I was in highschool and I used to do my art homework at lunch just before class started. So I would do still life drawings and stuff and then hand them in. My art teacher would always deduct points because she said, “you’re supposed to do it at home”.
I didn’t have a desk. Parents were poor and didn’t have work at the time so we were staying with my aunt who didn’t have much room for us. Even if I did have a desk there would be my cousins running around and noise and stuff.
I figured I made the compromise. I didn’t divulge why, I just did it for each homework assignment and she kept getting cross with me. I was like, whatever …
I eventually failed that course because I just hated that teacher and it’s only course I ever failed. Later on I wound up having the highest average in my year and getting multiple scholarships, so whatever.
Which kind of idiot says that to an elementary student? That incredibly dumb.
Which kind of idiot says that to an elementary student? That incredibly dumb.
A teacher that actually needs to run a classroom.
When you have 30 kids in your class and 50 minutes to teach a 90 minute lesson, you have to do triage. There simply isn’t time to litigate every single excuse a student may have for being late. Some will be the kid’s responsibility, some not. Teachers don’t have the time to call up parents and hold a detailed conversation or to investigate every excuse.
Instead, you just mark the kid absent or tardy. Then make sure the penalties for absences or tardies are light enough that a few won’t hurt them. If they get to the point of actually having disciplinary consequences for their tardies, at that point you can start having discussions with parents to see if something the parents are doing is causing the kids to be late.
What’s that saying about having all the accountability but none of the agency?
Side note: triaging doesn’t really imply a mandate for action. A teacher can make a note to follow up or mark a tardy slip without verbally repremanding the child on the spot.
To elaborate, I’ve consistently noticed a blind spot in lemmy when it comes to teachers and education. There is always a consistent failure to recognize the hard limits of available resources. The common wisdom here seems to be that a local tax base can support an unlimited amount of education spending, and that any problem in education can be solved by throwing more money at the problem. “Just hire more teachers” is the lazy zero-thought solution trotted out to any issue in education. I think it comes from lemmy’s left-leaning politics. Which is fine. But even socialists need to understand the concept of opportunity cost. Even if the economy was entirely state run, there are still hard limits on available resources.
There seems to be a great inability to recognize that teachers are actual human beings working very real jobs. And every time you tell a teacher, “the solution is to hire more teachers,” you are betraying the actual teachers. Because the teachers know they have to actually work around real-world limits in resources. And every time you tell a teacher, “just hire more teachers,” you’re indicating you are not seriously attempting to address the real challenges and limits of education. (I realize you didn’t explicitly say it, but your comment implies that resources are infinite.)
One thing teachers have to do is to design their classroom instruction and policies around the real limits of available resources, and that includes time. Often times you will deliberately write policies to require little investigation, simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day. For example, your suggestion was to follow-up after class, but that’s still time the teacher will have to spend litigating every excuse. If there’s five students late in each class, and you teach six classes, and it’s five minutes each? That’s two and a half hours of phone calls, just for one day’s tardies!
My dude, the assertion here is “there’s no need to be condescending to a small child for actions outside of their sphere of control”.
That obviously wasn’t the part I was responding to. There’s more than one point floating around this discussion. No need to take the bad faith approach and assume I’m responding to the blame issue. No need to be rude.
There’s no need to shame students. But I’m talking specifically about why schools have policies like this. Often you need to design policies so that blame isn’t assigned. Instead of litigating every late homework assignment, you except X number of late homeworks. Or you simply accept none and give opportunities for extra credit.
Teachers often have to design policies so that they don’t need to do a bunch of litigation. Instead you have blameless policies and simply have enough buffer that a few negative occurrences that aren’t the kid’s fault won’t affect their grade.
That obviously wasn’t the part I was responding to.
Then what were you responding to. The comment you responded to literally only said one thing, about talking to a child. So yeah, that is what you were responding to.
There’s more than one point floating around this discussion. No need to take the bad faith approach and assume I’m responding to the blame issue. No need to be rude.
No there wasn’t. You were the one that brought up everything else. The only thing being discussed was talking shit to a child.
But I’m talking specifically about why schools have policies like this.
Policies like what!?!? Blaming children?
Often you need to design policies so that blame isn’t assigned.
I think you must be a robot.
They asked who would say that to a kid. And I said any teacher that needs to run an actual classroom. Then I explained why so many teachers have policies like this.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with telling a kid, “sorry, I can’t dig into every excuse for every tardy and late homework. You get three free tardies and three free late homeworks. It’s ultimately your responsibility, and for unpredictable accidents, you’re covered.”
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with instructing students that they are ultimately responsible for their actions. There will be times in life where they simply have to be at a certain place and certain time.
Depending on whether or not there’s punishment, I might be somewhat OK with this. The whole point of school is to prepare kids for adult life, where your boss may not care why you were late, even if the circumstances were completely out of your control.
I mean, maybe in middle school or better yet high school absolutely. Primary usually means Kindergarten to 5th/6th grade in the US so mostly under 10s
That’s why I said it depends on whether or not there’s an actual punishment involved. If it’s just a finger wag and a calm “you need to be on time”, I’m not concerned. If the kid’s actually getting in trouble, with associated punishment, then that’s definitely not OK.
Nothing better to prepare for the horrors of the modern world than loading kids with guilt about things beyond their control as early as possible.
Part of life is learning to prepare for the unexpected. A lot of people are frequently late through a combination of circumstances and their own poor preparation. Random events will happen. You will hit an unpredictable traffic snarl. If you plan your schedule with zero margin, then you are failing to plan properly.
This is honestly a very important lesson for kids to learn. If they have a traffic ticket, and they get a court summons, they damn well better be in court, prepared, at the appropriate hour. The judge isn’t going to want to hear your excuse why you’re late. Unless you’re in the hospital, the judge is going to issue a warrant for your arrest. You can shout this is unfair til you’re red in the face, but there are simply times in life where not being on time has very real consequences.
A similar harshness exists for job interviews. If you’re late, forget it. It’s simply your responsibility to plan for the unexpected.
Sure, sometimes people are late purely due to circumstances. Sometimes you’re subject to large unpredictable delays. If a family member needs to be rushed to the hospital, that’s hours you’re going to lose with no way to predict it.
But 99% of the time when people are late, they’re late due to the ordinary everyday hurdles that should simply be planned for. Traffic is not a valid excuse for showing up 10 minutes late. For something important, you should just have a margin that large built into your schedule. Shit happens. And at some point, failing to plan for random but completely expected delays is your fault, not the fault of circumstance.
Everything you are saying in this thread is the exact opposite of what child care experts say. It’s like you went and thought “hmm all these scientists are wrong, so I’ll say the exact opposite”.
Care to cite a paper?