A cell phone video of a teacher having a violent mental breakdown in class:
http://www.newschannel5.com/Global/story.asp?S=13294058
The teachers career is almost certainly over. I’ve no idea if, before this, he was a good teacher or bad, popular or unpopular, skilled or incompetant. But going violent is unacceptible.
However, there is another side to this story. Along with the teacher going gonzo… there are the students in the video who are clearly uncivilized. My suspicion is that years of being forced to deal with the worthless detritus of society, with no practical means of enforcing discipline, led the teacher to his breakdown.
As I’ve mentioned before, in my view compulsory education should not be through 12th grade, but only through 6th grade or so. The jackholes shown in this video are precisely the kind of students who would be happier out of school. The jackholes shown in this video are precisely the kinds of students who would make the *other* students happier if they were out of school.
The dirtmonsters who seem to have driven this teacher over the edge have not only ruined the teacher life, they’ve done pretty good damage to their own, and have probably made a sizable dent in the lives of the kids in the class who might’ve actually been able to benefit from the education they might have otherwise received. The teacher, students and school would all have been much better off if the teacher had had the ability to fill out a slip of paper and have troublemaking students simply ejected from the school grounds, via either “bouncer” or “catapult.”
12 Responses to “Teachers Gone Wild”
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I think the biggest problem with our schools is that they insist on preparing everyone for college. Let’s face it, not everyone wants to go to college. If we were preparing more kids for non-college career tracks, I think we would have less problems in schools.
In 2005, I started to ask around about using my MA in history for teaching. The city and the two surrounding counties told me that I was needed to volunteer to mentor with at-risk males in the inner city — apparently the same environment that man was in. I’d never have lasted a week.
The problem is partly that everyone is expected to go to college, but we need to recognize that the main reason to send them to college is so they can learn to be civilized. They don’t learn to be civilized at home, and government schools seem to be more day care than anything else after about the 5th grade, at least for the kids who don’t have any interests beyond fitting into the society around them.
In 50 years, we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school, to teaching remedial English in college. -Joseph Sobran http://www.mrsdutoit.com/index.php/education/2044/
Ahem: I’ve just deleted a comment posted in this thread. Y’all can feel free to talk smack about groups of people based on their dumbass beliefs or nonsensical ideologies, but racism is right out.
Well, this is what America has made for itself. Too little willingness to shoulder collective responsibility for educational and social outcomes.
Actually… too *much* collectiveness. This sort of dismal educational outcome seems to have been a development of large, centralized educational bureaocracies, made worse by the creation of the Department of Education.
If education – and the rules that go along with it – was left to individual localities to deal with, most of these problems would go away, since the individual schools would be *allowed* to deal with their own unique issues.
America does not have large centralised educational bureaucracies. It has thousands of separate, de-centralised educational bureaucracies controlled by individual districts and states, as well as the federal government. It is a madhouse compared to most other nations, with every man, woman, dog, cat all trying to control how every child is taught with the result that there is no coherency, crazy beliefs like creationism and “intelligent design” get taught as science and books get banned because they are about fantasy subjects like witchcraft.
> America does not have large centralised educational bureaucracies. It has thousands of separate, de-centralised educational bureaucracies controlled by individual districts and states, as well as the federal government.
It can’t be both non-bureaucratized *AND* run by the FedGuv via the DOE.
> every man, woman, dog, cat all trying to control how every child is taught
Exactly so. And why it should be de-collectivized. Let individual small districts make their minds about how they want to educate their kids.
Of course it can be “both non-bureacratized *AND* run by the FedGuv via the DOE”. You’re assuming that such a system is effecient. In reality, decentralised systems are inherently inefficient. They suffer from massive friction and of course, the difficulties of making sure what is meant to be taught, is being taught.
Letting every district control education means that you will have no standards. How do you ensure coherency? What happens when a child, educated by district A moves to district X? What happens a child graduates from High School and seeks to go to University? How does the University ensure that the results handed in from a child from district Y is the same as the results handed in by a child district D? That a child from district C has the same understanding of a subject as a children from district V? How can employers know that the person they are hiring actually has been taught what they claim they’ve been taught?
Centralisation is about ensuring that standards are set, maintained and met. It ensures a coherent NATIONAL curriculum is decided upon and taught. It ensures that a NATIONAL education system does what its meant to do – serve the interests of the NATION. It appears you’d rather not have a NATION but rather at best, a loose confederation of organised groups which might, upon occasion fly in formation together, sometimes, if they can stop sniping at each other.
I rather suspect that you’d be the first to be complaining if your nation dissolved into such anarchy and anarchy is a good word to describe. Would you care to fly in an aeroplane which was designed by someone who had been taught that the world was flat or that the sun revolved around the earth?
> In reality, decentralised systems are inherently inefficient.
You’d think so. But then you look at history, and it doesn’t match your intial thought. In the US, the cost of education on a per-pupil basis has skyrocketed at the same time the actual value of that education has declined, thanks in no small part to centralization and standardization through the DOE.
> Letting every district control education means that you will have no standards. How do you ensure coherency?
Why would you want to?
> What happens when a child, educated by district A moves to district X?
Perhaps he finds that due to non-standardization, he can obtain a far better education in X than he did in A, which was still educating along the DOE lines.
> How does the University ensure that the results handed in from a child from district Y is the same as the results handed in by a child district D? That a child from district C has the same understanding of a subject as a children from district V? How can employers know that the person they are hiring actually has been taught what they claim they’ve been taught?
You’ve never heard of *tests*? SATs and ACTs, and whatever the universities and employers can cook up on their own?
A high school diploma is no longer proof positive that the graduate can even friggen’ *read.* So appealing to some phantom nightmare of inconsistency in some future education system is at best hilariously naive.
> It appears you’d rather not have a NATION but rather at best, a loose confederation of organised groups
The United States is a group of affiliated sovereign states. The US is not some homogenous mass with arbitrary meaningless borders.
> Would you care to fly in an aeroplane which was designed by someone who had been taught that the world was flat or that the sun revolved around the earth?
I don’t know. How good of an airplane did he design, all by his lonesome with no assistance or testing of any kind?
What I’d *really* dislike is not the product of engineering by an individual with some goofball notions unrelated to engineering, but giving political power to someone whose goal is the amassing of total power “for my own good.”
Appears you are such an extremist and zealot you can’t even face reality. If the US is not a nation perhaps it might be better for you to reacquaint yourself with your constitution and the role and function of your oh, so dreadful CENTRAL government!
> If the US is not a nation
It *is* a nation. But it is a nation composed of soverign states that have their own rights and responsibilities. The role of the central Federal government is made clear in the Consitution… and the *limits* of the FedGov are also made quite clear in the Constitution. Those powers not specifically called forth in the Constitution as powers of the FedGuv are, as per the 10th Amendment, powers of the states. or, indeed, no governments powers at all.