My students all get excellent results - many of them having been failed by the schooling system, most because of labelling by ignorant people like you rather than disruption from their peers.

See ya!

How can you steal something from someone who doesn’t have it?

Am also going to stop discussing on this post as we have wildly different world views and are never going to agree. If you haven’t seen the classroom startegy in FE then fair enough, and even if it did the structure of FE means it would be less likely to impact on you.

I will continue to make a difference to the vast majority of pupils who I teach. I will continue to protect the rights of the innocent in my class who wish to learn.

As you only educate those over the age of compulsory education you probably don’t feel the need, and the innoccent by the time of 6th form hopefully will stay in school, as long as their experience hasn’t been runined by those you seem to want to defend.

Fat-Tony, you are correct I teach in FE, and I’ve mentioned in comments elsewhere that different challenges and solutions are posed (students are in my lessons apparently voluntarily - for now - and the great pressure from managers, etc. is to keep them there even if it’s against their will!) But I am not justifying a classroom strategy that fits the description you give. I’m suggesting that your interpretation of a particular classroom strategy may be wrong. I’ve no doubt there are lazy, short-sighed and negligent staff out there, but I suspect it doesn’t always take the form you and ‘oldandrew’ suggest; I suspect much of what you label as such isn’t; and I suspect you and ‘oldandrew’ are not quite the antithesis of such practice that you profess to be.

I do object to the word scum. Very strongly. There are selfish pupils, there are idiotic pupils, there are violent pupils, there are enormously disruptive pupils. I think there is a tiny minority - almost non-existent - who wilfully ’steals hopes, aspirations and dreams’. I also think there is a tiny minority who don’t have some hopes, aspirations and dreams of their own that you ’steal’ by labelling them as ’scum’. Frankly you will never be able to teach those pupils until you see them as flawed human beings (in that way very like the pupils you like, and also very like yourself) rather than as inanimate refuse. Okay, I get it, you don’t want to teach them. But thankfully it is not your job to decide who is unteachable.

It is clear from your comments that you do not teach in a secondary school but in either an FE college or a PRU. Now in both of those you may not have appeasers. However this is about teachers in secondary education where the appeaser exists and causes all the problems mentioned by oldandrew.

You are doing exactly what I suggested an appeaser would do. You are trying to justify a lazy, short-sighted, and negligent classroom strategy, rather than argue for a solution that will benefit the majority.

I also notice you object to the word “scum” to describe someone who steals the education of others. I can think of no more fitting a word for someone who steals hopes, aspirations and dreams; and if you’re a teacher who appeases you are complicit in this theft.

Teachers don’t spend much time disciplining, they spend their time dealing with the consequences of indiscipline. As for involving “counsellors, mentors, mental health professionals”, the problem is these people do no good at all. All they do is make “helpful” suggestions about how if you stop enforcing the rules and generally appease the child then he might like you enough not to stop you teaching.

Okay, you’ve bought into this concept, but I strongly resent you applying it to me.

If we invent another concept (in the OldAndrew manner) - the teacher who uses intelligent discretion as part of a discipline strategy - then the last thing you can accuse it of being is short-term. How many hours of teaching are spent ‘disciplining’ (and I use the term loosely) the children you delightfully describe as ‘the scum’? Very many indeed. If you can develop strategies by which YOU don’t disrupt the learning of others by having to constantly bellow at anti-school pupils, you help the learning of everybody. That does require trying to understand why students behave the way they do. That does require involving others outside the classroom (counsellors, mentors, mental health professionals, etc. rather than assuming you are somehow omniscient) and it does not involve appeasement.

I await some pithy, meaningless tautology.

fat-tony

No offence.