Monday 11 April 2011

Looking Down From The Ivory Tower…

Alexander Chancellor on the Derwent School strike:
For teachers to go on strike because their pupils are badly behaved is rather like policemen striking because there are criminals about; or priests doing so because they have to deal with sinners; or me doing so because my Jack Russell barks at the postman. We are all in positions of care in which bad behaviour is something we are expected to deal with.
And that, Alexander, is the problem.

A problem entirely created by the progressives and their utterly ruinous policies,
The teachers say the phones they confiscate get returned by the management to the pupils, leaving them feeling "totally undermined". Well, the reports don't say how quickly they are returned, but the phones are presumably the pupils' property and must be returned some time. Why not make a rule saying they may not bring them to school?
Perhaps because they aren’t obeying the rules that are supposed to stop them ‘swearing at teachers, assaulting them, and making malicious allegations’, so why would they obey this new rule?
It sounds to me as if the school is suffering from chronic uncertainty about how to enforce discipline.
It sounds to me as if you might find it more useful to get down from your ivory tower, go into a few schools and see just what sort of generation your preferred policies have bred.

And continue to breed…

7 comments:

Macheath said...

'me doing so because my Jack Russell barks at the postman'

A revealing analogy - surely it is entirely the owner's responsibility to ensure the animal is properly trained.

Teachers, on the other hand, have to deal every day with the results of other people's mishandling of child-rearing.

Interestingly, I recently asked a francophone friend how she would describe an ill-mannered, badly-behaved pupil; her definite response was 'mal-élevé' - badly brought-up - thereby placing the responsibility firmly where it belongs.

Anonymouslemming said...

I really don't understand why anyone would be a teacher any more. I've seen acquaintances with bruises where kids have thrown things at them or pushed them into doors. Why would you go to a job to be assaulted, let alone have false allegations of sexual misconduct made against you.

And of course, in the long run, this will only lead to a situation where good people don't go into teaching. That will be to the detriment of all of us.

Back when I still volunteered with children, I saw time and again parents who could not believe that their little Johnny or Janey could ever misbehave. It was always someone else's fault. I can't imagine being forced to be around such monsters all day, every day.

The fact that these teachers are just striking is a credit to them. I would have quit and gone and flipped burgers by now.

Anonymous said...

Undermined? Lol!

I had a pupil who refused to take his stupid, IQ-lowering woolly hat off in class, so I invited him to go with me to see the management and clarify the position.

The student was backed, leaving me looking pretty stupid. He could wear it in class, and continued to do so. But I understood that the college really didn't care about my view of behaviour. I was just a teacher but he was, gasp, a student!

Of course, the day will come when he stops being a student and then I expect down at the job centre they will admire his woolly hat.

English Viking said...

Why do schools have 'management?

Brian, follower of Deornoth said...

So let me get this right: the NUT are going on strike to protest against the obvious and predictable consequences of the cretinous ideology they've been shoving down our throats for the last thirty years?

JuliaM said...

"A revealing analogy - surely it is entirely the owner's responsibility to ensure the animal is properly trained."

He's not really one for introspection, is Alexander...

"The fact that these teachers are just striking is a credit to them. I would have quit and gone and flipped burgers by now."

Indeed. But as Brian points out, it's purely the barmy educational policies they have supported for so long that's lead to most of this in the first place.

"Of course, the day will come when he stops being a student and then I expect down at the job centre they will admire his woolly hat."

:D

"Why do schools have 'management?"

All part of bringing business terminology into them, to try to make it look like they are run on business lines. Of course, they aren't.

Anonymous said...

Evil bugger that I am, I'd be tempted to set up a few fake phone base-station units to which the kiddies' handsets would pair up, then find themselves unable to make calls (GSM technology does not deal with the problem of the base station being a fake, because this is illegal and thus cannot happen).

Having done so, there is little reason to confiscate phones, as they would be useless as comms devices in schools.

On a related note, since we are building a lot of new schools, might it not be a good idea to "protect young people from the damaging effects of electromagnetic radiation" by building heavy shielding into the school walls and roof, which would incidentally block all mobile phone signals? Other useful tricks are to only install windows where the bottom panes are frosted, thus preventing the little darlings gawping out of the window in class...