Reply to NY times op ed on the teacher crisis

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The difference is that if one of your clients became violent, you could call a security guard or the police to have them removed. If one of my students becomes violent, nobody comes. I’m told I am a bad teacher. I will finish up this year and you can take my place. I cannot work in a place where I do not feel safe. A student threw a spiral notebook at me a few weeks ago and the scratch on my face is still there. Nothing happened to that student but I was told not to place any demands on him. So he sleeps through a few classes and I hope to God nothing wakes him up again. [/quote]

Hardly, lol. In legal aid I worked in tiny offices with zero support staff and no means to quickly access 911 - I could easily have been assaulted many times. As a public defender I often met my clients in their homes and was totally vulnerable to physical attack, and have in fact been assaulted more than once by adults much bigger and stronger than me. I also met clients in tiny rooms inside the jail or prison and no, there was not a guard standing right there waiting to intervene. It's a job that requires courage, to be sure.

I have also seen defense attorneys attacked in court by their clients, and you can too if you Google for the YouTube videos. Surrounded by armed deputies and in handcuffs, physically seriously assaulting their attorneys. At least most of the students in a typical classroom aren't already murderers and rapists.

People love to crap on defense attorneys, but they defend the Constitution and not really the individual - the individual is just the means to the end of defending liberty for all citizens. And it's a dangerous job. I was once stalked by a mentally ill client in a small rural town who had no trouble finding out where I lived. Thank goodness the police cared about me even though I was a defense attorney, and made sure to inform me of the activity that was occuring unbeknownst to me - and I was able to withdraw from representing that individual but still had to be very careful until he was incarcerated a long way away from where I lived.

I'm concerned about the physical violence that is occurring in schools, to be sure. It's one of the reasons I'm considering teaching at lower grade level than I might otherwise choose, although even grade schoolers can be combative and we all saw the six year old who shot his teacher. But I'm in a very strong gun control state and also a state which has consistently ranked #1 in educational investment and outcomes for decades - but still has poor schools. My attitude is that if it's just too awful working with at risk kids, I'll fulfill my two year contract and then move to a nice school with UMC kids where this kind of issue is much less common.[/quote]

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