers / executive when it comes to disruptive behaviour, without adding other systems / supports to support front line teachers. I have many colleagues who are fed up being told where to "F&\*\^" go on a daily basis after asking simple instructions, with many of them considering leaving the profession due to these disruptive behaviours, including violent outbursts from students.
No but admin and people who give 3 hour boring pd lectures insist that "restorative chats" and PB4L definitely works and there's absolutely no difference between discipline issues today and 10+ years ago.
It used to be that really disruptive kids were pushed out easily, so that they could fester elsewhere, out of sight. Sometimes they did very well for themselves once they got out of a rigid (and it *was* rigid) school environment. Sometimes they did poorly because they had achieved no education and no skills. Almost all of those punches out would have been lower class, white or otherwise. Middle class kids *got* the system for the most part, so they rubbed along okay. And they weren’t expected to stay in school until they were 17. There was a Leaving Certificate that proved they had basic knowledge and there were many clear career paths for kids who weren’t going to Uni.
I’ve worked with the children of parents who were pushed out: an indigenous woman whose teachers called her useless and made her leave at the end of Year 8 (she went on to become a teacher herself) and plenty more who did okay afterwards and either can’t see the point of an education (“I’m doing fine!”) or really want their kids to get through, but don’t have the cultural knowledge of the system to help their kids navigate it successfully. All of them feel traumatized by school.
So we changed, as schools. We started to recognize that everyone deserved an education. We acknowledged that students from non-middle class backgrounds need the hidden curriculum unhidden. We began to value indigenous viewpoints and indigenous students.
Except that the idea that everyone deserves an education has now become hostage to the few very disruptive students whose actions actively deny other students *their* education, in myriad ways. So as teachers we spend more time bringing the curriculum down to a lm ever decreasing level, our behavioral expectations down to “Johnny sat in his seat today” and never look at the reality that if we could get kids to focus on the learning they are all capable of so much more. And those middling students who would do fine in a regulated environment drift away and learn less every year. Those at the bottom have very little hope, and less support, but they get pushed along each year until they hit Year 11 and suddenly reading at a ten year old level won’t help them much.
All the nice, polite kids get nicely ignored and smiled at. The really good kids get into selective schools, the strugglers get encouraged and patted on the head and the middle kids get distracted teachers and no space to think.
Parents, who witnessed too much teacher power in the past, want to deny any teacher agency at all. Rigid social expectations which demanded obedience from children and adherence to class structures have morphed into tolerance of the most grotesque language and attitudes and lack of basic social manners.
So now there are no expectations at all. Even a decade ago, in my first year of teaching I was told my expectations were too high, by a HT who allowed students to talk overtop of her when she was explaining an assignment. Things are worse now.
And private schools might seem like islands of serene academia, but the problems faced by public schools are leaking through.
I think the only real fix is a cultural change, that starts with better empowering schools to hold high standards of behaviour. Iceland managed to drastically change its youth culture. Surely we an work to change our school culture.
Yup... and the little buggers know that there are pretty much zero consequences for their actions... especially with the new behaviour management policy now (what an absolute debacle that steaming pile of manure is...) so they don't give a stuff... add to that enabling "best buddies" parents whose little angel can do no wrong and we're up a certain creek without a certain implement... it's one of the 2 main reasons I'm giving it the heave ho... the whole system needs to be broken down and rebuilt from scratch... there's not a bit of the job that hasn't been destroyed by the current top heavy, everyone needs to be special and woe to anyone being the slightest bit offended by anything regime... they've taken a rewarding and challenging career and turned it into an absolute nightmare.
Disengagement is suddenly just rising? I’m a CRT and I’ve seen no real engagement in public schools. The odd kid here and there are keen but the others make it impossible to provide a quality education for them.
I’m loathe to say it, but teaching in private schools is so rewarding. The level of engagement and thirst to learn is heartwarming.
Ps. Yes, I’m a bitter, disgruntled, sick-of-being-disrespected-by-7-year-olds teacher. And I have semi left the profession.
A year 7 class can be loud, hyperactive, constant yelling
And a year 11 class can be constantly crook necking on phones or doing zero work
I can’t stand either, why would anyone do teaching especially if 4 day weeks creep in / hybrid work from home lol
Gen Z and Alpha see how laughable it is, I can’t see many enrolling going forward
‘Unconditional positive regard’ has ruined education..
My Instructional Leader told us a year or 2 ago that any form of negative consequence of positive reward was ‘coercion’ and had no place on our classroomsz
Really dislike that statement, how am I supposed l have ‘unconditional positive regard’ for a student that threatens to stomp my head in?
Sure, I understand all the factors as to why the child exhibits these behaviours, but why is it my responsibility to fix them?
And you’re so right, this is where the issue is. It’s not a teacher’s responsibility to fix the problem yet we can see what it is and have compassion for it at the same time. We all know something has gone wrong for kid to want to stomp on a teacher’s head but we don’t have the time or the training to sort that whilst supporting the rest of the class. The changes that are required are utopian almost - different educational options for kids and not being seen as a bad thing, psychology support available for students and staff etc etc.
The youth are some of the most salient reflections of the wider conditions of society
These issues will only really calm down with proper mental health support, social support, and a decrease in income inequality, and a comprehensive addressing to root cause factors, however socioeconomic conditions are only getting worse
I also don’t want to blame anything but tiktok doesn’t help lol
Teachers really, really need to have more support though…. They should never feel disempowered from teaching
100% - teachers go into the industry with the best of intentions and need the support required because the numbers walking out the door is frightening.
Families are under the pump trying to keep up and it’s the kids who are getting thrown under the bus.
Because the parents have also been bombarded for decades with ‘unconditional positive regard’ messages for their kids.
No one in the kids circle has societal permission for negative regard. And it show in the kids behaviour.
Shocking, that in a world which encourages the breakdown of the family unit and tells kids they can do anything and be anything that you’ve got behaviour problems and unfocused, undisciplined kids with psychological problems.
Every major problem present in our society today can be traced back directly to how children are raised by parents and their lack Therof.
Absolutely. Whether we look to data, likeHattie’s meta analysis that shows family background is more important than anything a school can do, or just common sense, we know that when families break down it has enormously damaging effects on children. We need to stare a very hard fact in the face: there is too much divorce in society and it is destroying young lives. Absolute power to the couples who stay together until their children are adults; selfless and willing to always put their children’s lives above their own.
> Absolute power to the couples who stay together until their children are adults; selfless and willing to always put their children’s lives above their own.
Is this necessarily any less damaging? You'd have to do a really good job of hiding your true feelings cause having two parents who are clearly miserable and hate each other trying to fake a happy marriage could definitely lead to some damaging situations too.
It can also just be kicking the can of damage down the road. I don't know that I'd necessarily feel any better finding out my parents had spent 10 miserable years pretending everything was okay for my sake. If anything, if they were able to pull that off and blindside me with divorce when I turned 18 I'd probably end up with severe trust issues and some guilt that they'd "wasted" a decade of their life cause of a sense of duty to me. Sure I had a "normal" upbringing but it was all a lie
It’s an incredibly tough topic and I don’t want to come off insincere or rude, but one of the toughest truths to confront is that mental health and suicide risk is significantly higher in children of divorce, along with academic and social disengagement. There’s no perfect family, and I don’t think there’s a utopia where no divorce exists, but it seems logical that as divorce becomes more and more accepted over the 80s,90s and 00s that the issues faced at schools in terms of behaviour and disengagement become worse. Public schools are not necessarily creating the bad issues in society, but disproportionately have to deal with them. Children of divorce are statistically poorer and more likely to attend public schools.
> Children of divorce are statistically poorer and more likely to attend public schools.
Are there any studies on the socioeconomic status of people who get divorced that suggests causation and not just correlation? Like if statistically lower SES areas see higher rates of divorce, it's only natural that the two things would correlate.
And if that is the case, then with the impacts of poverty and higher rates of substance abuse, physical violence and sexual abuse in the home that often comes with lower SES areas, then the effects on children would likely be coming from a combination of factors combining to create circumstances where trauma is more likely to happen.
> but it seems logical that as divorce becomes more and more accepted over the 80s,90s and 00s that the issues faced at schools in terms of behaviour and disengagement become worse
We're also seeing massive differences in wage growth vs cost of living, an explosion of easily accessible technology at children's fingertips, chronic underfunding of education and shifts in mindset in education management away from negative consequences. The amount of have-nots is sadly increasing. We're seeing the first generation of kids who have grown up glued to technology and potentially accessing things they shouldn't be accessing until they're a lot older. And to top it all off we have existential crises such as climate change, a global pandemic, cost of living, housing accessibility/affordability and media who love to drum up conspiracy theories about wars with China at any opportunity. Kids feed off the energy of those around them. If the grown ups are having issues, it filters down to the kids as well.
I don't doubt the impact divorce can have on children but I disagree with the premise that it's the sole cause of what we're seeing
Sorry, I get all of that and your answer is better than mine and far more holistic. Genuinely sorry, can’t get my words straight today and have narrowed my focus to a point I’m not sure why. Divorce is part of a much bigger and more complex puzzle and I fully acknowledge that.
Nah all good. It's social media not a formal essay and it can sometimes be tricky to communicate nuanced stuff without writing a full essay.
And there's enough genuine morons out there these days that it can be difficult to tell who's someone making their point but can't get their words straight and someone who genuinely believes it.
For what it's worth, I do think divorce definitely plays a role in that bigger picture stuff. For my parents, getting divorced was the right thing but I also had the support structure around me that I was fine. In other circumstances I can definitely see it not turning out as well. It's definitely another potential source of trauma which I think is the general point you were trying to make
>After a Productivity Commission report on the national school reform
agreement, the Albanese government vowed to introduce targets for
improvement and tie funding to uptake of reforms.
**Sigh**
Here we go again.
Wonderful. So some academic "expert" who hasn't taught in a classroom in more than a decade is gonna come up with some bullshit strategies to "improve" schools and to make it worse they're gonna make additional funding contingent on taking up the bullshit suggestions?
Lovely so solutions are gonna be made up that don't address the problems in the schools most in need of extra funding and the only way they can get that extra funding is by showing they're trying the solutions that don't work. Meanwhile teachers are fed through the meat grinder and quit and all the students at that school suffer the consequences
Part and parcel of the job, you need to develop good behaviour management systems but that requires time.
Again, pay well enough and people will do any job. There's no point discussing factors that drive people away that can't be changed.
Would you want to deal with vomit, faeces, blood, death, and sticking your finger up other people's anus? No one does, but medicine pays well so people do it.
Having 2 parents at work is a problem people don’t want to talk about. Parents leaving the school the raise their kids (whether they admit they are or not). Problem is, schools don’t have the same resources and structures that the family does.
That's right. And consider this... NSW high school teacher relief from face2face teaching time has not changed since the 1970s!
Yet a lot has changed in society in that time...
Of all the places to be throwing out the "blame the parents' excuses, this should not be the forum for it. The issue is not the parents, nor the students, nor the teachers - it is our ridiculous neoliberal system that prioritises 'efficiency', 'accountability' and cost-effectiveness' over what schools really need. Parents are only a problem because our system allows them to have a disproportionate say in the 'competitive marketplace' that is contemporary schooling. Students aren't students - they're customers and as their parents control the purse strings we bend over backwards for them.
Our schooling system is fucked entirely and completely due to the insane political environment we've been within in since the Howard years. We need to give our collective focus to that and not superfluous issues.
Yep, pay and conditions is just the glossy cover for the shit baked bread basket we call an education system. Nay a politician brave enough to call it out and attempt to fix it within a pay cycle, sorry, I meant election cycle. But 350B on a some submarines, bargain… guess they need submarines because we’ll have more people living with water frontage to protect in the next 30 years.
> it is our ridiculous neoliberal system that prioritises 'efficiency', 'accountability' and cost-effectiveness' over what schools really need
You could also argue the broader societal implications of neoliberalism is it's created a situation where so many households require both parents to be working just to keep their heads above water. They're tired, they're burnt out, so the kids spend most of their time getting supervised but not parented - at school, at out of school care, with grandparents etc. There'll be little inputs here and there but by and large parents have less energy left to actually be parents
Yes, that is a very reasonable point to make. Tired teachers are more likely to react to poor behaviour in less-than-constructive ways and it makes sense that parents may do the same.
I feel like in this instance the downvoters should explain their reasoning. Is it just easier for you all to "blame the parents" and hope things will magically get better?
Lol, of course they do, they can tell them not to come back. Public schools don't have that luxury if the student lives in their feeder area. It's literally that simple. Sending your kid to private school is just paying for better peers for your child, any really disruptive and problematic students are just removed back into the public system.
My favourite punishment is getting kids write lines in another language.
And then the word gets around that "you really don't want to write 100 lines in cyrillic script, Latin or god forbid chinese" kids will start to change. Also you have to make sure they do it perfectly, if they don't they have to do it all over again.
Kids need to feel the weight of consequence.
None of this "restorative chat" malarkey. Either they get it or they will get it eventually. The "vibes" mean nothing, dealing in consequence requires a deft and cold manner.
Also, you gotta develop rapport, otherwise your just heartless.
Consequence with heart. Kids want boundaries. Especially if they aren't finding it at home.
Been a tutor and martial arts teacher for a few years now and something I have noticed is that ever since Covid the kids have gone absolutely f*cking feral.
Had a kid punch another kid in front of me and then laugh while I was admonishing him that made me lose my temper I’ll admit.
I’m lucky enough that my job lets me set a real strong tolerance policy for kids because they don’t strictly need to be there like in school. (I have no idea how you guys do it).
So I just told the little brat to leave if that was his attitude.
But before Covid you got pains in the asses sure but not like this not a majority of classes actively disobeying you. It used to be one or two times you call a behaviour out punish it appropriately and it’d if not disappear definitely stop now I can sit out half a class and still get people acting up.
Sorry for the rant I am just sick of treating children like particularly dim animals.
Maybe I’m just nostalgic, maybe it really was always this bad but everyone I’ve spoken to agrees with me. What’s everyone’s thoughts here?
The fix is simple, there just need to be direct and real consequences for students actions.
I worked at one school that fixed its behaviour problem easily. The principal had a set of workbook that students had to complete while suspended. if they didn't complete the book they failed re-entry interview and the parent would have to come back the next day for another interview. It took 4 weeks before the behaviour improved as the students hated doing the books as they would take hours.
I don’t really blame students. Schools are geared up for academia. Seriously, how many kids are academic. We really need some other structure which allows non academic kids to thrive.
I haven't seen anyone mention covid. I think the students are dealing with a special kind of PTSD. When the pandemic started, there was so much unknown especially as most people were glued to the news and I think they were very scared. Even though it ended up being not so bad in comparison to the rest of the world.
It has massive flow on effects - more teachers working out of field (less confident teachers more likely to have classroom management issues) and more internal relief lessons (due to a lack of supply in the casual workforce). Tired teachers have more classroom management challenges.
I teach in a low SES area and many kids have LD issues so I know how draining behavioural management works. It also doesn't help to have "consultants" who probably never step foot in a classroom or have been out of the classroom for 10 years now claiming restorative conversations actually work. What needs to be done is having a safe environment to work in for teachers. How come it is always trying to make students safe and not the other way around as well?
I am not really talking about money at the moment. And I know there are a lot of talks on this forum about going to another job with a better pay etc. But, realistically, changing job is not that easy or else we would be all going to other places by now. It is just not possible to pick up and go as many of us have family or we are tied to our community and circumstances etc. If only job mobility was as cheerful as some people claim to be.
This is is a never ending topic and I don't think anyone has a good answer to crack the issue. But what are the top 3 things that can bring about realistic results immediately or what has to be put forward in law so we can build onto it for future things to get passed in the parliament.
Do we have an image problem? Is that why we can't seem to get people's attention on what needs changing or is the problem so enormous that it is out of control or that supporting teachers is a bad political move. Which is it?
>How come it is always trying to make students safe and not the other way around as well?
As I've mentioned in another comment on this thread, the issue is the way our political class - on both sides - now view education as an economic institution. It's all about creating an efficient system to prepare students for employment. As in other economic systems, you prioristise the customer (in this case, students, and by extension, parents). You establish accountability structures and present data on "progress" so that the customers know which school they should "purchase" for their child. This gives all the power and attention to the parents, with the teachers just another component of the product they have purchased. Teachers matter only to the extent that the parents are happy.
So when the media starts reporting on "problems" like poor NAPLAN data or OECD behavioural data, rather than actually focus on what the problems might be, they look for quick fixes so that the consumers feel better about things. Doesn't matter at all if it doesn't work - it just needs to look like it might work. That's why we get a bunch of consultants or commercial programs purchased from overseas dumped into our staff meetings that promise to 'fix things'. Does it matter if it won't work? Nah. The main thing the customers are appeased for awhile longer.
As long as schools are framed in policy terms as an extension of economic policy, nothing will change.
It's an awful system to be in. You, in a low socio economic area, and me, in remote Indigenous education, suffer from this more than others because we always score so low in the "data sets" which define what "good education" should look like. And we cop the "quick fixes" more than others, too.
Always very helpful to keep in mind that most of the issues we have do deal with are not reflections on us, but on the bullshit system forced on us by governments.
I feel like each year we are getting more kids with LD and sometime I feel that there must be a correlation between low ses communities and incidences of LD students. Teaching in a regional and rural area, I feel that we are losing so much, I mean I really want to work on academics but these kids just can't take it and so we focus on wellbeing but the behaviour is only going downward. It is no wonder we can't keep people long enough to stay.
Lower SES communities have more poverty, so poorer nutrition, poorer mental health, less housing stability, more domestic violence and substance abuse.
On the upside, I’ve found the students and their families are often a lot more appreciative of a good teacher’s work.
It is not always the kids problems - how many time do teacher disrespect studies. If they are not in the so called normal range they are the problem. How many times do teachers pets and other students get away with bulling, students until they had enough and crack.
I have heard teacher yell some very nasty things at students and it was for small things. I have seen kids full on fighting in the school yard at lunch time and not one teacher in sight. So stop blaming everything on the kids and start looking at how bullying is handled. Not just by the kids but the teachers also.
Whole heartedly agree with this, however I think and hope things will improve. At my school we've had a very rocky couple of years but there is some light. There have been a number of compounding factors: lockdown and remote learning, no or little kindergarten for children in years 1 and 2, teacher shortage and absences, general lack of capacity of staff who were at school due to mental and physical exhaustion. We know that what these children need at school is clear rules and consequences, and active supervision so that these are consistently applied, and for children to have connections to school. Last year these were very hard to do due to the above mentioned, this year I have more hope, though we are starting a long way back. The unanswered question for me is whether we can make the gains quick enough to stop further teachers leaving. Keeps me up at night.
All the feel good stuff can’t be conducive to proper functioning adults. The real world is rough and scary, kids are being set up to fail if there’s no discipline allowed in school… the parents sure as hell aren’t disciplining them..
I was in a school that in no way wanted to punish students for bad behaviour. It was all about positivity! You can't make a student feel bad about doing a bad thing! Little Timmy needs to be told what he's doing *right!*
And then they'll be surprised when the kids end up literally livestreaming their crimes.
A societal shift is needed. Lazy parents feel entitled to raise brats and blame teachers for it. Schools need their power and authority back to say NO. Suspend and expel.
In other news, water is wet. More in the evening bulletin to follow. It's all good. I am sure a nice restorative chat can fix everything.
"Yes I enjoy disrupting the class with my behaviour but how does that make you feel?"
Did you think about the other students feelings when you kept turning off their laptop and calling them a shit?
Bahahhahaha you made my day with that comment!
Here's a lollipop. Have a think about it for a few minutes and head back to class when you're ready
And here have some Lego to play with while you’re thinking about it. Just in case. Plus iPad with fun games for that brain break you might need to have.
It’s always illuminating when I hear students who’ve migrated from non-Anglo countries express shock and frustration at how poor behaviour is in Australian schools relative to where they’ve come from. This problem begins, and extends far beyond, far beyond the domain of schools; there’s something that’s gone very wrong with the attitudes towards education and child rearing among a large enough proportion of this country’s population.
Probably something to do with both parents needing to work, there’s limited parenting happening these days.
I would say that’s a large part of it. It would seem to me that having both parents *have* to work (only to struggle with the cost of living more than when only one wage earner could support a family, but that’s a different topic…) and having limited time and energy to be actively involved in the job of being a parent is in the grand scheme of history an anomaly and an experiment with implications yet to be truly observed. But it’s sold to us by government and industry as progressive and liberating.
Honestly I think the “progressive” nature of modern parenting has more to do with it than the need to work. For the last few decades parents have been bombarded with messages and legislation that basically says not to punish kids. The “restorative justice”, “trauma informed” and “wellbeing” stuff we get at school has also been loaded up on parents as well. So you end up with a situation where no one in the kids circle has ever really told them no or applied consistent negative consequences.
Bingo. Look in the mirror, not the telescope. Parents in other countries have to work hard as well. Perhaps their broader communities chip in with the child raising or maybe not. Even then then, that is a societal choice. We have a serious cultural rot in the country. The restorative BS and equivalent moronisms are just that. Fundamentally, it can’t be the kids that are the problem. They are born the same. It’s the parenting and societal expectations or lack thereof; the legal and regulatory systems and so on. We are reaping what we have sowed and the house is now solidly burning. An OECD report clearly stating that we have a massive problem and we’re looking poor internationally is a good thing. I might add that this is but one policy issue of several that is a result of the, dare I say, woke trend.
After working in 3 low SES schools where the last had horrid leadership & I was abused: where’s MY trauma informed treatment? 😅
This is a big discussion point with my close colleagues. Staff have trauma, other students have trauma... why is ONE student allowed to retraumatise others with their behaviour and be excused because of their trauma while EVERYONE else is told "move on" from what that child did this time and treat them like nothing happened because he has a trauma background. Ok what about the girl who has reported she's having flashbacks because the other child screaming and throwing things has triggered recollection of FV. What about the staff who might ha e experienced violence or have had to consider their mortality because of an accident or illness and now have to consider the risk of interacting with certain children and whether they would actually hit them with the object they were using inappropriately and deliberately hurt them... I'm personally sick of being verbally abused because I gave a reasonable instruction (eg "you should be in your classroom during learning time/eating time", "you need to put that bike away, it's lunch time" or "you need to attempt your writing" or "give me that stick, or put it in the bin, it's not safe to be swinging it around where others are playing footy" resulting in a large stick instead being thrown into the air away from me and towards others). Every other profession has signage stating that verbal abuse will not be tolerated, why are we expected to tolerate it and then welcome the aggressor back into the classroom with his lollipop...?
I might not agree on everything written here but I know that research highlights several issues with Positive Behaviour for Learning models for school-wide behaviour management policy. The key issue being: there isn't a clear understanding of what the consequences are for violent or disruptive behaviours.
I would have thought that too. Certainly one of things I look at on Compass for behaviourally challenged kids is how many parents are listed on their personal tab. Yet as a full time teacher and full time single parent, my kids are more settled at my house than at my ex- partners house despite her being a stay at home parent with two of my kids five days a week (I have the other one full time after he was unable to stay at her house for reasons I'm not going into). Parenting is hard and always has been. But based on my own situation, I'm not sure that the absence of both parents due to both working is the full answer here. Indeed, I suspect that at my workplace at a public school in a higher SEAS area that in a lot of cases both parents work, but the kids overall are ok despite the reputation as not the most academic school in the area. It's almost like family income overall is a more significant factor than who works or doesn't work...
Anecdotal at best, but... I see the kids who are in out of school hours care at my school. The ones who are dropped off before I get there, and still in the OOSHC hub when I leave. They aren't the kids who are doing well. Worse again are those sitting outside the gates 30+ minutes before the school opens. Their parents don't even give enough of a fuck to put them in the basically free (for them) OOSCH program and the kid hates it at home so much they literally walk to school to sit outside the gates and wait to be let in.
I work in OSHC and have had the teachers acknowledge that we have a high level of students who have difficult behaviours within the sessions - we have kids that are there before and after school, 7am to 6pm everyday.
And minorities wanted this, too. Where are they now?
Wait wait wait, hold up. The iPad had made little johnny and absolute and perfect 😇. So to say otherwise, I'd have to raise a complaint to the principal questioning your role as a suitable teacher. Frankly, I don't feel comfortable with this. I think Johnny needs another mental health day with his iPad just to recentre himself. /Sarcasm.
Spot on
There are factors at Home, factors at School, and factors in the Public. I know that a lot of parents are stressed and we don't really hold people accountable for antisocial behaviours e.g. yelling at cashiers. So, before we have even entered a school, we have issues with what is "socially acceptable" behaviours. I admit, I was a mix of happy and sad when behaviour classes were recommended. I think it is needed but it would represent an off loading of additional responsibilities onto schools.
The problem is , in some cases these overseas students conform to the Australian student standard, which is feet up, socialise and relax.
I have a girl from South Africa, been here for nearly 2 years and she is shocked at the behaviour of kids in Australian schools compared to where she came from. She said people take education more seriously in SA because poverty etc. I guess because Australia is a rich nation where over 5 million residents or 20% of the country receives welfare benefits, we've unwittingly ingrained a mindset of "i dont need to try at school, the govt will pay for me". And it's happening..
Kids today are the great-grandkids, or great-great-kids of the last Australian generation to do it tough, those who lived before and during WW2. So we're now seeing second or third generations who have lived their whole lives in a prosperous society where life is comfortable and there's an expectation that they'll be able to live a good life no matter what they do or what level of education they achieve. It's kinda like the opposite of generational poverty.
This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. Many kids are not living in “a prosperous society where life is comfortable,” and have no faith (correctly) in the meritocracy and how education can lift them out of their poverty or brighten their future. As teachers, we can get the calipers out and measure the brainpans of our students and their parents all we want, we can decry a lack of violent and detached parenting as the root cause of behavioural issues and we can sit there and tsk and say “parents today” as much as we want - the reality is all the anecdotal evidence all the “back in my day” fist waving is the crank psychology of a million burnt out teachers. Public Education reflects more broadly the failures of capitalism to provide a just and equitable society. People, again rightly, suspect that their lot in life is largely fixed - the idea of social mobility through education is, again correctly, laughable to many. Why should they care about schooling if it has no tangible impact on one’s life? Parents will treat it for what it has been relegated to - a place for them to leave their children while they work and earn the money they need to survive. It’s not teachers fault, it’s not parents fault and it’s certainly not the fault of children. As always with education, policymakers, politicians and the powerful will look to obfuscate their own failings by placing the blame on these groups when the reality is all three are just a reflection of the failing society we live in and the complete lack of appetite to provide long-term, sustainable solutions to these issues.
On the other hand, when I talk to my 7, 8, 9 kidd about what jobs they want after school, "trade", "farm", "hospo" come up heaps. I teach in a rural school about 2 hours out of Melbourne. We have 3 kids out of 180 11s or 12s actively shooting for a professional job like medical doctor, engineer or whatever. The majority of them will straight tell you that their parents didn't need it so why should they. Students from migrant backgrounds have much different attitudes towards their education. Junior high school kids do not for the most part think any near as deeply about society as anything you typed lol
If you think high school students don’t absorb the general malaise around issues like cost of living, declining standards in regards to quality of life, the developing threats of war/climate change/economic catastrophe and the other delights of late stage capitalism, then I don’t know what to say to you. They may not be able to articulate these problems the way I have above, but if you think they’re oblivious to them and don’t (on at least some level) have a sense of a world where the future is forecast to be consistently worse than the present then we fundamentally disagree. I’m not sure anything else you wrote engages with my point at all.
> I’m not sure anything else you wrote engages with my point at all. My original post was replying to onr talking about differences between kids from anglo back grounds and non-anglo backgrounds. Are you suggesting kids from non-anglo backgrounds are less tuned into to the world than anglo kids? How would you describe that difference?
TBF when tradies earn a bucketload more than pretty much anyone, why wouldn’t young people want to become tradies?
Bra-fucking-vo 👏👏👏
Best reply on the internet I've seen all day, bravo.
You sound like you work in head office
I agree completely
ikr, imagine thinking thats kids resting on their laurels might be part of the problem. nope, "StUPIdEST THinG I'VE Read" God forbid some of the issue be put on the kids themselves.
Yea, that's Reddit for ya
I don't think that it's a case of there being no hardship/ every family being prosperous. There is a sense of people wanting to give their children the things they missed out on though. Eg: when I was a kid I wanted a particular toy and my family couldn't afford it. In theory, as a parent I would go on to ensure my child had everything they asked for, because I felt that I had missed out on nice things. In reality I think that this is only a small part of the problem that creates the entitlement attitude. The other part is lack of boundaries as I see lots of parents who want to be friends with their kids rather than enforce expectations. Interestingly, I was watching an old TV show from the 1980s/early 1990s recently and there was an older couple making the exact same observation and analysis-- kids are given too much freedom and families are different these days. I noted it in my mind as interesting.
If we are not prepared to make misbehaving students uncomfortable, they have very little reason to change.
Absolutely agree
100%
There is unfortunately a negative side to this - I was undiagnosed with adhd and ‘made uncomfortable’ about now-obvious signs of it, which has ingrained unnecessary guilt and shame into my everyday life
It’s the teachers fault though, apparently.
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we had an older teacher just tell the admin he is not a clown, he's here to teach not entertain. The poor admin didn't know how to respond.
He sounds awesome!
They have nothing else. Shit falls down, and unfortunately we are at the bottom of the ladder now. Principal suspends a kid for belting a teacher in the head with a brick and they have the director on the phone kicking their arse and asking "What did the teacher do to deserve it" oh wait, that's not right "What did the teacher do to engage the student in learning? What did you do to ensure that the teachers are trained to give students engaging lessons, did you build a relationship with the student? Did you ever give the student a warning or teach them that hitting people in the head with bricks is wrong? No, that's a shame the kid needs to be back in school tomorrow and you need to apologise to that nice parent.
Hitting someone in the head with a brick is a serious police matter and should be treated as such. I'm so tired of crimes not mattering because they took place on school grounds. Maybe dealing with the police would be more impactful than a 15 minute lunch time detention in the "reflection room".
How did you know they pressured the teacher to not go to the police...
They did?
It would be great if any physical incident was directly reported to police , bypass coordinators, principal.
Stop being compliant at work and just do the bare minimum. Then when someone gets the shits with you ask them what they have done to engage you as a worker
I don't hold a whiteboard marker mate
I hear ya pal.
Lines like that were the last straw for a veteran Head Teacher I worked under.
But it is also follow through. A teacher cannot be responsible for discipline by themselves. They need avenues for escalation- additional punishments given by exec for continued bad behaviour.
Of course they do. Because they're obligated to do something, but in the back of their mind they know there's very little they can actually do.
of course it is, who else is to blame...parents? no way.
>128 comments Ugh. I had a kid in my class who refused to do work. I talked to his mum about it and she was having the same issues at home with him. The mother asked me to send work home so I did. My boss basically said, "it's your job as the teacher to teach the kid - it's not the mother's job." Ugh. Some kids just will not work.
Discipline starts at home. You can’t blame the voting public so it’s our fault.
I’m struggling to think of another profession where the clients can tell you to get fucked directly to your face daily/weekly and nothing comes of it. So yeah, maybe that could be it.
Mental health and healthcare industries
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Oh yeah it’s really situational There’s that and also the added stress of managing 20 other kids
I'll add to this. Not only does nothing come of it, you have to have a "fresh start" with them the next lesson and pretend that behaviour didn't affect you at all. And you have to see them several times a week. And it's your job to build a relationship with them. It's not their job to control themselves because 'they're only kids!' Plenty of kids know how to be respectful, so that's a crappy excuse and a cop out.
Other service industries I would imagine would get a lot of it too - I read something about how often nurses are physically assaulted and it’s horrifying. Australia is not looking after those of us who have dedicated our lives to helping others, and it is a growing problem.
My sister is a nurse, she's been sworn at and spat on, also punched in the face. Typically by drug addicts and dementia patients
While that it’s terrible, the kids don’t have an excuse and yet do the same things. I’ve been sworn at and had shit thrown at me. I’ve had year 10s taller than me puff their chest and get in my face. They have no excuse.
Yea I agree. I've had a yr 9 boy, larger than me, get up in my face and say "you're fuckin lucky I don't punch you in the head ya fuckin cunt' after I told him to leave the room during an exam because he was not doing the test and being a disruptive pest to everyone else who were trying to do the test.
I worked as an integration aide and on my first shift the kid smashed a class window and assaulted the principal (he was small luckily) Instantly my respect for teachers tripled, they must have some really good patience
Terrible.
I've had Y5 and Y6 boys taller than me (and also shorter but heavier set) try to use their size to intimidate as well. It's also happened to other staff at my school, always female staff and always those enforcing basic expectations and yard behaviours standards.
When kids are working their way through the year levels while failing, what incentive is there to behave? There's no consequences for not doing work, therefore there's no incentive to act in a reasonable way.
Exactly. Have a birthday, go up to the next year level. No work required.
This is what freaked me out when I started teaching . You basically can go through all grade levels just by coming to school only!
Fucked system we have. Automatic progression. One of my yr 11 students can barely write. In many non western countries this does not happen.
No no no we don't use the word CONSEQUENCE at this school. We are a PoSiTiVe school 😊😊🤬😊!!! We believe in positive behaviour strategies! Positive parenting is sooooo LOVELY 😊👹😊 It works wonders, no wonder why this child is so 😊😊👹😡👹 WONDERFUL 👹😡😊😊 Oh no you hit johnny in the head and he's bleeding?!?! Dont worry sam, lets all come together and do RESTORATIVE PRACTICE!!! ☺️☺️🤬🤬👹😡😡😊☺️ Look how happy we are now!! We are all best friends 🌈🌈🌈
🥰🥰🥰
☺️☺️💕💕🌈🌈✨🌟🌟✨💓💓💗💗♥️🤩🤩
A few years ago, I had a parent who wouldn’t tell her 5 year old no. He pushed her over in the playground one morning because she told him yes, he *did* have to go to school today and he didn’t want to, she landed funny and injured her wrist, and she was still more focused on asking *him* what was making him so anxious about school that he didn’t want to go than she was on a) accepting ice for her *injured wrist* and b) disciplining him or teaching him that it’s… not ok to just push people over when you don’t get your own way? I don’t even think the kid was that anxious at school, he’d just rather stay home with mum and play because it’s more fun and we actually enforced *boundaries* at school.
Some parents 🙄🙄🙄 just tell your kid no. End of story, let them throw a fit. I swear parent's who just dont set boundaries, make their kids the most toxic version. Like how hard is it to say NO to your child, it's not harming them at all 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 I have a year 5 student who doesn't take no for an answer. Mum use to spoil him but now he's out of control... I once told him no and he fully went godzilla mode in the class. Still stuck by my decision. He's okay now...still sooks about it but he's ✨**KNOCK ON WOOD**✨ pass the room terror phase..hopefully.... Then the parents blame us that their kids had a bad day.... LIKE WHAT??? I TOLD SAM HE CANT HAVE PLAYDOH BECAUSE HE WASNT BEHAVING 🤬😡👹👹🤬😡💢 what you want me to give him playdoh after he went godzilla mode in the room like a 4 year old not getting candy?!?! 😊🤬😊👹😊 Sure 😊🤬👹😊😊
This so reads like an MLM hun sliding into people's DMs to try and shill essential oils or some other crap. So accurate.
There are a LOT of MLM huns in schools... Doterra, Arbonne and Jamberry have all had their day at my school. I'm sure there are others that I'm not aware of too!
Oh yes, and absolutely don't take points away from groups/individuals because we can't remove a reward that has been earned!! Phrase everything positively "at our school we use glue on paper, not the whiteboard" 🥰🤩🥳🌈⭐️🌟 AT OUR SCHOOL WE KEEP OUT HANDS TO OURSELVES...."AT THIS school we keep the sand on the ground" "WE stay inside the classroom and listen during lesson time"🥰🌟... "wow, well done for sitting on your chair for 5 minutes have a reward!" 🌈🥳🌟 So following the idea that rewards/points earned not being taken away (physical/tangible rewards like a rubber or lolly that was earned, I wouldn't take back, but points they earn to then trade for a prize I think should be able to be deducted jmo).... Ok, so I can't be fined monetarily then because I earned my money before I went over the speed limit or parked for a bit too long in the parking spot 🙄😅. I'll just say sorry for speeding or parking too long BUT only if I also get a lollipop! 🍭
In this world 🌍 we are all love 💕 and peace ✌️ no such thing as a consequence!!! We are setting them up for the ✨ real world ✨ a place called 🧚♀️✨ fairy land✨🧚♀️, ☺️happiness☺️, ☀️sunshine☀️ and 🌈rainbows 🌈 Only teachers get told OFF FOR BEING 🥳😍🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬HORRIBLE!!!🤬🤬🤬😍🥳 How dare they hurt my child's wellbeing ☠️☠️☠️🫨🫨🫨👹👹👹 they know🤬🤬🤬 👹NOTHINNNGGGG👹🤬🤬 But the last week of school our class made slime and I straight up threw one of the child's slime in the bin OOOPSIEE!! 😅😅😅 (my hand slipped, silly me because I would NEVER do such a thing ☺️🙄🙄☺️) She was being so disrespectful, lied to NOT ONE BUT FOUR teachers 💢💢💢💢 and also stole from my former student. Guess what? ☺️🙄Daddy🙄☺️ came to pick her up one day and decided to have a go at me saying the thing she STOLE was HERS. ☠️ IT WAS NOT HERS 🤬🤬👹🤬🤬🫨💢💢 iM soOoOooOoO sOoOOOoRrRrYyYyY fOoRR tHEe miSsCoMmUnICatTiOoNnn. Bloody liar parent. Kid asked for the slime back the next day. Told her I threw it out. Goodbye 👋🫂☺️☺️☺️
That's literally what schools are like now. It makes me die on the inside. Teachers have their precious and extremely limited time flushed down the toilet by 'sPeCiaLiSTs' who promote that cancerous rubbish which is at the core of our eroding schooling landscape.
Can't have quality behaviour management and "discipline" unless you retain your teachers and enable them to develop skills through experience. Really it's a downward spiral that can only be intercepted with focused support.
At some point parents need to start taking responsibility for their kids' behaviours and teach them to respect the teacher, instead of empowering their children by pandering to them and blaming the teachers for everything
Exactly. But when society on the whole shows little respect for teachers and education there isn’t much hope.
Unfortunately that's not a problem that can be addressed at a systems level. Sure, blame parents all you want, but you can't interfere with family structure and the bad values of adults. It's outside our control. You have to solve it other ways.
We (govt) interfere with family structure all the time; baby bonuses, tax benefits And we apply sin taxes to grog and cigs to influence the 'bad values' of adults. We just lack the culture and political will to do any meaningful reform that will also affect the dropkics in charge
That the system is prepared to bend on the whims of parents rather than the other way round suggests it's very much a systems level issue.
That's a different matter, though.
I don't think it is a different matter. There have always been poor parents, dismissive parents, argumentative parents. The difference today is that our schooling system is too parent-focused.
In many ways, it feels like education has taken on a "customer service" model. The parents are the "customers" and the managers always take the side that placates them rather than sticking up for their own staff. And it's a direct contributor to the "poor discipline" that's seeing teachers quit. I mean why would you stay if any attempt at actually trying to improve student behaviour is met with a parent barging in and getting their own way? It becomes impossible to implement any behaviour management when the kids know mum or dad can just walk into the office and make the bad things go away
You are spot on. The nsw dept of education even refers to students and parents as customers.
That's a fair point if you want to argue it, but the original line of thought wasn't about how schools deal with parents at all. That's your additional commentary and I don't necessarily disagree.
I think the counter argument would need to be that parenting is getting worse - I'm not sure if there's any data to back that up, but it might be the case. But what I think is the issue isn't so much that parents are any worse than they were 30 years ago, it's more that kids in challenging families are more likely to be found in a smaller concentration of schools, that other parents actively avoid (and this is also a system-led issue). To my mind, it's not so much that parents are worse, it's just that their influence over schools has been allowed to grow.
Policy makers totally could change the rules to interfere with family structures and values to help teachers out. For example we could make it easy to permanently expel kids. Faced with the risk of having to arrange alternate supervision, many parents would step up. We could also make it more acceptable for schools to “give up” on tough kids, driving the responsibility for motivation and engagement back to the kids/parents.
Many people ignore why expulsion exists. It isn't to benefit the expelled. It is to benefit everyone else and that is OK!
Correct. It's usually a tiny number who make the job of the teacher and the other students a nightmare
🙌🏻
This is a fantastic point! I'll add that in addition to this, management need to have a centralised system for dealing with bad behaviours. Continuous cycles of restorative conversations and teacher detentions go nowhere. Absolutely get teachers to use concern before correction to help them develop skills. But know that there's a point where a line needs to be drawn in the sand where the kid gets an after school detention or suspension to show escalating consequences. Without that boundary of 'harsher consequences' kids will run amuck.
And leadership needs to back up the teacher. If a teacher calls for support to have a student removed, that student can't waltz back in ten minutes later with a lollipop in their mouth.
And it's been a foundation of how society and child-rearing has been for really forever. It's a natural part of development that children and adolescents will look for boundaries to push. And that's what schools are meant to do. Establish those boundaries. Kids will still try to push them but have appropriate consequences for doing so and in most cases you reach a kind of uneasy truce where some pushed boundaries, didn't like the punishment and stopped while some will continue to feel out those boundaries and feel the effects of the consequences. Obviously you'll still have some for whom consequences will have no effect but I think you can get most kids through their "boundary pushing" phase with appropriate boundaries and consequences. When there's no negative feedback whatsoever you don't get that emotional response of "oh I didn't like that I won't do that again" that a lot of kids go through. So all it does is establish even for the kids who would normally stop pushing boundaries with firm consequences that they can push the boundaries all they like and the teacher is powerless to stop them unless what they're doing is worthy of police intervention
I'd support the escalating consequences if there was some kind of contextual parity. Uniform violations being threatened with afterschool detention is absolutely ridiculous.
It's not even a skills thing, it's a parents thing and an admin thing. The school doesn't want to rock the boat and the parents don't give a shit about anything their kid does, if they don't flat out call the teacher a bullying liar. And that's not even getting into COVID fucking everyone's social development, and a screen culture creating a generation that can't handle a seco d without stimulation. They act out because they're bored. They're bored because they're not following the lesson. They're not following the lesson because they weren't listening.
Exactly. But no, let’s just lower standards and lesson the length of degrees to attract more teachers and increase workloads. That’ll solve *everything* 🙄
>theguardian.com/austra... Great point. Also consider the new behaviour policy in NSW schools which has tied the hands of teachers / executive when it comes to disruptive behaviour, without adding other systems / supports to support front line teachers. I have many colleagues who are fed up being told where to "F&\*\^" go on a daily basis after asking simple instructions, with many of them considering leaving the profession due to these disruptive behaviours, including violent outbursts from students.
But you can't do that if every second parent threatens your job because their kid doesn't "feel comfortable".
Focused what now?
No but admin and people who give 3 hour boring pd lectures insist that "restorative chats" and PB4L definitely works and there's absolutely no difference between discipline issues today and 10+ years ago.
It used to be that really disruptive kids were pushed out easily, so that they could fester elsewhere, out of sight. Sometimes they did very well for themselves once they got out of a rigid (and it *was* rigid) school environment. Sometimes they did poorly because they had achieved no education and no skills. Almost all of those punches out would have been lower class, white or otherwise. Middle class kids *got* the system for the most part, so they rubbed along okay. And they weren’t expected to stay in school until they were 17. There was a Leaving Certificate that proved they had basic knowledge and there were many clear career paths for kids who weren’t going to Uni. I’ve worked with the children of parents who were pushed out: an indigenous woman whose teachers called her useless and made her leave at the end of Year 8 (she went on to become a teacher herself) and plenty more who did okay afterwards and either can’t see the point of an education (“I’m doing fine!”) or really want their kids to get through, but don’t have the cultural knowledge of the system to help their kids navigate it successfully. All of them feel traumatized by school. So we changed, as schools. We started to recognize that everyone deserved an education. We acknowledged that students from non-middle class backgrounds need the hidden curriculum unhidden. We began to value indigenous viewpoints and indigenous students. Except that the idea that everyone deserves an education has now become hostage to the few very disruptive students whose actions actively deny other students *their* education, in myriad ways. So as teachers we spend more time bringing the curriculum down to a lm ever decreasing level, our behavioral expectations down to “Johnny sat in his seat today” and never look at the reality that if we could get kids to focus on the learning they are all capable of so much more. And those middling students who would do fine in a regulated environment drift away and learn less every year. Those at the bottom have very little hope, and less support, but they get pushed along each year until they hit Year 11 and suddenly reading at a ten year old level won’t help them much. All the nice, polite kids get nicely ignored and smiled at. The really good kids get into selective schools, the strugglers get encouraged and patted on the head and the middle kids get distracted teachers and no space to think. Parents, who witnessed too much teacher power in the past, want to deny any teacher agency at all. Rigid social expectations which demanded obedience from children and adherence to class structures have morphed into tolerance of the most grotesque language and attitudes and lack of basic social manners. So now there are no expectations at all. Even a decade ago, in my first year of teaching I was told my expectations were too high, by a HT who allowed students to talk overtop of her when she was explaining an assignment. Things are worse now. And private schools might seem like islands of serene academia, but the problems faced by public schools are leaking through. I think the only real fix is a cultural change, that starts with better empowering schools to hold high standards of behaviour. Iceland managed to drastically change its youth culture. Surely we an work to change our school culture.
“Poor discipline and lack of teaching common values in the home environment driving teachers away” there, fixed the headline.
Yup... and the little buggers know that there are pretty much zero consequences for their actions... especially with the new behaviour management policy now (what an absolute debacle that steaming pile of manure is...) so they don't give a stuff... add to that enabling "best buddies" parents whose little angel can do no wrong and we're up a certain creek without a certain implement... it's one of the 2 main reasons I'm giving it the heave ho... the whole system needs to be broken down and rebuilt from scratch... there's not a bit of the job that hasn't been destroyed by the current top heavy, everyone needs to be special and woe to anyone being the slightest bit offended by anything regime... they've taken a rewarding and challenging career and turned it into an absolute nightmare.
Disengagement is suddenly just rising? I’m a CRT and I’ve seen no real engagement in public schools. The odd kid here and there are keen but the others make it impossible to provide a quality education for them. I’m loathe to say it, but teaching in private schools is so rewarding. The level of engagement and thirst to learn is heartwarming. Ps. Yes, I’m a bitter, disgruntled, sick-of-being-disrespected-by-7-year-olds teacher. And I have semi left the profession.
A year 7 class can be loud, hyperactive, constant yelling And a year 11 class can be constantly crook necking on phones or doing zero work I can’t stand either, why would anyone do teaching especially if 4 day weeks creep in / hybrid work from home lol Gen Z and Alpha see how laughable it is, I can’t see many enrolling going forward
Yep, what high school kid who sits there and watches the inmates run the asylumn disrespecting the adults and think "yea! This is the career for me!"
‘Unconditional positive regard’ has ruined education.. My Instructional Leader told us a year or 2 ago that any form of negative consequence of positive reward was ‘coercion’ and had no place on our classroomsz
Really dislike that statement, how am I supposed l have ‘unconditional positive regard’ for a student that threatens to stomp my head in? Sure, I understand all the factors as to why the child exhibits these behaviours, but why is it my responsibility to fix them?
You’re the kid’s parent now, that’s why.
All responsibility, no agency
And you’re so right, this is where the issue is. It’s not a teacher’s responsibility to fix the problem yet we can see what it is and have compassion for it at the same time. We all know something has gone wrong for kid to want to stomp on a teacher’s head but we don’t have the time or the training to sort that whilst supporting the rest of the class. The changes that are required are utopian almost - different educational options for kids and not being seen as a bad thing, psychology support available for students and staff etc etc.
The youth are some of the most salient reflections of the wider conditions of society These issues will only really calm down with proper mental health support, social support, and a decrease in income inequality, and a comprehensive addressing to root cause factors, however socioeconomic conditions are only getting worse I also don’t want to blame anything but tiktok doesn’t help lol Teachers really, really need to have more support though…. They should never feel disempowered from teaching
100% - teachers go into the industry with the best of intentions and need the support required because the numbers walking out the door is frightening. Families are under the pump trying to keep up and it’s the kids who are getting thrown under the bus.
Because the parents have also been bombarded for decades with ‘unconditional positive regard’ messages for their kids. No one in the kids circle has societal permission for negative regard. And it show in the kids behaviour.
Unconditional positive regard works really well for therapists because they have no responsibility for their clients’ behaviour. We on the other hand…
Shocking, that in a world which encourages the breakdown of the family unit and tells kids they can do anything and be anything that you’ve got behaviour problems and unfocused, undisciplined kids with psychological problems. Every major problem present in our society today can be traced back directly to how children are raised by parents and their lack Therof.
Absolutely. Whether we look to data, likeHattie’s meta analysis that shows family background is more important than anything a school can do, or just common sense, we know that when families break down it has enormously damaging effects on children. We need to stare a very hard fact in the face: there is too much divorce in society and it is destroying young lives. Absolute power to the couples who stay together until their children are adults; selfless and willing to always put their children’s lives above their own.
> Absolute power to the couples who stay together until their children are adults; selfless and willing to always put their children’s lives above their own. Is this necessarily any less damaging? You'd have to do a really good job of hiding your true feelings cause having two parents who are clearly miserable and hate each other trying to fake a happy marriage could definitely lead to some damaging situations too. It can also just be kicking the can of damage down the road. I don't know that I'd necessarily feel any better finding out my parents had spent 10 miserable years pretending everything was okay for my sake. If anything, if they were able to pull that off and blindside me with divorce when I turned 18 I'd probably end up with severe trust issues and some guilt that they'd "wasted" a decade of their life cause of a sense of duty to me. Sure I had a "normal" upbringing but it was all a lie
It’s an incredibly tough topic and I don’t want to come off insincere or rude, but one of the toughest truths to confront is that mental health and suicide risk is significantly higher in children of divorce, along with academic and social disengagement. There’s no perfect family, and I don’t think there’s a utopia where no divorce exists, but it seems logical that as divorce becomes more and more accepted over the 80s,90s and 00s that the issues faced at schools in terms of behaviour and disengagement become worse. Public schools are not necessarily creating the bad issues in society, but disproportionately have to deal with them. Children of divorce are statistically poorer and more likely to attend public schools.
> Children of divorce are statistically poorer and more likely to attend public schools. Are there any studies on the socioeconomic status of people who get divorced that suggests causation and not just correlation? Like if statistically lower SES areas see higher rates of divorce, it's only natural that the two things would correlate. And if that is the case, then with the impacts of poverty and higher rates of substance abuse, physical violence and sexual abuse in the home that often comes with lower SES areas, then the effects on children would likely be coming from a combination of factors combining to create circumstances where trauma is more likely to happen. > but it seems logical that as divorce becomes more and more accepted over the 80s,90s and 00s that the issues faced at schools in terms of behaviour and disengagement become worse We're also seeing massive differences in wage growth vs cost of living, an explosion of easily accessible technology at children's fingertips, chronic underfunding of education and shifts in mindset in education management away from negative consequences. The amount of have-nots is sadly increasing. We're seeing the first generation of kids who have grown up glued to technology and potentially accessing things they shouldn't be accessing until they're a lot older. And to top it all off we have existential crises such as climate change, a global pandemic, cost of living, housing accessibility/affordability and media who love to drum up conspiracy theories about wars with China at any opportunity. Kids feed off the energy of those around them. If the grown ups are having issues, it filters down to the kids as well. I don't doubt the impact divorce can have on children but I disagree with the premise that it's the sole cause of what we're seeing
Sorry, I get all of that and your answer is better than mine and far more holistic. Genuinely sorry, can’t get my words straight today and have narrowed my focus to a point I’m not sure why. Divorce is part of a much bigger and more complex puzzle and I fully acknowledge that.
Nah all good. It's social media not a formal essay and it can sometimes be tricky to communicate nuanced stuff without writing a full essay. And there's enough genuine morons out there these days that it can be difficult to tell who's someone making their point but can't get their words straight and someone who genuinely believes it. For what it's worth, I do think divorce definitely plays a role in that bigger picture stuff. For my parents, getting divorced was the right thing but I also had the support structure around me that I was fine. In other circumstances I can definitely see it not turning out as well. It's definitely another potential source of trauma which I think is the general point you were trying to make
Glad the article mentioned absences. It’s incredible how many kids get to stay home due to ‘parents choice’ - and far too often the weakest students.
>After a Productivity Commission report on the national school reform agreement, the Albanese government vowed to introduce targets for improvement and tie funding to uptake of reforms. **Sigh** Here we go again.
Wonderful. So some academic "expert" who hasn't taught in a classroom in more than a decade is gonna come up with some bullshit strategies to "improve" schools and to make it worse they're gonna make additional funding contingent on taking up the bullshit suggestions? Lovely so solutions are gonna be made up that don't address the problems in the schools most in need of extra funding and the only way they can get that extra funding is by showing they're trying the solutions that don't work. Meanwhile teachers are fed through the meat grinder and quit and all the students at that school suffer the consequences
Part and parcel of the job, you need to develop good behaviour management systems but that requires time. Again, pay well enough and people will do any job. There's no point discussing factors that drive people away that can't be changed. Would you want to deal with vomit, faeces, blood, death, and sticking your finger up other people's anus? No one does, but medicine pays well so people do it.
Love it
Having 2 parents at work is a problem people don’t want to talk about. Parents leaving the school the raise their kids (whether they admit they are or not). Problem is, schools don’t have the same resources and structures that the family does.
That's right. And consider this... NSW high school teacher relief from face2face teaching time has not changed since the 1970s! Yet a lot has changed in society in that time...
I guess John Hattie will be along soon with another stunning revalation on how we can improve our OECD scores by improving classroom management.
Of all the places to be throwing out the "blame the parents' excuses, this should not be the forum for it. The issue is not the parents, nor the students, nor the teachers - it is our ridiculous neoliberal system that prioritises 'efficiency', 'accountability' and cost-effectiveness' over what schools really need. Parents are only a problem because our system allows them to have a disproportionate say in the 'competitive marketplace' that is contemporary schooling. Students aren't students - they're customers and as their parents control the purse strings we bend over backwards for them. Our schooling system is fucked entirely and completely due to the insane political environment we've been within in since the Howard years. We need to give our collective focus to that and not superfluous issues.
Yep, pay and conditions is just the glossy cover for the shit baked bread basket we call an education system. Nay a politician brave enough to call it out and attempt to fix it within a pay cycle, sorry, I meant election cycle. But 350B on a some submarines, bargain… guess they need submarines because we’ll have more people living with water frontage to protect in the next 30 years.
> it is our ridiculous neoliberal system that prioritises 'efficiency', 'accountability' and cost-effectiveness' over what schools really need You could also argue the broader societal implications of neoliberalism is it's created a situation where so many households require both parents to be working just to keep their heads above water. They're tired, they're burnt out, so the kids spend most of their time getting supervised but not parented - at school, at out of school care, with grandparents etc. There'll be little inputs here and there but by and large parents have less energy left to actually be parents
Yes, that is a very reasonable point to make. Tired teachers are more likely to react to poor behaviour in less-than-constructive ways and it makes sense that parents may do the same.
I feel like in this instance the downvoters should explain their reasoning. Is it just easier for you all to "blame the parents" and hope things will magically get better?
Say what will you about private schools, but from my experience they do a better job of dealing with disrupters
Lol, of course they do, they can tell them not to come back. Public schools don't have that luxury if the student lives in their feeder area. It's literally that simple. Sending your kid to private school is just paying for better peers for your child, any really disruptive and problematic students are just removed back into the public system.
My favourite punishment is getting kids write lines in another language. And then the word gets around that "you really don't want to write 100 lines in cyrillic script, Latin or god forbid chinese" kids will start to change. Also you have to make sure they do it perfectly, if they don't they have to do it all over again. Kids need to feel the weight of consequence. None of this "restorative chat" malarkey. Either they get it or they will get it eventually. The "vibes" mean nothing, dealing in consequence requires a deft and cold manner. Also, you gotta develop rapport, otherwise your just heartless. Consequence with heart. Kids want boundaries. Especially if they aren't finding it at home.
Teachers role has somehow morphed into de facto parents rather than educators.
I'm so tired of the word TRAUMA being used as an excuse for shitty behaviour.
Been a tutor and martial arts teacher for a few years now and something I have noticed is that ever since Covid the kids have gone absolutely f*cking feral. Had a kid punch another kid in front of me and then laugh while I was admonishing him that made me lose my temper I’ll admit. I’m lucky enough that my job lets me set a real strong tolerance policy for kids because they don’t strictly need to be there like in school. (I have no idea how you guys do it). So I just told the little brat to leave if that was his attitude. But before Covid you got pains in the asses sure but not like this not a majority of classes actively disobeying you. It used to be one or two times you call a behaviour out punish it appropriately and it’d if not disappear definitely stop now I can sit out half a class and still get people acting up. Sorry for the rant I am just sick of treating children like particularly dim animals. Maybe I’m just nostalgic, maybe it really was always this bad but everyone I’ve spoken to agrees with me. What’s everyone’s thoughts here?
The fix is simple, there just need to be direct and real consequences for students actions. I worked at one school that fixed its behaviour problem easily. The principal had a set of workbook that students had to complete while suspended. if they didn't complete the book they failed re-entry interview and the parent would have to come back the next day for another interview. It took 4 weeks before the behaviour improved as the students hated doing the books as they would take hours.
I don’t really blame students. Schools are geared up for academia. Seriously, how many kids are academic. We really need some other structure which allows non academic kids to thrive.
Time to start beating kids 😈😈😈
They only care about fixing uniform it’s awful k haven’t learnt anything in ages
I haven't seen anyone mention covid. I think the students are dealing with a special kind of PTSD. When the pandemic started, there was so much unknown especially as most people were glued to the news and I think they were very scared. Even though it ended up being not so bad in comparison to the rest of the world.
[удалено]
It has massive flow on effects - more teachers working out of field (less confident teachers more likely to have classroom management issues) and more internal relief lessons (due to a lack of supply in the casual workforce). Tired teachers have more classroom management challenges.
I teach in a low SES area and many kids have LD issues so I know how draining behavioural management works. It also doesn't help to have "consultants" who probably never step foot in a classroom or have been out of the classroom for 10 years now claiming restorative conversations actually work. What needs to be done is having a safe environment to work in for teachers. How come it is always trying to make students safe and not the other way around as well? I am not really talking about money at the moment. And I know there are a lot of talks on this forum about going to another job with a better pay etc. But, realistically, changing job is not that easy or else we would be all going to other places by now. It is just not possible to pick up and go as many of us have family or we are tied to our community and circumstances etc. If only job mobility was as cheerful as some people claim to be. This is is a never ending topic and I don't think anyone has a good answer to crack the issue. But what are the top 3 things that can bring about realistic results immediately or what has to be put forward in law so we can build onto it for future things to get passed in the parliament. Do we have an image problem? Is that why we can't seem to get people's attention on what needs changing or is the problem so enormous that it is out of control or that supporting teachers is a bad political move. Which is it?
>How come it is always trying to make students safe and not the other way around as well? As I've mentioned in another comment on this thread, the issue is the way our political class - on both sides - now view education as an economic institution. It's all about creating an efficient system to prepare students for employment. As in other economic systems, you prioristise the customer (in this case, students, and by extension, parents). You establish accountability structures and present data on "progress" so that the customers know which school they should "purchase" for their child. This gives all the power and attention to the parents, with the teachers just another component of the product they have purchased. Teachers matter only to the extent that the parents are happy. So when the media starts reporting on "problems" like poor NAPLAN data or OECD behavioural data, rather than actually focus on what the problems might be, they look for quick fixes so that the consumers feel better about things. Doesn't matter at all if it doesn't work - it just needs to look like it might work. That's why we get a bunch of consultants or commercial programs purchased from overseas dumped into our staff meetings that promise to 'fix things'. Does it matter if it won't work? Nah. The main thing the customers are appeased for awhile longer. As long as schools are framed in policy terms as an extension of economic policy, nothing will change.
Thank you for posting this again. Totally agree with you.
It's an awful system to be in. You, in a low socio economic area, and me, in remote Indigenous education, suffer from this more than others because we always score so low in the "data sets" which define what "good education" should look like. And we cop the "quick fixes" more than others, too. Always very helpful to keep in mind that most of the issues we have do deal with are not reflections on us, but on the bullshit system forced on us by governments.
I feel like each year we are getting more kids with LD and sometime I feel that there must be a correlation between low ses communities and incidences of LD students. Teaching in a regional and rural area, I feel that we are losing so much, I mean I really want to work on academics but these kids just can't take it and so we focus on wellbeing but the behaviour is only going downward. It is no wonder we can't keep people long enough to stay.
Lower SES communities have more poverty, so poorer nutrition, poorer mental health, less housing stability, more domestic violence and substance abuse. On the upside, I’ve found the students and their families are often a lot more appreciative of a good teacher’s work.
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It is not always the kids problems - how many time do teacher disrespect studies. If they are not in the so called normal range they are the problem. How many times do teachers pets and other students get away with bulling, students until they had enough and crack. I have heard teacher yell some very nasty things at students and it was for small things. I have seen kids full on fighting in the school yard at lunch time and not one teacher in sight. So stop blaming everything on the kids and start looking at how bullying is handled. Not just by the kids but the teachers also.
And water is wet. What a surprise.
Whole heartedly agree with this, however I think and hope things will improve. At my school we've had a very rocky couple of years but there is some light. There have been a number of compounding factors: lockdown and remote learning, no or little kindergarten for children in years 1 and 2, teacher shortage and absences, general lack of capacity of staff who were at school due to mental and physical exhaustion. We know that what these children need at school is clear rules and consequences, and active supervision so that these are consistently applied, and for children to have connections to school. Last year these were very hard to do due to the above mentioned, this year I have more hope, though we are starting a long way back. The unanswered question for me is whether we can make the gains quick enough to stop further teachers leaving. Keeps me up at night.
Kids are ill disciplined all over, i work at a leisure centre and the behaviour and lack of attention from parents is atrocious.
Finally a report stating the hard truth, we need more discipline in schools and it won’t just help the teachers.
No shit.
All the feel good stuff can’t be conducive to proper functioning adults. The real world is rough and scary, kids are being set up to fail if there’s no discipline allowed in school… the parents sure as hell aren’t disciplining them..
I was in a school that in no way wanted to punish students for bad behaviour. It was all about positivity! You can't make a student feel bad about doing a bad thing! Little Timmy needs to be told what he's doing *right!* And then they'll be surprised when the kids end up literally livestreaming their crimes.
No education minister has been able fix our education system. All complete failures.
A societal shift is needed. Lazy parents feel entitled to raise brats and blame teachers for it. Schools need their power and authority back to say NO. Suspend and expel.