DVDs, p****s and stamina

I’m walking home from work. As I come across four teenagers in hoodies, one of them can’t resist: “Got any DVDS for sale? DVD? DVD?”

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A student tries to barge into the classroom I am in today. I let the student I’m teaching out first, then keep the little nuisance from entering. “Don’t touch me! Keep your hands off me, you pri©k!” I lock the door, and when he manages to con another teacher into unlocking it, coming in to make a fool of himself again, he goes around yelling “Don't touch me you pri©k”. I’d love to grab my hands around his collar and throw him out, but unfortunately school rules in this country forbid this sort of contact, and my next student has arrived anyway, and I let the other teacher deal with it.

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Teenage kids in London do little to surprise me these days. If you’ve read this blog from about a year or two back, you’ll notice that I’ve stopped blogging about these sort of incidents – they still happen, don’t bother me as much now. You could class my reaction as defeatist, since I don’t acknowledge any of this rude behaviour to give it any credence, but from experience (and plenty of that) I’ve learnt you cannot reason with Unreason. Some people are like that – so starved for attention, they’ll try to bait you into a verbal or physical fight which they’ll then try to escalate, possibly with knives, thinking eventually they can pin the cause on you. I might not feel I’ve won, but I’d be more successful teaching Mandarin to squirrels than talking sense into such people. And there are a lot of kids like that in schools nowadays, truanting lessons, going around to other classrooms, trying to make a nuisance of themselves, and disrupting those classes. They like the attention. They like it that you're stopping to speak with them. They like it that by pretending to be dumb, they aggravate you and wind you up. It might sound silly to you, but I know of some state schools where teachers routinely lock themselves (and sometimes their students) in their classrooms to keep other teenagers out, so they can actually get some work done and some peace. Me? I’m just glad I bailed out of class teaching years ago.

Rules in the Far East are stricter. In Singapore headmasters can administer caning (and in front of the whole school, too) to miscreants. At one of my schools a student pointed his middle finger at me, and was rewarded with two strokes of the cane on his palm during assembly the next day. You might question if the punishment was proportionate, but that sort of insolence and rudeness is not tolerated, which is why there are fewer behavioural problems there, and the teachers can concentrate on teaching. Here? At one of the schools I taught at, you had to mete out “warnings” for each instance of rude behaviour – two such warnings a week would warrant a lunchtime detention, and three, an after-school detention. Which meant a student could yell “Fu©k” at me three times a week, whereupon the justice I deserved would be to have to stay with him for an extra hour after school, and set him some work to keep him occupied – and that’s after liaising with his parents to make sure he did the detention on a day that was convenient for him. The same system meant the 30 students in a class could individually yell obscenities at me once a week, get a warning, and get away with it. (The warnings system reset itself each week so students began Mondays on a clean slate.)

Just out of interest, could anyone enlighten me on what schools, student behavior, and systems of punishement are like where you are? I know there are teachers and ex-teachers who read this blog, but even perspectives from a non-teaching point of view are very welcome. Are schools in your area bad? Is the above behavior typical? Are teenagers a law unto themselves? People in Britain (at least, the teachers that I talk to) seem to think it’s always worse on that side of the Atlantic, but I can’t see that’s true – maybe they’re just trying to console themselves for the remaining years until they reach pensionable age.

Like I said, I’m so glad I’m not a state school teacher any more. I don’t have the day-to-day stamina for that - the rudeness, the lack of achievement, the petty behavior. I’d be surprised if British society, which is increasingly full of such behaviour from a very young age, doesn’t implode within five generations from now.

Teachers - run for it!