Disruptive kids. Who is at fault the teacher or the kid?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s awful. I’m on a group chat for the grade and the moms are constantly complaining about one teacher. “Jackson says she yells all the time and he feels uncomfortable at school. I’ve complained to the principal but nothings getting done. She won’t let him sit with his friends” Jackson is a disruptive little jerk and the teacher is at her wits end!!! Tell your kid to listen to his teacher instead of always taking his side!

This is kind of the point though. How is the parent actually supposed to know what is happening in the classroom? How does she from afar "correct" the kid for conduct she can't see and doesn't know about? Jackson is manipulating mom, or maybe truly feels they way he does and can't see the bigger picture. What is the teacher telling mom?

Jackson’s mom needs to contact the teacher directly instead of gossiping in the chat. Find out what is going on and work with teacher to improve the situation.

More likely Jackson’s mom thinks her kid is just amazing and can do no wrong. Or simply can’t be bothered.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s awful. I’m on a group chat for the grade and the moms are constantly complaining about one teacher. “Jackson says she yells all the time and he feels uncomfortable at school. I’ve complained to the principal but nothings getting done. She won’t let him sit with his friends” Jackson is a disruptive little jerk and the teacher is at her wits end!!! Tell your kid to listen to his teacher instead of always taking his side!

This is kind of the point though. How is the parent actually supposed to know what is happening in the classroom? How does she from afar "correct" the kid for conduct she can't see and doesn't know about? Jackson is manipulating mom, or maybe truly feels they way he does and can't see the bigger picture. What is the teacher telling mom?

Jackson’s mom needs to contact the teacher directly instead of gossiping in the chat. Find out what is going on and work with teacher to improve the situation.

More likely Jackson’s mom thinks her kid is just amazing and can do no wrong. Or simply can’t be bothered.

100% and if Jackson's friends parents are in the chat, they are probably asking the teacher to subtly keep their kid away from Jackson cause clearly his mom is encouraging the problem...

[Anonymous]

Teachers follow the trend of disruptive kids: they are getting worse with time.

[Anonymous]

It's always the teachers fault unless they are poor then those students are prison pipeline kids. If your rich then crime is legal. That gives poor kids incentives to be rich. It's the American duality.

[Anonymous]

The parents are to blame for not teaching discipline and manners and following through. Put the blame where it belongs: at home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The parents are to blame for not teaching discipline and manners and following through. Put the blame where it belongs: at home.

They also don’t back up teachers when their child misbehaves. They stamp their feet and say “not little Jackson!”

When I lifeguarded in my teens, we would put kids in timeout for breaking the rules and their parents were fine with it. Now parents protest when a guard blows a whistle to tell a kid to stop jumping off the board when another child is still in the well.

It’s the parents.

[Anonymous]

If you want parents and teachers to do better then champion policies that support parents (many teachers are also parents). Our society and government should be supporting care-giving including health-care for all, maternity leave, affordable housing, etc. There is a direct correlation between the financial stress our oligarch driven out-of-control capitalist model is causing working families and behavior. Stop voting for people who essentially tell working families to stop complaining and try harder or worse, tell us to blame others rather than blame the system as its designed or god for bid blame the rich and powerful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The parents are to blame for not teaching discipline and manners and following through. Put the blame where it belongs: at home.

They also don’t back up teachers when their child misbehaves. They stamp their feet and say “not little Jackson!”

When I lifeguarded in my teens, we would put kids in timeout for breaking the rules and their parents were fine with it. Now parents protest when a guard blows a whistle to tell a kid to stop jumping off the board when another child is still in the well.

It’s the parents.

Dude, if a lifeguard had to put my kid in time out, that would be the end of swimming for my kid for the day. You can't mess with not listening in the water!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The parents are to blame for not teaching discipline and manners and following through. Put the blame where it belongs: at home.

While I do think parents need to do more, kids often act different at school than at home. We absolutely would back any punishment a teacher doled out.

My middle child is very difficult at home, but apparently is an angel and even a leader at school. It boggles our mind. The kid that the teacher sees is not necessarily the kid that the parents see.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The parents are to blame for not teaching discipline and manners and following through. Put the blame where it belongs: at home.

While I do think parents need to do more, kids often act different at school than at home. We absolutely would back any punishment a teacher doled out.

My middle child is very difficult at home, but apparently is an angel and even a leader at school. It boggles our mind. The kid that the teacher sees is not necessarily the kid that the parents see.

The bolded, combined with the fact that teachers rarely communicate clearly about kids' behavior in the classroom. We've liked all our kids' teachers, but the way they describe classroom behavior is a mystery. We literally always ask "how is her behavior in class? are there any issues we need to be addressing?" and the teachers will respond with some word salad that simultaneously makes me concerned there is misbehavior but fails to give me any sense of what the problem might be or what I might do.

Like regarding my kid who is really well behaved like 90% of the time but sometimes has random meltdowns when she's hungry, I'll get "Nope, no issues. Not really. Sometimes she gets frustrated. I'm encouraging her to express herself but at appropriate times. But really nothing to worry about." What does that mean? What is happening? I'll follow up and be told "no no no, she's so great, don't worry." My spouse and I have decided that likely there are some issues but because she's mostly great, they don't want to harp on it too much. I also get the sense there are always a few kids in any class who have tons of issues, so our kid who might have some issues looks great by comparison? But it also seems like teachers are loathe to just state directly "this is a problem, yes it would help if you could work on xyz at home." I've never had a teacher tell me something like this directly. It's like they'll obliquely reference an issue but not describe it well and then reassure us it's no big deal. But then why did they bring it up?

So at some point, I'm just like "okay, well let us know if there is anything we should know about." And we get self-reports from the kids of course but who knows how accurate those are. Both our kids complain a lot about school, but most of the complaints are about peers and stuff that sounds really petty to us ("I wanted to play on the swings during recess but Larla wouldn't give up her swing even though I asked really nicely!"). So who knows. Maybe our kids are terrors at school. We do our best.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pretty much the only punishment teachers are allowed to use is taking away recess, and the parents absolutely howl if you do that because “it’s not developmentally appropriate for kids full of energy” so I’d love to know what punishment they’d accept for their darlings. They are terribly disruptive and the parents just excuse it with “they’re social and love talking with their friends” provided that the friends are the right ones from the good neighborhood.

I’m envious of any teacher that is allowed to take away recess.
Even when I started teaching in public school 20 years ago, we weren’t allowed to take away recess
Teachers truly have their hands tied in trying to deal with misbehavior.
It’s for this reason, along with parents like the OP I walked away from teaching without a means of earning a comparable income.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Tell us about these many situations where you’ve seen teachers and yet you’re not a teacher. Doubt it.

It’s the PARENTS fault. Parenting has shifted massively. They are afraid of making their kids sad so they give them what they want. They allow kids to negotiate everything—bedtime, meals, screen time. I’ve seen kids in stores whine because they want a toy and the parent gets it for them so they don’t have to hear the whining. Nowadays strollers have babies holding phones instead of looking at the world. Parents put on videos instead of reading to their kids. It’s absolutely insane. I was in another country over spring break and didn’t see a single child—baby, toddler, elementary school aged kid, even tween—with a device in their hands. Not one. And over here? It’s common place. No more delayed gratification. No more “you better listen to your teacher,” now it’s “why did the teacher yell at you? I’ll go talk to them.”

It’s really really bad now.

I can’t believe the poster didn’t include parents as part of the problem. And it’s super rich because it’s in the private school forum.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pretty much the only punishment teachers are allowed to use is taking away recess, and the parents absolutely howl if you do that because “it’s not developmentally appropriate for kids full of energy” so I’d love to know what punishment they’d accept for their darlings. They are terribly disruptive and the parents just excuse it with “they’re social and love talking with their friends” provided that the friends are the right ones from the good neighborhood.

I’m envious of any teacher that is allowed to take away recess.
Even when I started teaching in public school 20 years ago, we weren’t allowed to take away recess
Teachers truly have their hands tied in trying to deal with misbehavior.
It’s for this reason, along with parents like the OP I walked away from teaching without a means of earning a comparable income.

Thank goodness you walked away from teaching. There's a reason why we don't want to take recess away! Inmates get more outside time than kids do during the school day. Adults get more freedom in a 9-5 workday (unless you work in a factory) than our kids get in school.
Wake up people!!!

[Anonymous]

"Disruptive kids. Who is at fault, the parents or the kid?"

There. I fixed your title. This is an absolutely ridiculous post aimed at, once again, blaming teachers.

Everyone thinks they know how to teach since they went to school once. Schools have changed dramatically in the last 50 years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:"Disruptive kids. Who is at fault, the parents or the kid?"

There. I fixed your title. This is an absolutely ridiculous post aimed at, once again, blaming teachers.

Everyone thinks they know how to teach since they went to school once. Schools have changed dramatically in the last 50 years.

What you say makes sense, except that there are very good teachers that are able to manage the classroom. We need more of them.