Leave Some Behind

Leave some behind

I and nine thousand of my fellow teachers roll up our sleeves and go to work every day work, sometimes excited for what the new day will bring and other times pessimistic that it will be more of the same.

When I first became a teacher nine years ago, after a decade working in special needs camps, I thought I was going to change the world, that every student who came threw my classroom would leave not only educated but a better human being as well. However the sad fact is some of my students weren't just learning they were teaching to, and what they taught me was, you can't save them all.

Way to many students come to school with no pretense of learning, they come to be with their friends, they come because society tells them they have to and more than a few come to see what trouble they can find and these few bad apples are spoiling the whole bunch. You hear it everyday, in the offices and teachers lounges of schools, if only Johnny wasn't in my classroom I could teach. If only little Suzy would stop disturbing class the other kids could learn, I had a good day today because so and so was absent, I felt like a teacher. If that one bad apple was gone the whole class could thrive.

Every year you see the same students in the hall after the tardy bell rings, they aren't carrying books and they aren't in a hurry to get anywhere; then when you ask them where they are supposed to be, they inform you often with the word fuck added in somewhere, that it's none of your business, well I say enough is enough because if not now, if not this year then when? It's time we took back from our school system from those unruly few that have hijacked it.

If you don't believe me, try this parents wait a week or two after school begins and then go ahead and ask your little Suzy and/or your little Johnny, if there is a student or two in their class that the teacher always has to discipline, and then ask them if the same student picks on their classmates or does their work, if you don't already know, I believe you will be unpleasantly surprised.

And now parents let me ask you a couple of questions, at your place of employment are you routinely threatened and harassed, and what would you do if you were, and your bosses did nothing about it, would you show up the next day? Also do you think this would be a good way to run a business; well sadly that's how some of our schools are run, and it's one of the reasons that our school system is suffering.

Did you know over half of the districts teachers have five years experience teaching or less and two of the things that make teachers leave the field so quickly are unruly students and lack of support from our administration when it comes to discipline. Teachers for the most part only write students up as a last resort when every other option has failed, but there is nothing more defeating than to see this same student returned to our classrooms a few moments later with no consequences, now something may have happened but for a consequence to be effective it must be meaningful, and what we do to the kids is not meaningful. To make matters worse often we receive visits from our administration wondering why we have written the same student up several times, instead of supporting us they question our teaching methods when the blaring reason we have done this is they haven't done anything.

Furthermore what type of message does this send to the child, well I'll tell you, that's they can do whatever they want whenever they want to and they can then expect no real punishment. I often wonder how many times these criminals we read about in the news or see on television were in trouble while they were in school or what punishments they received, I would bet the answers would be often and little.

One of the reasons discipline is so bad is it's nearly impossible to remove a student to an alternative school unless they are caught with a gun or physically assault a teacher, no matter how often they are in trouble. The thing is by letting them stay with just the meekest of consequences after they misbehave over and over is just courting tragedy. Do we need a student to be shot or a teacher to be beat up before we do anything? Instead of being reactive it's time our school system stepped up and was proactive. If you get in two fights in a year you should be gone. If you get written up five times in nine weeks you should be gone. If you miss more than nine days in nine weeks without a doctor's note you should be gone, if you are late fifteen times in nine weeks you should be gone, if you get arrested while not at school for violence, stealing or drugs you should be gone, and if you threaten a teacher or school board employee once, and just once is all it should take, you should be gone.

I and many of my colleagues are tired of ignoring bad behavior because we figure nothing will be done. We are tired of being looked at in an accusatory matter when we attempt to impose discipline. We are tired of not being backed up and seeing the same student returned to our classrooms with no consequences, but most of all we are tired of not being able to teach.

You see we spend so much of our time on the five percent of students who create ninety-five percent of the problems, we have lost focus on those students who want to be there and want to learn, and sadly many of these students are falling through the cracks, because they aren't getting the services and attention they deserve.

These disruptive students are a cancer to our school system, and when a body has a cancer we don't say, it didn't mean it, lets give it a chance, then another chance and another, we don't ask if we think it's being serious, no what we do is cut it out, and we do so because that's the only way we can save the body, and it may be the only way we can save our school system to.

Mr. Superintendent I call on you to get your teachers back, to make sure we have a safe working environment and to reinstall discipline into our schools. You want f-cat scores to go up, you want student achievement to improve lets try that. No child left behind should be changed to; we're leaving about five percent of them behind until they shape up. By doing so we can help make sure the ninety-five percent of students who want to learn, who want to achieve can be as successful as possible.