I'm Tired of Playing Pretend

Basically all school admin, as well as parents and society at large, suffer from the shared delusion that if a teacher makes the right choices, he can "make" a student behave. This is not true. Students are autonomous and cannot be forced to do anything aside from what they choose to do. In the past, teachers handled this by threatening the student in various ways. "You can do whatever you want, but so can I, and if you do something wrong, I will react." In the distant past, that reaction was beating the student. When that became unacceptable, it shifted into sending the student to the office, suspending the student, giving him detention, and so on. There was also the natural consequence that the student who misbehaves will almost certainly perform poorly in class and get a bad grade. Over time, however, these threats lost their potency. Using violence is now (rightfully) banned. Consequences like detention and suspension have grown much rarer, and in my experience students don't care whether they get punished; at least, they don't care nearly enough to change their behavior. Grades also don't matter to them at all. They get passed on no matter what they do, and even if they don't, few of my students express any concern for failing or being unable to graduate. Further complicating matters is the fact that a teacher has many responsibilities, and punishing an individual student takes a lot of time that may be better spent elsewhere. In my experience, entire classes typically misbehave at once, and in the time I spend misdirecting or punishing a particular student, the rest of the class grows much noisier. The consequence for me is that there is always a base level of noise in my classroom because students refuse to shut up, and at every moment of my lesson I have to decide whether to teach or to pause class to give a whole group reminder, which they ignore anyway. Sometimes I choose to teach, and as a result, I'm not choosing to punish, which means the students don't face any consequences for their misbehavior. But the only alternative is to stop teaching altogether and spend the entire class trying to quiet the students. I'm really tired of evaluations that punish me for the choices my students make. I love teaching, but I spend very little classtime teaching, because all of my time goes towards managing behavior, which is fully ineffective anyway. I sometimes hear other teachers discuss the strategies they use for classroom management. I see this as missing the forest for the trees. A teacher's job is to help people learn, not control their behavior, and I don't think that should be a consideration in the first place. tl;dr teachers can't force students to behave, and let's stop pretending they can submitted by /u/thetruegasolineman [link] [comments]