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Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

adamcadre.ac

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Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#671

Post by [deleted] »

adamredwoods wrote: post #141
rahimnathwani wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an effort underway to recall members of the SFBOE: https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions. Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentio…

I am baffled why they are doing a recall? According to the site, the main reason states because their kids have not gone back to school. To me, that's not a good enough reason for a recall (recalls cost money). Public schools are under state and county health guidance.

[deleted]

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#672

Post by pjerem »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #662
pjerem wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learn to behave in class. Who’s the job to teach those kids how to behave in class ? Their parents ? And what do you do if their parents don’t care (which is the common case with those kids) ? What do you do if the student has undiagnosed mental illness ? Entire generations of misbehaved children were in fact suffering ADHD. How do you manage a misbehaving children that is bullied every single morning when he comes…

Someone has to be there for that kid to say 'shut up and study'. Failing that, disruptive student is a drag on the rest. I am sympathetic to the thought process behind it but the end results are hard to argue with.

I agree. But if their parents are not able to say « shut up and study », it should be the role of the public power to say it, even if it means transferring them into specialized schools, but letting them aside of the road should never be an acceptable option, because it will hurt them and it hurts the society (by making up future criminals and spreading wrong values)

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#673

Post by ganzuul »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #655
chongli wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wrinkle in this discussion is the inevitable march of technology. It’s simply a lot more difficult to make a valuable contribution to society today than it was a few decades ago. It takes a lot more education and specialized training to gain the skills that put oneself in demand. The idea that we can push water uphill, and bring the most struggling students up above an ever-rising bar, is becoming a controversial…

The logical conclusion of this thought process is a question of what to do with laggards and I do not see it being addressed. Ignoring it is not a real option.

Please don't label people as laggards. It is dehumanizing. They could be your lost identical twin who had a chemical accident at a young age and never got the opportunity to develop properly.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#674

Post by pjerem »

Khaine wrote: post #573
pjerem wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learn to behave in class. Who’s the job to teach those kids how to behave in class ? Their parents ? And what do you do if their parents don’t care (which is the common case with those kids) ? What do you do if the student has undiagnosed mental illness ? Entire generations of misbehaved children were in fact suffering ADHD. How do you manage a misbehaving children that is bullied every single morning when he comes…

The problem is keeping those kids in school ruins the education of all of the kids in that class. How is it fair to damage the potential of so many kids, because one kid is disruptive, and their parents don’t care.

The options here are not binary. There are other possibilities than keeping them ruining the class or abandoning them.

A lot of countries have dedicated schools for those children, so they damage nothing around them and can be treated individually. And in lot of cases, since it requires removing them from families where their problems comes, it’s a breadth of fresh air for them.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#675

Post by ganzuul »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #606
ganzuul wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct, but there are going to be cases where the help should come in the form of UBI or NIT. Otherwise people on the unfortunate end of the ability spectrum are going to have to get gainful employment somehow. We should definitely take care of them as a society built on solidarity, but we can be efficient about it too.

> take care of them It sounds like you want to just pay people to stay alive without helping them to gain the skills necessary to make that life worthwhile to themselves. Before we try to be efficient we need to agree on what we are being efficient about.

The unfortunate truth about IQ is that the distribution is on both sides of the mean. Some people are unteachable, but it sounds like you want to ignore the inconvenient.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#676

Post by dntrkv »

candiodari wrote: post #658
throwaway210222 wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0% should be wasted on the incorrigible. And yes, they exist.

Even the incorrigible will perform (much) better given 1-on-1 instruction. Less kids per teacher yields better results. The problem is that performance is exponential. That same 1-on-1 instruction will take a well performing kid to "surgeon". It will take the incorrigible ... maybe ... to only quit school at 10th grade. Which does directly translate to money for the school these days. What teachers/schools also effec…

Many of these difficult kids are legit toxic to everyone around them. They make life hell for other students and any of the faculty that dares interact with them.

At my school of ~2,000 I'd say at any given moment there would be at least 30 of these kids (they didn't last long). They were violent. They hit teachers. They were regularly dragged out of classes by police officers. After a few of these interactions, they would be transferred to the problem child school. Our school actually had some great teachers that really cared about the students, but many of these kids were broken. Their home lives were just horrid. Most ended up in juvie and later jail.

Those were the worst of the bunch, but a good 20% of the school was beyond help. Daily fights, constant police presence, tons of kids brought weapons to school, lots of theft, vandalism every day, I could go on... That school was a nightmare, and it wasn't even the worst one in the city.

Point is, there is nowhere near enough teachers and resources to fix these broken kids. Their broken homes are what need to be fixed.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#677

Post by chmod600 »

duped wrote: post #669
chmod600 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"school as the institution taking care of those kids" But that's the question, right? Are schools facilities for education, or for taking care of kids? The format is reasonable for education, but not for complete rearing of children. When children, for whatever reason, are not being raised effectively, a classroom is not going to do a great job with education.

Both. The public school system goes behind education because it's the only state service where most children can be reached. They're crucially important for providing food security and shelter to millions of children whose parents can't or won't.

Aren't those goals in tension? Isn't that a big part of the problem?

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#678

Post by dntrkv »

Lammy wrote: post #388
muyuu wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people cannot opt out of the DMV and I hear it's still garbage for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is…

> for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions This is by design, sadly, because the "wrong people" might benefit from them. But hey we have MLK Day and Juneteenth now so we fixed racism :)))))

Yes, the California DMV is a shit hole because republicans want to keep black people down. Makes total sense.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#679

Post by [deleted] »

adamredwoods wrote: post #141
rahimnathwani wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an effort underway to recall members of the SFBOE: https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions. Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentio…

I am baffled why they are doing a recall? According to the site, the main reason states because their kids have not gone back to school. To me, that's not a good enough reason for a recall (recalls cost money). Public schools are under state and county health guidance.

[deleted]

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#680

Post by [deleted] »

mmarq wrote: post #222
lubujackson wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of narrow thinking is what has caused schools in SF to suck for everyone. Because Lowell doesn't exist in a vacuum and the arguments that privileged people have a leg up doesn't really make a difference - it is similar logic to burning libraries because some folks can't read. So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send y…

> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries. > So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are n…

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