I and all my classmates had walking distance to school - almost all of us without having to cross a road. It was very common at that age to walk to school alone, thus being responsible for being on time as long as we were sent out at an appropriate time.
One of my siblings actually got repeatedly in trouble because my parents weren’t dropping her off early. This was in elementary school. Some of the buses didn’t even get there by the time she wanted them there (10 minutes before the morning bell rang). The school ‘solved’ the situation by moving my sister to a different class. Which I guess did solve it for my sister, but I still have no idea how the school decided that was a normal thing to tell children 10 and under to do??
Just because you are a piece of shit excuse for a human being, doesn’t mean those wanting to teach the next generation are. Quite the opposite in fact.
Which kind of idiot says that to an elementary student? That incredibly dumb.
A teacher that actually needs to run a classroom.
When you have 30 kids in your class and 50 minutes to teach a 90 minute lesson, you have to do triage. There simply isn’t time to litigate every single excuse a student may have for being late. Some will be the kid’s responsibility, some not. Teachers don’t have the time to call up parents and hold a detailed conversation or to investigate every excuse.
Instead, you just mark the kid absent or tardy. Then make sure the penalties for absences or tardies are light enough that a few won’t hurt them. If they get to the point of actually having disciplinary consequences for their tardies, at that point you can start having discussions with parents to see if something the parents are doing is causing the kids to be late.
What’s that saying about having all the accountability but none of the agency?
Side note: triaging doesn’t really imply a mandate for action. A teacher can make a note to follow up or mark a tardy slip without verbally repremanding the child on the spot.
To elaborate, I’ve consistently noticed a blind spot in lemmy when it comes to teachers and education. There is always a consistent failure to recognize the hard limits of available resources. The common wisdom here seems to be that a local tax base can support an unlimited amount of education spending, and that any problem in education can be solved by throwing more money at the problem. “Just hire more teachers” is the lazy zero-thought solution trotted out to any issue in education. I think it comes from lemmy’s left-leaning politics. Which is fine. But even socialists need to understand the concept of opportunity cost. Even if the economy was entirely state run, there are still hard limits on available resources.
There seems to be a great inability to recognize that teachers are actual human beings working very real jobs. And every time you tell a teacher, “the solution is to hire more teachers,” you are betraying the actual teachers. Because the teachers know they have to actually work around real-world limits in resources. And every time you tell a teacher, “just hire more teachers,” you’re indicating you are not seriously attempting to address the real challenges and limits of education. (I realize you didn’t explicitly say it, but your comment implies that resources are infinite.)
One thing teachers have to do is to design their classroom instruction and policies around the real limits of available resources, and that includes time. Often times you will deliberately write policies to require little investigation, simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day. For example, your suggestion was to follow-up after class, but that’s still time the teacher will have to spend litigating every excuse. If there’s five students late in each class, and you teach six classes, and it’s five minutes each? That’s two and a half hours of phone calls, just for one day’s tardies!
That obviously wasn’t the part I was responding to. There’s more than one point floating around this discussion. No need to take the bad faith approach and assume I’m responding to the blame issue. No need to be rude.
There’s no need to shame students. But I’m talking specifically about why schools have policies like this. Often you need to design policies so that blame isn’t assigned. Instead of litigating every late homework assignment, you except X number of late homeworks. Or you simply accept none and give opportunities for extra credit.
Teachers often have to design policies so that they don’t need to do a bunch of litigation. Instead you have blameless policies and simply have enough buffer that a few negative occurrences that aren’t the kid’s fault won’t affect their grade.
No, you definitely responded to them saying “Which kind of idiot says that to an elementary student? That incredibly dumb.” by describing them as “A teacher that actually needs to run a classroom”.
I don’t know what kind of classroom you’re running but I certainly didn’t feel any need to blame a child for their parent dropping them off late.
You’re too focused on blame and responsibility. When a teacher says, “it’s your responsibility,” they’re saying, “ultimately, in life, you are the one who will have to deal with the outcome. You need to plan for the unexpected.” It’s not a statement of moral responsibility. It’s saying, “one way or another, it’s your responsibility to be here.”
If a parent is consistently dropping a kid off late, the student needs to reach out to the teacher about that. The teacher can then have a discussion with the parents.
You solve conundrums like this by getting away from the blame mentality. We’re talking about K12 students being late for class, not people being indicted for felonies. We don’t need to obsess so much over guilt and innocence or whether once absence is the parent’s fault or the student’s fault.
Do you not see the disconnect between saying others need to move away from the blame mentality while actively defending blaming the kid? Why would the teacher not be able to independently recognise the pattern of lateness and need a literal 7 year old to point it out? What help could a teacher even offer beyond a report to social services?
How, as specifically as possible, is 7 year old meant to ensure their own timeliness when they have almost no legal control over their actions?
That obviously wasn’t the part I was responding to.
Then what were you responding to. The comment you responded to literally only said one thing, about talking to a child. So yeah, that is what you were responding to.
There’s more than one point floating around this discussion. No need to take the bad faith approach and assume I’m responding to the blame issue. No need to be rude.
No there wasn’t. You were the one that brought up everything else. The only thing being discussed was talking shit to a child.
But I’m talking specifically about why schools have policies like this.
Policies like what!?!? Blaming children?
Often you need to design policies so that blame isn’t assigned.
They asked who would say that to a kid. And I said any teacher that needs to run an actual classroom. Then I explained why so many teachers have policies like this.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with telling a kid, “sorry, I can’t dig into every excuse for every tardy and late homework. You get three free tardies and three free late homeworks. It’s ultimately your responsibility, and for unpredictable accidents, you’re covered.”
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with instructing students that they are ultimately responsible for their actions. There will be times in life where they simply have to be at a certain place and certain time.
You need to remember ALL the children in front of you. Spending ten minutes arguing with one student about an absence is 10 minutes stolen from every student in that classroom.
You should have the education required to both define the word ‘rude’, and use it with nuance. It’s a bad look for an educator to use semantics to weasel out of their responsibilities.
Keeping your mouth shut regarding your opinion about the rationale for a specific tardy instance, costs you zero minutes, and allows you to go back to your resource management game, earlier.
Without a single repercussion to your process, because as you already previously mentioned, it is simple too much to expect of you to address any of them until the consequences of serial tardiness/truancy come into effect.
Your children must be respectful to you. They have not yet signed the social contract.
I owe you no such thing and am already being exceedingly more cordial than I believe your blasé approach towards your effect upon the psyche of your wards merits.
I do not need to make an appeal to authority, to back my statements up. But yes.
And in the areas that have to later mitigate the damages done by those who earlier in the chain decided burn out and struggle justified their neglect and abuse.
Details thereof which shall remain undisclosed, because, again, I do not need to make an appeal to authority here. It’s simple humanity.
So your life is tough. It’s not an excuse, or their fault.
I get that teachers are under so much pressure that it may sometimes not be possible to do their jobs while also treating students in a way that is fair and honest, but to me that’s one sign among many that there is something deeply wrong with the whole institution, and not something that should be just accepted.
Again. This is the type of blind spot I see on Lemmy. There’s always a failure to recognize real world limits. The fact that education needs to work within limited resources is not some horrible flaw in its design. It’s simply how every institution mankind has ever or will ever create has to operate within limits. You have to design any institution around its material limits. That doesn’t mean there’s something deeply wrong with education. It means that those that expect schools to have infinite resources are simply delusional.
So is your position that stuff like what is described by OOP is a necessary and worthwhile tradeoff for the smooth operation of a school? Or maybe that it isn’t a bad thing at all?
I think it can be phrased better. But the core policy is perfectly fine. Often you can’t spend class time arguing with every student about every absence. Instead, you tell them, “sorry, it’s your responsibility to be here on time. I realize accidents happen, that’s why you get a certain number of free tardies, so the accidents don’t hurt you.”
It’s a perfectly fine way to run a classroom. You don’t try and figure out whether the student is truly responsible for a small number of absences. Give them three free tardies. When shit happens, they’re covered. But it saves your from having to argue with 16 year olds about every single absence and tardy. If a student goals over the limit, then you can actually put in the time to see if their excuses are valid.
Smooth operation of a school is not some minor thing to be dismissed. Every minute in class spent arguing about absence excuses is a minute taken from the instruction of every other student in the class.
Smooth operation of a school is not some minor thing to be dismissed
That’s fair, but the benefits of bureaucracy do not negate the ways that it is dehumanizing, even if they happen to outweigh them. The inability of individual bureaucrats to do anything about it also doesn’t negate that.
I’m obviously talking about education in general. Again, obviously it started with a discussion of elementary school, but it’s a pretty bad-faith take to assume someone doesn’t know how elementary school instruction is handled.
Depending on whether or not there’s punishment, I might be somewhat OK with this. The whole point of school is to prepare kids for adult life, where your boss may not care why you were late, even if the circumstances were completely out of your control.
That’s why I said it depends on whether or not there’s an actual punishment involved. If it’s just a finger wag and a calm “you need to be on time”, I’m not concerned. If the kid’s actually getting in trouble, with associated punishment, then that’s definitely not OK.
Part of life is learning to prepare for the unexpected. A lot of people are frequently late through a combination of circumstances and their own poor preparation. Random events will happen. You will hit an unpredictable traffic snarl. If you plan your schedule with zero margin, then you are failing to plan properly.
This is honestly a very important lesson for kids to learn. If they have a traffic ticket, and they get a court summons, they damn well better be in court, prepared, at the appropriate hour. The judge isn’t going to want to hear your excuse why you’re late. Unless you’re in the hospital, the judge is going to issue a warrant for your arrest. You can shout this is unfair til you’re red in the face, but there are simply times in life where not being on time has very real consequences.
A similar harshness exists for job interviews. If you’re late, forget it. It’s simply your responsibility to plan for the unexpected.
Sure, sometimes people are late purely due to circumstances. Sometimes you’re subject to large unpredictable delays. If a family member needs to be rushed to the hospital, that’s hours you’re going to lose with no way to predict it.
But 99% of the time when people are late, they’re late due to the ordinary everyday hurdles that should simply be planned for. Traffic is not a valid excuse for showing up 10 minutes late. For something important, you should just have a margin that large built into your schedule. Shit happens. And at some point, failing to plan for random but completely expected delays is your fault, not the fault of circumstance.
Everything you are saying in this thread is the exact opposite of what child care experts say. It’s like you went and thought “hmm all these scientists are wrong, so I’ll say the exact opposite”.
Based on the number of adults I’ve met who think that nothing is their fault ever, kids need to at least be introduced to the concept of personal responsibility even in situations not completely in their control.
Planning for predictable but random events is part of your responsibility.
There are many random circumstances that can make a person late. Some are a person’s responsibility to plan for. Some aren’t.
Consider minor traffic delays. If you’re 10 minutes late because of traffic, that’s not traffic’s fault. That’s your fault. A 10 minute traffic delay is not a rare occurrence. You simply shouldn’t be operating your schedule with so little margin that a ten minute delay will make you late to something important. If you don’t have some margin in your schedule, this is entirely your fault. You built a schedule that only works if absolutely everything goes perfectly right, and then you blamed circumstance when the inevitable happens.
Then there are some delays that it’s not reasonable to expect people to plan for. If you’re hours late because you had to rush a family member to a hospital, that’s not your fault. That’s a legitimate emergency. And it’s not reasonable for people to build multi-hour buffers into their daily schedule.
I’m late for work all the time, my value isn’t that it’s my capability to do my job.
Similarly, the kids are responsible for LEARNING. being driven to school late doesn’t matter until that is impacted, and when it does it’s the issue for the caregivers, not the student.
Ok. Instead of just criticizing, what’s your solution? Don’t say just throw more money at the problem or hire more teachers. Pretend you’re the teacher. If you tell the principal, “just hire more teachers,” you’ll be laughed at to your face.
So, what is your solution?
You going to investigate every tardy? Every kid will say it’s not their fault. Some will be telling the truth. Some will be lying. How do you separate the two? Do you call the parents to verify the excuse?
How quickly can you do that? Can you perform a mini disciplinary investigation in five minutes? Let’s assume you can. Well you have 30 students in each class and five of them are late. And you teach six classes. So you have 30 tardies you need to investigate, 5 minutes each. You’ve just signed yourself up for two and a half hours of phone calls to parents. And many you’ll have to call several times, as they work their own jobs and aren’t available at the drop of a hat.
So what exactly is your solution? It’s easy to criticize. But if you’re going to criticize, you should propose your own solution, if even just to indicate you have any idea what you are talking about.
It’s not a teacher’s job to do any of this, because of the problems you stated. Even the smallest schools have some kind of administrator, typically waaaaaaaay too many because administrative bloat is academia’s favorite activity. It is 100% a school administrator/secretary’s job to call parents when kids have a tardiness issue.
What isn’t acceptable is just being shitty to children because life isn’t fair. Thats just abuser behavior.
Again, notice the assumption of infinite resources. You assume that these resources always exist, and that those resources aren’t being used for something else. You fail to recognize opportunity cost.
Someone is going to have to spend 2.5 hours calling all those parents. Whether it’s the teacher or someone in the office staff is immaterial. And that someone could be doing other things, like helping a teacher out with instructional duties. If you have 30 classrooms in a school, that means your office will be making 75 hours of calls to parents every single day. You’ll need to hire ten people just to call all the parents. Do you really think the best we can do with our scarce education dollars is to pay ten people to do nothing but call and investigate tardy excuses?
Having anyone spend that much time litigating every tardy excuse simply isn’t a very good use of tax dollars. There are better things to spend money on that will do more to help kids. Far better to just have a certain number of excused absences and not have to worry about investigating every single excuse.
What isn’t acceptable is just being shitty to children because life isn’t fair. Thats just abuser behavior.
It’s a perfectly fair system. You have a certain number of free absences, free late homework assignments, etc. This way if shit happens, students can have a few ooopsies without it affecting their grades. Instead of litigating every incident, you just give a certain number of freebies.
This is a perfectly fair system. It’s not being shitty to kids. It’s just deliberately designing a system so you don’t always have to assign blame.
Which kind of idiot says that to an elementary student? That incredibly dumb.
I and all my classmates had walking distance to school - almost all of us without having to cross a road. It was very common at that age to walk to school alone, thus being responsible for being on time as long as we were sent out at an appropriate time.
I grew up in Europe.
One of my siblings actually got repeatedly in trouble because my parents weren’t dropping her off early. This was in elementary school. Some of the buses didn’t even get there by the time she wanted them there (10 minutes before the morning bell rang). The school ‘solved’ the situation by moving my sister to a different class. Which I guess did solve it for my sister, but I still have no idea how the school decided that was a normal thing to tell children 10 and under to do??
Elementary school teachers are often children themselves.
We aren’t so lucky.
Children that age have a very sharp sense of fairness and cause/effect relation. They sort their issues out if allowed to.
The adults in that role most often take it either for the social prestige or because they couldn’t get anything better.
Oh, so that’s a common thing and it wasn’t just the mentally unstable morons at my elementary school? I’m not even surprised tbh.
Oh, it was definitely the mentally unstable morons at your school, but it was also the mentally unstable morons at everyone else’s school too
Kids can’t fight back after all, so there is no pushback punishing the teachers.
Good luck with teens, who will get parente hawking for them, or adults, who will rip her a new one right there and then.
Elementary teacher
They couldn’t even graduate to middle school, such a shame
The kind that only knows how to solve problems by punishing.
I had this sort of shit from my teacher, she was such a cunt.
Every teacher and coach I had growing up. And I still hear it working in education.
teachers are cunts a lot of the time
They said that a lot to me
Nobody wants to work at a school by design, that means the people that do work there are scraping the barrel genetically.
Just because you are a piece of shit excuse for a human being, doesn’t mean those wanting to teach the next generation are. Quite the opposite in fact.
A teacher that actually needs to run a classroom.
When you have 30 kids in your class and 50 minutes to teach a 90 minute lesson, you have to do triage. There simply isn’t time to litigate every single excuse a student may have for being late. Some will be the kid’s responsibility, some not. Teachers don’t have the time to call up parents and hold a detailed conversation or to investigate every excuse.
Instead, you just mark the kid absent or tardy. Then make sure the penalties for absences or tardies are light enough that a few won’t hurt them. If they get to the point of actually having disciplinary consequences for their tardies, at that point you can start having discussions with parents to see if something the parents are doing is causing the kids to be late.
What’s that saying about having all the accountability but none of the agency?
Side note: triaging doesn’t really imply a mandate for action. A teacher can make a note to follow up or mark a tardy slip without verbally repremanding the child on the spot.
To elaborate, I’ve consistently noticed a blind spot in lemmy when it comes to teachers and education. There is always a consistent failure to recognize the hard limits of available resources. The common wisdom here seems to be that a local tax base can support an unlimited amount of education spending, and that any problem in education can be solved by throwing more money at the problem. “Just hire more teachers” is the lazy zero-thought solution trotted out to any issue in education. I think it comes from lemmy’s left-leaning politics. Which is fine. But even socialists need to understand the concept of opportunity cost. Even if the economy was entirely state run, there are still hard limits on available resources.
There seems to be a great inability to recognize that teachers are actual human beings working very real jobs. And every time you tell a teacher, “the solution is to hire more teachers,” you are betraying the actual teachers. Because the teachers know they have to actually work around real-world limits in resources. And every time you tell a teacher, “just hire more teachers,” you’re indicating you are not seriously attempting to address the real challenges and limits of education. (I realize you didn’t explicitly say it, but your comment implies that resources are infinite.)
One thing teachers have to do is to design their classroom instruction and policies around the real limits of available resources, and that includes time. Often times you will deliberately write policies to require little investigation, simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day. For example, your suggestion was to follow-up after class, but that’s still time the teacher will have to spend litigating every excuse. If there’s five students late in each class, and you teach six classes, and it’s five minutes each? That’s two and a half hours of phone calls, just for one day’s tardies!
My dude, the assertion here is “there’s no need to be condescending to a small child for actions outside of their sphere of control”.
That obviously wasn’t the part I was responding to. There’s more than one point floating around this discussion. No need to take the bad faith approach and assume I’m responding to the blame issue. No need to be rude.
There’s no need to shame students. But I’m talking specifically about why schools have policies like this. Often you need to design policies so that blame isn’t assigned. Instead of litigating every late homework assignment, you except X number of late homeworks. Or you simply accept none and give opportunities for extra credit.
Teachers often have to design policies so that they don’t need to do a bunch of litigation. Instead you have blameless policies and simply have enough buffer that a few negative occurrences that aren’t the kid’s fault won’t affect their grade.
No, you definitely responded to them saying “Which kind of idiot says that to an elementary student? That incredibly dumb.” by describing them as “A teacher that actually needs to run a classroom”.
I don’t know what kind of classroom you’re running but I certainly didn’t feel any need to blame a child for their parent dropping them off late.
You’re too focused on blame and responsibility. When a teacher says, “it’s your responsibility,” they’re saying, “ultimately, in life, you are the one who will have to deal with the outcome. You need to plan for the unexpected.” It’s not a statement of moral responsibility. It’s saying, “one way or another, it’s your responsibility to be here.”
If a parent is consistently dropping a kid off late, the student needs to reach out to the teacher about that. The teacher can then have a discussion with the parents.
You solve conundrums like this by getting away from the blame mentality. We’re talking about K12 students being late for class, not people being indicted for felonies. We don’t need to obsess so much over guilt and innocence or whether once absence is the parent’s fault or the student’s fault.
Do you not see the disconnect between saying others need to move away from the blame mentality while actively defending blaming the kid? Why would the teacher not be able to independently recognise the pattern of lateness and need a literal 7 year old to point it out? What help could a teacher even offer beyond a report to social services?
How, as specifically as possible, is 7 year old meant to ensure their own timeliness when they have almost no legal control over their actions?
Then what were you responding to. The comment you responded to literally only said one thing, about talking to a child. So yeah, that is what you were responding to.
No there wasn’t. You were the one that brought up everything else. The only thing being discussed was talking shit to a child.
Policies like what!?!? Blaming children?
I think you must be a robot.
They asked who would say that to a kid. And I said any teacher that needs to run an actual classroom. Then I explained why so many teachers have policies like this.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with telling a kid, “sorry, I can’t dig into every excuse for every tardy and late homework. You get three free tardies and three free late homeworks. It’s ultimately your responsibility, and for unpredictable accidents, you’re covered.”
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with instructing students that they are ultimately responsible for their actions. There will be times in life where they simply have to be at a certain place and certain time.
The thing being asked, School Administrator-in-the-making, is to pull your head out of your…woes and troubles, and remember the child in front of you.
Keeping a condescendingly presumptuous mouth shut, costs no resources and impedes no tardy marking nor the consequences thereof.
You need to remember ALL the children in front of you. Spending ten minutes arguing with one student about an absence is 10 minutes stolen from every student in that classroom.
And please do not be rude.
You should have the education required to both define the word ‘rude’, and use it with nuance. It’s a bad look for an educator to use semantics to weasel out of their responsibilities.
Keeping your mouth shut regarding your opinion about the rationale for a specific tardy instance, costs you zero minutes, and allows you to go back to your resource management game, earlier.
Without a single repercussion to your process, because as you already previously mentioned, it is simple too much to expect of you to address any of them until the consequences of serial tardiness/truancy come into effect.
Your children must be respectful to you. They have not yet signed the social contract.
I owe you no such thing and am already being exceedingly more cordial than I believe your blasé approach towards your effect upon the psyche of your wards merits.
Have you ever actually worked in education in any form whatsoever?
I do not need to make an appeal to authority, to back my statements up. But yes.
And in the areas that have to later mitigate the damages done by those who earlier in the chain decided burn out and struggle justified their neglect and abuse.
Details thereof which shall remain undisclosed, because, again, I do not need to make an appeal to authority here. It’s simple humanity.
So your life is tough. It’s not an excuse, or their fault.
I get that teachers are under so much pressure that it may sometimes not be possible to do their jobs while also treating students in a way that is fair and honest, but to me that’s one sign among many that there is something deeply wrong with the whole institution, and not something that should be just accepted.
Again. This is the type of blind spot I see on Lemmy. There’s always a failure to recognize real world limits. The fact that education needs to work within limited resources is not some horrible flaw in its design. It’s simply how every institution mankind has ever or will ever create has to operate within limits. You have to design any institution around its material limits. That doesn’t mean there’s something deeply wrong with education. It means that those that expect schools to have infinite resources are simply delusional.
So is your position that stuff like what is described by OOP is a necessary and worthwhile tradeoff for the smooth operation of a school? Or maybe that it isn’t a bad thing at all?
I think it can be phrased better. But the core policy is perfectly fine. Often you can’t spend class time arguing with every student about every absence. Instead, you tell them, “sorry, it’s your responsibility to be here on time. I realize accidents happen, that’s why you get a certain number of free tardies, so the accidents don’t hurt you.”
It’s a perfectly fine way to run a classroom. You don’t try and figure out whether the student is truly responsible for a small number of absences. Give them three free tardies. When shit happens, they’re covered. But it saves your from having to argue with 16 year olds about every single absence and tardy. If a student goals over the limit, then you can actually put in the time to see if their excuses are valid.
Smooth operation of a school is not some minor thing to be dismissed. Every minute in class spent arguing about absence excuses is a minute taken from the instruction of every other student in the class.
That’s fair, but the benefits of bureaucracy do not negate the ways that it is dehumanizing, even if they happen to outweigh them. The inability of individual bureaucrats to do anything about it also doesn’t negate that.
You’re confusing a perfect world with one we can actually live in.
It’s elementary school. That’s not how lessons work.
The rest of your comment completely depends on this one made up thing so no need to bother with more.
I’m obviously talking about education in general. Again, obviously it started with a discussion of elementary school, but it’s a pretty bad-faith take to assume someone doesn’t know how elementary school instruction is handled.
Depending on whether or not there’s punishment, I might be somewhat OK with this. The whole point of school is to prepare kids for adult life, where your boss may not care why you were late, even if the circumstances were completely out of your control.
I mean, maybe in middle school or better yet high school absolutely. Primary usually means Kindergarten to 5th/6th grade in the US so mostly under 10s
That’s why I said it depends on whether or not there’s an actual punishment involved. If it’s just a finger wag and a calm “you need to be on time”, I’m not concerned. If the kid’s actually getting in trouble, with associated punishment, then that’s definitely not OK.
Nothing better to prepare for the horrors of the modern world than loading kids with guilt about things beyond their control as early as possible.
Part of life is learning to prepare for the unexpected. A lot of people are frequently late through a combination of circumstances and their own poor preparation. Random events will happen. You will hit an unpredictable traffic snarl. If you plan your schedule with zero margin, then you are failing to plan properly.
This is honestly a very important lesson for kids to learn. If they have a traffic ticket, and they get a court summons, they damn well better be in court, prepared, at the appropriate hour. The judge isn’t going to want to hear your excuse why you’re late. Unless you’re in the hospital, the judge is going to issue a warrant for your arrest. You can shout this is unfair til you’re red in the face, but there are simply times in life where not being on time has very real consequences.
A similar harshness exists for job interviews. If you’re late, forget it. It’s simply your responsibility to plan for the unexpected.
Sure, sometimes people are late purely due to circumstances. Sometimes you’re subject to large unpredictable delays. If a family member needs to be rushed to the hospital, that’s hours you’re going to lose with no way to predict it.
But 99% of the time when people are late, they’re late due to the ordinary everyday hurdles that should simply be planned for. Traffic is not a valid excuse for showing up 10 minutes late. For something important, you should just have a margin that large built into your schedule. Shit happens. And at some point, failing to plan for random but completely expected delays is your fault, not the fault of circumstance.
Everything you are saying in this thread is the exact opposite of what child care experts say. It’s like you went and thought “hmm all these scientists are wrong, so I’ll say the exact opposite”.
Care to cite a paper?
Got it, at farm scale, who cares if a few apples get bruised by the machinery?
How about you offer constructive solutions instead of just criticizing?
Because that is the cry of the oppressor. Give me a solution that works within my framework and existing constraints.
Based on the number of adults I’ve met who think that nothing is their fault ever, kids need to at least be introduced to the concept of personal responsibility even in situations not completely in their control.
“personal responsibility”
“out of their control”
Maybe we should accustom society to holding people responsible for things that are within someone’s control?
Planning for predictable but random events is part of your responsibility.
There are many random circumstances that can make a person late. Some are a person’s responsibility to plan for. Some aren’t.
Consider minor traffic delays. If you’re 10 minutes late because of traffic, that’s not traffic’s fault. That’s your fault. A 10 minute traffic delay is not a rare occurrence. You simply shouldn’t be operating your schedule with so little margin that a ten minute delay will make you late to something important. If you don’t have some margin in your schedule, this is entirely your fault. You built a schedule that only works if absolutely everything goes perfectly right, and then you blamed circumstance when the inevitable happens.
Then there are some delays that it’s not reasonable to expect people to plan for. If you’re hours late because you had to rush a family member to a hospital, that’s not your fault. That’s a legitimate emergency. And it’s not reasonable for people to build multi-hour buffers into their daily schedule.
I know SO MUCH about the people who are downvoting this comment.
Don’t be changing what I said. I very intentionally didn’t say “out of their control”. I said “not completely in their control”.
For example, if it snows, and the resulting traffic delays make you late for work, is that your responsibility? You don’t control the weather.
As an adult you can be expected to know that there might be snow tomorrow and plan accordingly. What is a kid going to do, other than feel helpless?
I’m late for work all the time, my value isn’t that it’s my capability to do my job.
Similarly, the kids are responsible for LEARNING. being driven to school late doesn’t matter until that is impacted, and when it does it’s the issue for the caregivers, not the student.
Yea we should just torture kids at their place of learning because life ain’t fair.
Ok. Instead of just criticizing, what’s your solution? Don’t say just throw more money at the problem or hire more teachers. Pretend you’re the teacher. If you tell the principal, “just hire more teachers,” you’ll be laughed at to your face.
So, what is your solution?
You going to investigate every tardy? Every kid will say it’s not their fault. Some will be telling the truth. Some will be lying. How do you separate the two? Do you call the parents to verify the excuse?
How quickly can you do that? Can you perform a mini disciplinary investigation in five minutes? Let’s assume you can. Well you have 30 students in each class and five of them are late. And you teach six classes. So you have 30 tardies you need to investigate, 5 minutes each. You’ve just signed yourself up for two and a half hours of phone calls to parents. And many you’ll have to call several times, as they work their own jobs and aren’t available at the drop of a hat.
So what exactly is your solution? It’s easy to criticize. But if you’re going to criticize, you should propose your own solution, if even just to indicate you have any idea what you are talking about.
It’s not a teacher’s job to do any of this, because of the problems you stated. Even the smallest schools have some kind of administrator, typically waaaaaaaay too many because administrative bloat is academia’s favorite activity. It is 100% a school administrator/secretary’s job to call parents when kids have a tardiness issue.
What isn’t acceptable is just being shitty to children because life isn’t fair. Thats just abuser behavior.
Again, notice the assumption of infinite resources. You assume that these resources always exist, and that those resources aren’t being used for something else. You fail to recognize opportunity cost.
Someone is going to have to spend 2.5 hours calling all those parents. Whether it’s the teacher or someone in the office staff is immaterial. And that someone could be doing other things, like helping a teacher out with instructional duties. If you have 30 classrooms in a school, that means your office will be making 75 hours of calls to parents every single day. You’ll need to hire ten people just to call all the parents. Do you really think the best we can do with our scarce education dollars is to pay ten people to do nothing but call and investigate tardy excuses?
Having anyone spend that much time litigating every tardy excuse simply isn’t a very good use of tax dollars. There are better things to spend money on that will do more to help kids. Far better to just have a certain number of excused absences and not have to worry about investigating every single excuse.
It’s a perfectly fair system. You have a certain number of free absences, free late homework assignments, etc. This way if shit happens, students can have a few ooopsies without it affecting their grades. Instead of litigating every incident, you just give a certain number of freebies.
This is a perfectly fair system. It’s not being shitty to kids. It’s just deliberately designing a system so you don’t always have to assign blame.