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ORIGINAL: jlf1961

Well, there is juvenile detention.

Or there is always expulsion. You cant teach someone that is not wanting to learn.

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ORIGINAL: myotherself

~FR~

I'd like to add my two penn'orth here. I'm a teacher in an inner city school. I chose to work in a school where the kids come from deprived backgrounds, because I love the joy that helping a child succeed brings me. I'm also from a similar background, so I understand how important a good education is to these children.

However the school I'm in is about the same (in terms of size, type of students, etc) as the school the teacher the OP mentioned was in. Every day I'm verbally abused by kids I don't even know. 'Fat cunt'...'ugly bitch'...'fucking slag'...as I walk down the corridor. In the classroom, it's taken best part of a year to get my classes settled to the point I can actually teach them.  THIS is horrific, and teacher abuse!

This is not down to my lack of classroom discipline - it's a school-wide problem.  I insist on good manners and good learning in my classroom. I spend hours every evening preparing interesting lessons that engage the kids. Most of them appreciate it, but there are those who are so undisciplined they wreck every lesson they can. I can use every trick in my arsenal to get the kids to focus, and I have succeeded with some real hard cases. I also involve parents/carers with the more difficult students, hand out detentions if necessary (great for getting one on one time with a student and build up a relationship)

But some are just not suited to the big school learning environment. They have no control over their emotions or their fists. They will hit each other, and staff, and scream obscenities. I can remove the student and give a detention. I can call parents in. But if the kid doesn't come to detention or the parents refuse to come in, it's up to the leadership team to take on the case. In my school, they won't. I suspect in that other teacher's school it's something similar.

So in my school, kids know full well that they can run pretty much riot and there's not a damn thing that happens. Verbal abuse reports (I file a dozen or so a day) are ignored. I have reported over 20 cases of physical assault on me or my students since September. Four of those (on me) have actually resulted in a 5 or 15 day 'exclusion', and the violent kid is back in my room, and I'm left to cope with them and 20+ other kids. I have been physically assaulted 6 times since september. Proper assaults - had a door kicked into my face. Pushed over by a girl I asked to sit down. Tripped up by a boy who thought it would be funny. Each assault resulted in me being bruised, or bleeding.
 
This is horrific! You are being abused!  If you hit one of them back, you will end up in jail.

Two months or so ago I was deliberately and violently pushed over by a 16 year old student and broke my arm. I spent 4 weeks on the sick in a plaster cast, and actually spent the night before my return to school throwing up with stress. On my return NOTHING had changed. The kid wasn't excluded - they just found him another school because exclusions make the school look bad.  Why in heaven did you come back? You should have gone out on disability {nervous breakdown}.
Don't get me wrong - I love my job. I think the majority of my kids are truly fantastic young people, and the world is lucky to have them in it. Many/if not MOST of the kids are good, it's the rotten apples that can make your life a living hell. I also think that a good 10% of students at my school need special needs support. I think most of the teachers deserve support in dealing with difficult classes, if only for their own health - physical and mental. But most of all, I think those in charge of schools like mine need to understand that doing nothing is giving some kids carte blanche to act like savages and destroy lives and careers.

After eight months of this kind of treatment I'm looking for a new job. I'm letting down my fantastic students to protect my own physical and emotional wellbeing, so that I don't end up as a news story...

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ORIGINAL: LadyEllen

The high school I went to was pretty rough, well stocked with the upcoming generation of neer do wells, petty criminals and armed robbers. But we were streamed according to ability - as one might expect, I was in the top class of the top stream; the only student there whose parents were not 4-bed detached, prestige German car middle class.

Now, one might have expected a good standard of discipline and behaviour from these other students in my class, if its all about abusive households, poor environments and being at the lower end of the social stratum that promotes the opposite. But no. What I found was that these classmates of mine were, if anything, far worse than those elsewhere in the school who by now, some 25 years later, have made various appearances in the crime reports.

For when it came to bullying others and abusing the staff, it was their very intelligence and their understanding of psychology, alongside their presumed nature, that made them the best at it. I suffered through years of it, what with being quiet and unassuming and lacking the financial means they had access to through their parents to do this or that, wear this or that, go here or there.

But their crowning glory was the physics teacher - a highly intelligent and well qualified man who had been teaching for about 20 years when this lot came along. They planned, that is deliberately and knowingly set out to give him a nervous breakdown, and executed this plan purposively and in concert - because it would be "funny". And they succeeded. One day he refused to come into the class and could be seen weeping in the next door preparation room. When the lab assistant came into the room to tell us she'd be taking the lesson that day - there was no one else after all - they laughed, knowing that they had achieved their aim. He was off work for several months then, and then retired, aged I would guess about my age now, 25 years early, in 1983.
Sad story, it's a wonder he didn't go ballistic on their asses.
I am sure this is only one story, out of thousands.
But we rarely here this side of the story, do we, matey?
Oh, the poor, poor misunderstood children!
 
Teacher abuse is real and widespread, and we just don't hear enough about it.
Thanks for sharing Lady E.

They all passed physics. They all later got their university degrees. And now theyre all, like their parents before them 4-bed detached, prestige German car middle class.

E

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However, if it is the law that at 10 years of age a child is considered capable of committing crime and ought to face justice, how is it that children may commit a range of criminal offences in school and get away with them with no criminal sanction? Is the schoolground an outlaw region over which lawful authority has no jurisdiction? How then to explain teachers facing arrest for the slightest transgression?