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”.
Lazy entitled thinking. Blame capitalism and imperialism for every problem. Free yourself from all thought and responsibility.
Sorry, if you’re going to criticize, offer a solution. Because what you’re doing currently is demanding that teachers tear down capitalism.
It’s not teacher’s responsibility to tear down capitalism. If that’s the problem you diagnose, then it has zero relevance to discussion of classroom management strategies.
Because when you say to tell a teacher, “this problem will go away if we just completely reorganize society top to bottom,” you are making clear that you don’t give a shit about teachers.
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.
Remember that the context is seven year old kids. Its a downvote worthy comment because children have no licenses or ability to get to school without their parents. Nor do they have the ability to order their parents to leave more time for potential delays
Yeah. We all have those friends that are late every single time. Something always happens. In reality, they just fail to plan, leave absolutely zero margin in their schedule, and then blame circumstance when they’re inevitably late.
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.
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.
Lazy entitled thinking. Blame capitalism and imperialism for every problem. Free yourself from all thought and responsibility.
Sorry, if you’re going to criticize, offer a solution. Because what you’re doing currently is demanding that teachers tear down capitalism.
It’s not teacher’s responsibility to tear down capitalism. If that’s the problem you diagnose, then it has zero relevance to discussion of classroom management strategies.
Because when you say to tell a teacher, “this problem will go away if we just completely reorganize society top to bottom,” you are making clear that you don’t give a shit about teachers.
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.
Remember that the context is seven year old kids. Its a downvote worthy comment because children have no licenses or ability to get to school without their parents. Nor do they have the ability to order their parents to leave more time for potential delays
Yeah. We all have those friends that are late every single time. Something always happens. In reality, they just fail to plan, leave absolutely zero margin in their schedule, and then blame circumstance when they’re inevitably late.
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.