When I read stories like this, I despair:
PHILADELPHIA — A high school teacher was assaulted by two students and hospitalized with broken vertebrae after he took an iPod away from one of them during class, officials said.
I’m going to take a wild guess, and suggest that these two students weren’t models of behavior already. In fact, I’ll go further than that: kids that would even contemplate a physical confrontation with a teacher need intensive remedial instruction in socialization and respect. And they won’t get it in jail. In fact, by this point in their lives, it’s unlikely they’ll ever “get it” at all.
Meanwhile, the 60-year-old teacher, who has apparently been teaching for over 30 years, is now in the hospital with a broken neck… and what’s he worrying about?
Hooked up to tubes and monitors, a metal brace drilled into his skull to immobilize his broken neck, Frank Burd worried how his students would fare on state tests next month now that he could not be there to help them.
“I want them to do well,” said the 60-year-old math teacher from his bed at Albert Einstein Medical Center yesterday.
Obviously, at least one of them is going to fail, having been expelled — although Polimom thinks that any student plugged into an iPod during a math class instead of the teacher’s lesson isn’t on the fast track to success anyway.
But were these students anomalies? Apparently not:
As word spread of the attack throughout the school, staff called their union, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.
“It is absolutely unacceptable,” said union vice president Jerry Jordan.
Jordan said Germantown lost their teachers’ assistants this academic year, which has placed the teachers at a greater risk.
From Jordan’s comments, Polimom has the distinct impression that it isn’t the loss of teachers’ assistants that’s the problem — unless their job description included “bodyguard” along with “instructional help”.
What possible point is there to worrying about how many years of math or science a student has, or whether the school day (or year) should be lengthened, when socialization has utterly failed?
You can’t teach angry sociopaths much of anything.
This is just one example of why the marketing term “No Child Left Behind” is so wrong. The truth is that some of them have to be left behind if the rest are to move forward. That principle should never be in doubt, even if the exact means are hotly debated.
“…Polimom has the distinct impression that it isn’t the loss of teachers’ assistants that’s the problem…”
Well, it is apparent that you and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers have different viewpoints.
Seriously, though, I agree that “You can’t teach angry sociopaths much of anything.” And, in the case of these two, the only option remaining may be to quarantine them, and accept that they are lost/gone forever.
The question remains, however: what do you do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future? After all, lots of kids go through school without breaking their teachers’ necks (or inflicting any damage on them, for that matter.) What is different between these two (and their ilk) and the others? That is the question I feel we have to answer (though the answer may be blindingly obvious to most of us.)
~EdT.
I bet that if you found their former teachers who still remember them, that none of them will have great things to say. This is not behavior that is just suddenly picked up in high school. They were probably not the best children going way back into elementary. Either the bad behavior escalated over time slowly, or they have just been passed along as another another school’s problem.
My mom has taught for 35 years in New Orleans. She’s taught at some really bad schools.
She’s had some incredible stories to tell through some of those years. One kid she saved grew up in the projects. Never knew who his father was. He pretty much raised himself from the age of 10. If you want to see an empty building, go to a New Orleans Public School on Parent-Teacher Conference night. This kid was a “Behavior Modification/Special Ed” students with a serious criminal record.
Despite that background, my mom got through to him. She is a talented art (TVA) teacher and this kid was an incredible artist. She is routinely astonished how here best students are the ones with the most problems. She helped get him a job when he graduated as an illustrator for a local publishing company.
That being said, she declares ‘success’ if she reaches 2 out of 10 students. That’s a scary statistic.
Clay,
Thanks so much for telling us about your mom… and yes, the problems in New Orleans were absolutely in the back of my mind when I wrote this post. Clearly, it’s not just NOLA.
It’s hard to know where one draws the line — or even if one should be drawn…. But then I think of the kids who are in school with those who cannot (or will not) be helped… and of teachers like the one in this article…. and of school districts (like NOLA’s) that are overcome by the problems.
Can one balance the scales? As you said — scary.