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.