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[jg]

Well, so long after my inital post, I am now subbing in a city near L.A., working class/kinda thuggish town - March thus far at the high school:

Race riots at the evening talent show, several students slightly injured. One student compains to me that another is bringing crack to school and sniffing (?) it in his classes. Another student was smashed in the head with a bat at a fast food restaurant across the street from the main entrance. Lone Asian student in one of my classes is consistently called "Chino" and belittled - due in no small part to his being kind of geeky and ethnic but not Latino; no, he isn't Chinese. Student nursery seems to be operating at capacity: there are more girls with babies than braces, I'd wager. There seems to be a seperate class for many of the gay male students with the most "feminine" behavior. Students are being encouraged to attend career days sponsored by institutions specializing in such life-affirming "talents" as hair and nail care, or certified nursing assistants. UCLA? Stanford? Ha!

Today there were threats of another race riot, and the Police Department was rounding up kids for questioning about the baseball bat incident. There aren't metal detectors just yet, but we do have closed campus, since there was a girl who was shot - in the head - during a driveby at lunchtime several years ago. I usually remember to let the kids know I speak Spanish at the start of any class, just so they (on the assumption that I cannot understand) don't say anything I might have to hold them accountable for.

I have no illusions that this school is in any way particularly bad, its just... pathetic that this is what education in the U.S. has come to. I'm no old codger either, and I went to public schools in the inner-city myself. But damn! This is hellish. There are good days: those are soaked in the fear of what might lurk around the corner.

And I do mean it: dispiriting in varied and intense ways.

[guest of Japan]

I've been in my fair share of schools and it sounds like a pretty bad one to me.

[ls650]

Geez, that does sound terrible. Hopefully you can use this job to leapfrog to something better soon...

[rusmeister]

I ultimately left my public teaching career in part because of that kind of stuff. I could've stayed to 'make a difference', but the laws and rules and the system itself generally prevent people from making that difference.

A society that has no sense of agreement on what is right or wrong, that says, 'do whatever you want to do' is inevitably going to be chaotic and ultimately anarchic. Public schools are the worst because we confine kids all day in mini-prisons in the company of only kids of exactly their own age in large numbers. Because of the lack of agreement on right and wrong (something that usually comes from some kind of faith or religion) teachers are forbidden to, uh, teach morality.

Try reading John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of Education (free online) for a fairly accurate picture of how this has come to pass.

[neveah]

[rusmeister]

[comenius]

Wow, just reading this gave me flashbacks to a year I spent at a particularly tough high school in Istanbul. It wasn't nearly as bad as what you reported, though!

[choctawmicmac]

Most public schools with discipline problems are the ones where, if you are the teacher and you actually want to "make a difference" and try to actually teach something the powers that be refuse to let you. For example: in all of this disruptive behaviour, if a student tries to sexually assault me, and I successfully fight him off me then it's his word against mine in a lawsuit against ME. For assaulting HIM. Not for defending myself against rape. That would be my counter-suit in which I would have to prove that was his intent. Even though I am the teacher and he is the student, there still is this assumption in society that I, the teacher, must have "asked for it," or provoked that kind of attention from male students simply by my being there.

That's the kind of thing that kept happening to me as a teacher, or a would-be teacher. (As a teacher-aide and student-teacher, and substitute teacher). That's the kind of thing that drives all decent, intelligent, otherwise commited female would-be teachers, into either other professions or into insane asylums.

The most insulting part is the very idea that I "must have wanted it." I get told a lot that I "don't look like a Math teacher" and then hit on and sexually harrassed or worse. How is someone supposed to take all of that?! I don't meet too many other women in my situation: Native American, female, Math or Science majors, and have attempted to teach junior high or high school Math or science.

[mex2005t]

The USA is in the process of privatizing its public schools through the backdoor of making them unbearable for anyone