Reply to How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OK, I am not a teacher at Basis but I do teach middle school science and I am cracking up at this thread.  This teacher made such a rookie mistake-- I learned long ago that if you are going to use food in a lab, you better make sure it's uncooked beans or something similar, because if you use candy it's not coming back.  LOL.  Once one of my colleagues had raw potato slices in salt water to show hyper-, hypo-, and isotonic solutions, and a kid actually ate a raw potato slice!  Kids that age are nuts, man.  (Excuse the pun.)  I'm not saying it's okay, and obviously if a kid stole something he or she should be disciplined, but I can believe a kid taking some candy has blown up into some kind of federal case.  Goodness.[/quote]

Yes and no.

I can TOTALLY agree with you where it comes to Elementary School, 5th graders, et cetera.   Yeah, kids are nuts, they don't know better, they make lots of mistakes, they don't listen, and you should EXPECT it.  Yeah, I can TOTALLY see handing out candy for a class experiment saying "This candy is for an experiment, and before you even touch it, we're going to count/measure..." but before you've barely even uttered two syllables, little Johnny Turbogullet has already in nanoseconds gorfed his down in one swell foop without even chewing and has shot his hand up, saying, "Umm, Ms. Crabapple, I already accidentally ate mine..."   And yeah, that's cute/funny/and totally to be expected.

But this is different.  That's not what happened here.  These are teenagers, 8th graders, who at that age should be well into knowing better.  It's a kid who stealthily and deliberately took something that they knew wasn't theirs.  It's a kid who selfishly decided, "rather than the class sharing in a tasty treat, screw them all, I'm taking it all for myself," it's a kid who basically said "F-U classmates, F-U teacher, F-U class experiment."  It's behavior that I would never tolerate from my own kid at that age, and I am not at all alone in that regard.  If, by the time kids have gotten to be teenagers, are still engaging in that kind of selfish behavior, and at that point still don't have any regard or respect for others or the property of others, then the grownups have failed them and have likely set them up for a ton of future failure, and that's serious and sad business.[/quote]

The above teacher teaches middle school - read, one step below high school, including 8th grade.  She is telling you that kids do this.  Another is telling you that MS kids are just "crazy."  Basis is not a reform school.

Would you really want the Dean to say "I will mess with your grades" to [b]your child[/b], who had just searched high and low for the "lab materials?"  Yes there are some hungry kids, there are even some badly behaved kids still at Basis in 8th grade, but she made a "rookie" mistake according to veteran teachers, you do not know if the "criminal" as another pp called the candy-eater, was aware the candy was intended to be used by the teacher as part of a lesson or even whether the child was aware that the candy was the teacher's.  Yes, theft at Basis is fairly rampant, and it is a "serious and sad business" sometimes, especially expensive prescription glasses, but in a school where the best advice parents get is to tell their kids to take everything [b]to the bathroom with them if they need to go, rather than leaving it at their desk[/b] why didn't the teacher take that into account when she left the candy somewhere it could be stolen without the stealer being seen?[/quote]

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