Totem Middle School students walked out of class to demand discipline for unruly students, reports the Everett (Washington) Herald.
Claiming they’re sometimes afraid to go to class, they asked administrators to dole out tougher and more equitable punishments for things such as fighting, bringing alcohol to school and smoking marijuana.
“The students that have been committing these offenses have been doing them multiple times and the most they get is a two- or three-day suspension,” said eighth-grader Farrah Wolgamott, who helped organized the protest. “We don’t really feel safe because they don’t get expelled. We think people are going to bring it to the next level and bring guns and knives to school.”
Administrators plan to require students who walked out to come to school on a day they’d otherwise be free to discuss problems at the school.
Via Jim Miller’s Sound Politics.
“Administrators plan to require students who walked out to come to school on a day they’d otherwise be free to discuss problems at the school.”
Right. Because every hour of the school day is filled to the max with meaningful activities, and taking 2 hours to talk about disruptions in the classroom would be a waste of that time. Once again, school administrators miss a chance to really educate kids.
It sounds to me as if the kids were attempting to educate the administration. The kids are taking action to confront a worrying situation.
I love it. Good for those kids.
A few thoughts come to mind here. The reporter who wrote the newspaper article seems not to doubt that the event was entirely student organized and led. That’s possible, I suppose, but it seems unlikely. The idea that students want good discipline is certainly not unexpected. But for most students this usually takes the form of resentment of the unfairness and practical disadvantages of poor discipline. Common sense, it seems to me, would lead one to believe there may be some covert leadership. Hopefully parents as well as students are concerned about poor discipline and want to improve the situation. If that’s the case wouldn’t it be more sensible for parents to act more directly?
Perhaps they have tried and been frustrated.
But regardless of its genuineness, it does point out once again that discipline is very important in schools. This article, or the protesters, make it seem that the cure for the problem is simply to crack down, to be tougher on offenders. That may be true to one extent or another, but it’s not the whole story. I have long argued that discipline is not easy. I think the dynamics are not well understood, and that shameful lack of understanding is promoted by an even more shameful ideological position of educational “leaders” for at least the last hundred years. The ideology says that if we really care, and if we follow our ideals, then we won’t have discipline problems. Therefore we won’t study discipline. We won’t teach about it in ed school, and we won’t talk about in job interviews, and we certainly won’t talk about it to the media. So when idealists who are far removed from the schools and know nothing about education decide that students should have a bill of rights of some sort, we have no rebuttal. We have no well thought out perspective that could lead to constructive social policy.
When I taught in public schools, many years ago, I was not very good at handling discipline problems. But over time I felt I had good reason to think that a lot of school administrators (though not all by any means) were also not very good at it. But I did form some ideas on discipline, and they’re all on my website. Here’s a link: http://www.brianrude.com/Dconten.htm
> come to school on a day they’d otherwise be
> free to discuss problems at the school
sounds like they free to talk on any day with a walkout.
might be make it more palatable by calling it a teach-in rather than a walkout.