My mom made me late everyday in high school. I’d miss the first 5-10 minutes of first period
I had a teacher in 4th grade that was an issue from day 1. My parents had moved right after Hurricane Hugo. I started at this school during the middle of the year, and due to the timing of everything also in the middle of the week.
The class had apparently been working on something earlier in the week that I was unaware of. The teacher hadn’t mentioned it during my first day, and then expected me to have it on my second day. So my first grade in the class was a zero. It never went uphill. I have ADHD, and she was entirely unwilling to try at all with me; I spent many of my days in a vice principal’s office. Generally she was unpleasant, and often specifically cruel to a 10yr old.
That school was doing a team teaching thing. Two teachers split subjects. I ended up with As and Bs in her teammate’s classes, and Fs in all of her classes.
I did get some revenge on her later, but that’s another story.
Ok let’s hear the story. I had a similar teacher experience, even had the dual teacher thing, but it was not as bad. Although she ended up having a major seizure in the middle of class which was pretty upsetting for us, but obviously that had nothing to do with how she was treating me.
Since she often would just send me directly to the administration offices most days, I got to be very familiar with them. That school had three vice principals, and I got to know them all pretty well. They were having a hard time understanding why I was being excluded so regularly. As the school year concluded, they would come and “observe” me to see what about my situation was the issue. I wasn’t perfect; I was a ten year old boy with ADHD. But neither was I any more disruptive than the other children in the class.
My parents decided to have me repeat the 4th grade, and I had an entirely different teacher pair. They also put me in the school’s TAG program. This was definitely the right thing to do for me. The other teachers had none of the problems that that one teacher did. Meanwhile, that teacher had decided to to the same sort of thing with another child.
My fifth grade year was exciting, because that first teacher had apparently decided to start sending “problem” children out of her classes, and administration was not thrilled as they had things to do and couldn’t monitor kids all day. I ended up being a part of their process to force her to retire earlier than she intended.
Over three decades later I’m still angry about how she treated me, and I feel like her punishment wasn’t nearly as harsh as it ought to have been. She kept telling me I was a terrible child, and I internalized much of the abuse. I had a difficult time trusting teachers after my experiences with her.
I did run into her as an adult though. She recognized me and asked me if I had ever managed to “learn how to behave.” I told her that I had, and because of her I even read the newspaper daily. This seemed to excite her until I told her that I checked the obituaries daily for hers, and asked her to not keep me waiting much longer. She finally died about eight years after that.
Fuck you, Mrs. Gamble. The only thing keeping me from pissing on your grave is my fear of urinating in public.
That is an amazing line, and I’m gonna yoink that into my repertoire…
Vindictive & malicious teachers honestly have no place in the public school system or anywhere within 300 m / 1000 ft of children. I had one of those evil people as a teacher for 3rd grade. I hope she’s burning in hell, if such a place exists. Terrible human being.
Back in my school days it was hit or miss as to whether the bus riders would be penalized if the bus was late getting us to school. I don’t think I was ever personally called out for it though. Punished for it, sure.
High school was particularly ridiculous. If we were 10 (or maybe 15) minutes late for a class, we would get counted as absent and we’d have to spend the rest of the period in the holding room they used for in-school suspension. The bus riders were predominantly the kids from poor families, because middle class and up typically either the parents dropped the kids off at school or got their kids a car when they turned 16 (legal driving age). It was literally penalizing poor students for the bus drivers’ inability to stick to the schedule.
I was in highschool and I used to do my art homework at lunch just before class started. So I would do still life drawings and stuff and then hand them in. My art teacher would always deduct points because she said, “you’re supposed to do it at home”.
I didn’t have a desk. Parents were poor and didn’t have work at the time so we were staying with my aunt who didn’t have much room for us. Even if I did have a desk there would be my cousins running around and noise and stuff.
I figured I made the compromise. I didn’t divulge why, I just did it for each homework assignment and she kept getting cross with me. I was like, whatever …
I eventually failed that course because I just hated that teacher and it’s only course I ever failed. Later on I wound up having the highest average in my year and getting multiple scholarships, so whatever.
There are people who have no business having any power over others. Sometimes because they are corrupt and abuse the power because they can. Sometimes because they are stupid and don’t understand the point of rules and enforce them for all the wrong reasons.
I wish schools did more to weed these types out, though suspect that the first step would need to be better pay and work conditions.
Wow. Meanwhile, I asked my math teacher to put the homework on the board at the start of class everyday so I could read the textbook, and teach myself and start on it while she taught the whole class. She would still call on me, but I was able to figure out the answer most of the time. After I finished, I’d play Pokémon emerald on my calculator until the bell rang.
Screw that teacher. If there is a deadline and you hand it in before or on the deadline then who cares where it got done. Any teacher worth their salt would notice this pattern and ask what was going on that prevented you from doing it at home.
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.
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.
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
The kind that only knows how to solve problems by punishing.
Elementary teacher
They couldn’t even graduate to middle school, such a shame
Every teacher and coach I had growing up. And I still hear it working in education.
I had this sort of shit from my teacher, she was such a cunt.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
You’re confusing a perfect world with one we can actually live in.
When you have 30 kids in your class and 50 minutes to teach a 90 minute les
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I think they expect you to walk your ass to the bus stop. Like - fuck that. But that’s what they were expecting.
Sometimes they don’t even have a solution, just a problem.
Ah yes, the bus stop you never use because your parent brings you. So you don’t know where it is. And it probably picks up from your stop 30 minutes before you could even know you were going to be late.
Seriously, why would I ever take the bus to school? That’s where all the bullies were. If my mom couldn’t drive me, my neighbor’s mom would.
I used to live just literally down the street from my primary school, so I could’ve very much walked instead of my parents taking me. It would take like 5 mins to get there, so I “my parents made me late” would’ve not been a very good excuse for me. Not that I had to use it anyway, I was never late… I used to be the kid with the classroom keys so I could unlock it for everyone cause I came first usually :p
I’m too American for this anecdote because what do you mean you had keys to your elementary school classroom? There’s no way I would have been able to be trusted with that kind of responsibility at 7, I would’ve been like riding the trikes on the track at midnight on a weekend and painting the walls blue or something.
There’s no way I would have been able to be trusted with that kind of responsibility at 7
Well technically since 6 in my case :3
Anywho, yeah, there used to be 2 kids in class that had the keys to the homeroom class, usually the kids who got there early, and 2 kids in case 1 gets sick or otherwise doesn’t come to school etc. Those kids also usually were the class president/vice president, which came with it’s own set of responsibilities… I usually just had the key, not the president role tho, cause I was a quiet kid who didn’t want all that attention x3. I got nominated for vice president once and passed on that role to someone else
Surprisingly we didn’t destroy the school… I did one time accidentally hit the wall with a bunch of coloured pencils which never washed out when we were cleaning the school over the years, but that was during a break rather than at any time I was in class alone :3
Yeah I mean it was a mile to school for me and I started walking there in kindergaten with my brother as the supervisor. He’s almost 2 years older than me, so we were kike 5 & 7. All the kids we knew would walk to and from school, if they brought a bike they’d have a lock fot it and obviously have to remember their house keys everyday, you can’t just leave the house unlocked everywhere (depending on the parents). Where I was at schools were constantly expanding do to population growth, so there were always portables (“temporary” classrooms outside the main buildings that were essentially cheap manufactured homes).
I can 100% see a teacher giving spare keys to whomever they thought was going to get their first so they could turn down the AC because they weren’t supposed to keep it at moderate temperatures all afternoon/night. Extremely hot temperature days in portables were the worst. To be honest though I seem to remember that the portable I had in 5th grade you just pulled the door witg or without the key and it had enough flex on the door/wall that it would just pop open. (Think someone skimped out on some fasteners).
high trust soceity
My school system if you were late too me times you get detention. It happen to me one time. I hot mysrlf out of the second one
