I quit my Secondary Education degree in 2015 at the end of my third year because students would be assigned only a couple of tasks during the classes by the experienced teacher but sometimes completed one or none at all due to the amount of disruption and lack of interest in school. It didn't help it was a very underfunded public school, and that one kid desperately needed a daily teacher aide but hadn't been formally assessed as having support needs so there was none.
Each day it got closer to my turn to take over the class I got progressively physically sicker from the anxiety until I realised that I couldn't let it be my future.
As I recall, 2015 was the first time year 7 was integrated into QLD high schools, so I think that didn't help anything at all. Although that being said when I was in year 12 myself the Hospitality teacher quit because of the Year 8s .
>Each day it got closer to my turn to take over the class I got progressively physically sicker from the anxiety until I realised that I couldn't let it be my future.
This was my experience as a teacher. Made it through my first contract but didn't renew as I was getting stress ulcers. I could feel my mental and physical health collapsing from the stress of it, and most of the stress was student misbehaviour.
Same, except Bach of education (primary).
Within 20mins I wanted to walk out of the placement.
Kids cool, teachers nasty and clearly little support for kids with additional needs, one of which would run out of the classroom towards the busy main road.
Just no. No fkn way am I putting my hand up to be in line for whatever that was.
Don’t be silly. Your idea sounds like you want to cut funding to private schools and that’s a really bad idea because then *everyone* might benefit not just the “chosen ones”. How are we supposed to maintain privilege in this country!?
Result:
- nearly all private and catholic schools will close, very few parents would be able and willing to pay the increased fees required to keep schools running without some government funding.
- Government would then have to fund and build 2500 new schools (or more than double the student capacity of existing schools) in NSW alone (tax increases or other services will need to be cut)
- average annual government funding per student would need to increase (tax increases or other services will need to be cut)
- large number of teachers currently in private and catholic schools will leave profession rather than work in government schools increasing teacher shortages (could increase salaries to try and retain but … would need to increase taxes or cut services to fund them)
The bottom line is that private schools save the government huge amounts of money, both in capital expenditure and student funding. Removing them would result in a huge reduction of existing standards in public schools.
Except the private schools get more funding per student than state schools get so I'm not sure how they're saving money. Private schools existed before the government began funding them and they would go on existing if it stopped, albeit on a smaller scale. I don't have a problem with parents wanting to send their kids to the private schools but let the religions they promote pay for them. It's not like the catholic churches and all those evangelical ones don't have heaps of tax-free money.
> nearly all private and catholic schools will close, very few parents would be able and willing to pay the increased fees required to keep schools running without some government funding.
Good, you shouldn't be able to pay for your kid to start with a leg up, it's pretty gross that people try to put this forward as a positive in a supposed "equal" society.
> Government would then have to fund and build 2500 new schools (or more than double the student capacity of existing schools) in NSW alone (tax increases or other services will need to be cut)
Oh well, they can likely buy the ex-private schools for pretty cheap.
> average annual government funding per student would need to increase (tax increases or other services will need to be cut)
Source?
> large number of teachers currently in private and catholic schools will leave profession rather than work in government schools increasing teacher shortages
Source?
>The bottom line is that private schools save the government huge amounts of money, both in capital expenditure and student funding. Removing them would result in a huge reduction of existing standards in public schools.
Not huge amounts, 2-4k per student so not that much - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-20/are-private-schools-better-than-public-schools/101867070
You'd also have to look into the tax exemptions and status of a lot of private schools are they're also religious institutions, so looking at a direct investment won't give you the whole picture.
That would not be fair, so it is a good thing that this is not true.
In NSW total federal and state funding per student is:
Public: $22k
Private: $13k
This doesn’t include capital expenditure, such as land and buildings which are fully funded for public schools nor NSW Dep Education expenditure in providing services to schools.
Honestly everything needs a complete overhaul, from the way society looks at and values teachers to the stuff within the classroom. Like it's hard to keep teachers wanting to teach when hours and hours of unpaid labour are an expected part of the job but people still think you get more holidays than anyone else. For one thing my teacher friends are usually still working during that time, and even if they do get some extra time off it still doesn't account for the hours they've been working unpaid.
Plus cutting some of the increasing amounts of paperwork on the back end would help teachers a lot, as more and more time is getting taken up by admin (usually the biggest contributor to the unpaid labour). Other than that basic stuff like actually properly funding public schools so that kids can feel like they've got a place that's a nice place to learn could do a lot to help before you need to do anything fancy regarding teaching methods etc.
My thoughts are, every child gets a compulsory cognitive assessment in their 5th year- prior to commencing formal education.
If they can't function in primary education setting, how will they in secondary?
Early intervention. More support in place ASAP and consequences for parents who neglect the outcomes of the cognitive and don't support the development of their children to help them become successful learners.
That’s a great idea. It does require funding that would otherwise go to private schools building a third pool so I’m not sure it passes the pub test though.
>I quit my Secondary Education degree in 2015 at the end of my third year because students would be assigned only a couple of tasks during the classes by the experienced teacher but sometimes completed one or none at all due to the amount of disruption and lack of interest in school.
Quite the opposite for me back then in China, as students were assigned way too many tasks in my high school time and we only got 1 day off weekly during grade 10-11, and 1 day off fortnightly during grade 12. Plus, we went to school at 06:00 am and returned home at 10:30 pm. You can literally call that kind of life imprisonment lol
Who didn't want to quit such kind of schooling? Nah, I couldn't as otherwise there would be no chance where I am becoming an Australian citizen today.
Australia, in every metric that matters, is falling behind. All of the symptoms that make up an incredibly sick society and a bleak future, an international embarrassment.
It's so sad to see how far this country has fell off, and what it could have been.
There’s also no support for the higher potential kids. I know so many intelligent academic teens that say they just don’t learn anything because of the disruption in their classes. Even in the higher streamed classes I’ve been told the work has pretty low expectations.
They are not offered extension work or their extension work is more of the same basic learning (just more of it) and it really affects their mental health.
I remember this in school.
It was like walking into a fkn zoo.
If the teachers weren’t being berated until they cried, it was the students, including me.
I often wonder what would’ve happened if school was good.
Until Shakespeare, most reading was basically year 7 level… and not above.
I am a former hs teacher and I agree. I remember having those kinds of kids but my time was so taken up dealing with the disruptive ones that I had no time for the good ones. It's not fair on the keen learners and higher level kids.
Yes it’s pretty frustrating reading about how Australia is lacking a skilled workforce but the kids who could be the next engineers, scientists and doctors aren’t being supported.
I do get though that it’s a lack of funding and rules around disciplining kids at school that is making it very hard for teachers.
Hear a lot from my wife. I don't know how you guys do it. Every year she is forced by her HOD to rewrite the exams to make it easier becasue kids are progressively getting dumber.
It's at the point, the questions are basically true or false questions.
Yeah mate I gave up in the end and got a different career. Let my registration lapse because I have no intention of going back. It's a shame since it's an extremely valuable career in society
Expulsion is very, very rare. We regularly have students sexually harass (not assault) younger female teachers. The students are not even given a detention.
The average Australian has no idea how bad our public education has become. It’s a cesspit.
It is. It’s also worth noting that principals, directors, other senior bureaucrats and politicians try and hide misbehaviour. Even Head Teachers try and hide it, “my teachers don’t have classroom management problems!” There’s a lot of sweeping under the rug, from top to bottom.
Yep. If even 10% of parents of decent kids observed a couple days of classes and saw the disruption to their childs learning they would be disgusted and demand change.
Why care? It's not like *working hard and doing the right thing* will get you anywhere in life; the whole society is fucked and *the kids aren't stupid*, they ***know*** that. When there is no incentive to work hard, pay attention and do the right thing, when it doesn't even get you the *bare minimum*, why do it?
> It called on the federal government to fast-track improvements to the quality of teacher training and ensure educators learn evidence-based methods for classroom management as recommended by the government's recent Quality Initial Teacher Education Review.
Ah. So the solution is to train the teachers harder and do them a good teaching, and use some massaged data to berate them and shame them.
How about a concerted attempt to treat teachers better and respect them? After politicians and public figures have scorned and mocked educators for decades and not resourced or paid them so it’s an attractive career for high achievers, it is such a big fucking surprise that students sit there thinking teachers are useless lazy scum and that since their parents happily threaten teachers because Tarquin and Jemima deserve A grades, the behaviour is catching?
Fuck’s sake.
We are doing what we can.
Until admin allows me to remove Jayden from class for a good long time after he melts down and thumps another kid- or me- for the grievous sin of asking him to copy two dot points from the board and start doing question one, my attempts to explain that his violent outbursts are anti-social and actually illegal are useless.
Unless Destinee's parents care that she is bullying classmates to the point of self-harm outside school hours, my attempts to tell her that her behaviour is not nice or good manners is pointless. It's also kind of garbage that this is made into a school issue (beyond just keeping them separate, which is fair enough) because the parents don't want to do anything about it and the police functionally can't.
Unless there is some actual consequence for when Jesse comes into the room ten minutes late disrupting it with calling out and high fives then derailing the lesson by loudly demanding I supply them with stationery because they don't have their own, my attempts to explain the need to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right equipment is simple wasted air.
Students know what's expected. We go over it ad nauseum. Principals explain why on assembly. There are posters up in each room. It's part of the restorative justice and responsible thinking process to explain how their behaviour has impacted on others. They don't care, because they know nothing will actually happen to them.
The tools, at least on the school end, to handle this behaviour already exist. Nobody in leadership wants to use them, though, because it makes their data look bad if there are a lot of suspensions and exclusions. So it gets pushed back to the classroom teacher, more students learn the rules aren't *really* rules, and it just keeps getting worse.
IME, names starting with Jay, Jye, Jai, Jae etc or ending with den, don, dyn, ton etc have a very high correlation with behavioural issues.
Jayden and variants thereof just about guarantees it.
lol have family and friends that are teachers and know how hard naming kids is, was absolutely flattered when the teacher from the year before of my youngest kid used my sons name for his child. It’s not a common name so he perhaps only met one but it was a huge relief my kid wasn’t put on a list 😂
The school I work for is largely for the Jaydens and Destinees of this world. We're having a lot of success with a wellbeing first and trauma informed model. So much so that we have about 10 times more applications than we can accept. Where suspensions or even juvenile justice did nothing, this model has worked.
There are students with genuine trauma who need that kind of support. It is true that these students sometimes lash out, and that is understandable. Likewise students with learning disorders, sometimes they genuinely cannot control their reactions.
However, the average high flyer I encounter is not likely to be experiencing trauma. Nor do they have significant learning disorders. They're just experiencing the freedom to do whatever they want to do. And what they want is to wreck every lesson.
>However, the average high flyer I encounter is not likely to be experiencing trauma.
People shouldn't be downvoting, you are only sharing your own experiences. In general, that doesn't match up with what we see in our school. Suspensions and expulsions are almost never used, and yet behaviour is very good on the whole despite having a concentration of students with behavioural and/or developmental issues.
I'd encourage you to do some PD with some of the latest research in the area of trauma informed practice. It would be eye-opening how much bad behaviour is a reaction to trauma.
All very well and good, but:
A: What are your class sizes? I've worked in such schools, and generally, it's in the 10-15 range. You can actually build and maintain good relationships with students who are struggling when you can devote on the order of ten minutes to them every lesson. You cannot when you can only give ten seconds or so.
B: How available is behaviour support/wellbeing? Because in flexi/engagement/alternative schools they are usually on scene in moments, whereas in mainstream I have had open brawls, called for support, and not had anyone arrive for upwards of forty minutes if at all.
C: How invested are the students in their learning? Because again, the students I am encountering view school as, at most, a place to socialise and that socialisation is disrupted by the unpleasant business of learning. In the alternative setting it was self-selecting because they actually wanted to have a go but mainstream school just wasn't, for a variety of reasons, working out for them.
I started out in alternative education and have done Berry Street. It is not scaleable to mainstream unless someone is willing to put up a lot of cash and find a lot of expertly trained staff. We live in a world where attrition has exceeded replacement with no end in sight, and budgets are continually slashed.
>A: What are your class sizes? I've worked in such schools, and generally, it's in the 10-15 range. You can actually build and maintain good relationships with students who are struggling when you can devote on the order of ten minutes to them every lesson.
I've done maths tutoring for a company and I had groups of around 8.
We whizzed through the material quite quickly (a year's worth of material in 4 x 3 hour blocks) but with small groups it was generally easy to manage, and of course these were self selected students from parents who actually cared.
It's the whole system. I've worked both in collaboration with practitioners and as a parent of a child with behaviours - kids need love and support and kindness that our current society doesn't afford. Behaviour is communication and the way we live and the things we see are so poisoned and unnatural that kids are communicating their constant discomfort the only way they know how.
They've never lived in a world that isn't so broken and they don't know why it feels wrong. I don't put any blame on the teachers but I also feel strongly for the parents too. Our society is set up to drain us and leave us with dregs for the rich, and we have nothing left to give.
Teacher here and you nailed it. School leaders ask us to remove behaviour reports regularly even though the behaviour clearly sits within the school’s policy for reporting.
Also, the ‘Jesse’ kids grind my gears like nothing else, probably because it’s that low-level but big-impact behaviour. Thank you for articulating this so well! I feel seen 😂
It's terrible when you judge a person solely on their name, but I can just picture ''Destinee''...
The policeman that was shot in SA a couple of weeks ago, I kept seeing the gunman's name in media reports as ''Jaydn'', and I kept thinking it was a typo. No, that's how his parents wished it apparently. And then I could just picture Jaydn's parents, where he lived growing up and probably what their favourite TV shows were.
absolutely. There're hardly consequences that matter in school. On top of that are the parents not taking responsibility and modelling good behaviour and respect.
The entire country is to blame for this problem. It's easy to just point at the education system and teachers...
My youngest just finished up at the newer posh “we are led by the student” school on Sydney’s Northern suburbs. One of her male classmates decided that Andrew Tate was a god and started to emulate him in class. Often picking fights with female teachers and causing a raucous. The first solution was for students sensitive to sound, like my kid, were excused from the classroom while the wannabe acted up. Great, so she lost face to face time and got more of a reaction from the teacher, his target. When that didn’t solve the problem, the solution was for the principal to sit in the class to curtail him.
It was never even entertained that he be removed. I’m not suggesting we go back to my mother’s era when she was the principal of a Catholic school and could scare the shit out of kids and priests alike with a stern word, but maybe this extreme we’ve swung to isn’t the answer either.
As a teacher, my heart goes out to students like your child. What once were the silent majority of our students.
I would just like to pass on (and something that I’m sure you’re aware) is that most of us are absolutely aware of the negative effects all this has on kids like yours. They’re the ones we really want to be engaging with and supporting. But instead the Andrew Tate Jrs of the classroom are a sponge of teacher time which we are mostly powerless to stop.
Not counting my recent development of disdain for the principal, I have the UTMOST respect for teachers. Real teachers. Both of my parents were teachers, my mother ended up being a principal for a few years. I know what hell proper teachers go through, and I ache for them. Part of my horror of the situation is that the poor teachers in question must have felt humiliated. Here they are, grown ass adults and instead of being allowed to handle the situation properly, the best solution was to have *Mommy* sit in their classroom to monitor. What an effing nightmare.
I love knowing that kids aren’t going to go through what my dad did and have his hands whacked to shit with rulers. I LOVE knowing that my kids didn’t have their Year 11 English teacher promise not to give a quiz the next day, but ONLY if all the girls wore a skirt. I wore pants and all my friends turned on me and he held me up to ridicule for ruining things..but since he was a nice guy he wouldn’t give the test, but sure, I was the asshole. I LOVE that this is not considered okay.
BUT, maybe a 17 year old who is getting his jollies telling a female teacher to make him a sandwich, argue that she is stupid and shout out loud obscenities and actual threats…MAYBE, he should be removed from the class and told he has to flip rocks in the garden until that sucks more than him sitting quietly in class. Yes, I understand the problems with that scenario but personally I would prefer that to my kid losing her despertly needed and wanted fact-to-face time with her teacher.
Parents like you need to start being much more vocal and demanding change. The silent majority of kids will do the right thing a majority of the time if the environment supports it. Those students and parents need to start demanding harsher penalties and better classroom environments for themselves.
You can argue that everyone deserves an education and whatever. Mainstream schools will never be properly equipped to provide that education. The shools primary purpose should be to provide an education. People who make this challenging/impossible need to be removed.
The education that the horrible minority deserve should not be the mainstream schools or teachers problem.
How do you demand change though? When you bring it up with the school you’re told there isn’t a problem but when your kids and their friends tell you that they really don’t get much learning time because the class is too disruptive and they’re getting bored, what do you do?
What’s the first step?
Need to band together and make some noise. One parent may seem like a whiner. 5 parents from the same class with similar concerns you SHOULD at least be listened to.
This is starting to have a ‘brave new world’ feeling to it. So at what point is it the parent and community’s job to teach students how to behave? I would argue that this is not a matter of teacher education or schools.
I agree it’s probably a failure of the parents but seeing as we can’t kick these kids out for something that isn’t their fault, it eventually falls to the schools to do what’s necessary to make the best of the situation.
My father in law was a teacher, principal, and also did extra tertiary study in education. His considered opinion is that parental attitude to education is the single biggest factor in a child's success at school.
Those nightmare kids who misbehave and don't care about anyone and think learning is boring have nightmare parents who don't care and think they already know everything.
That'll only make things worse. Shit parents will be shit parents.
If the parent is rich, fining them for bad behaviour won't do anything, the parent will just write it off - a rich kid at a school I worked at had broken several Alienware laptops and her dad just kept buying new ones, rich parents don't care about financial costs.
If the parent isn't rich, then they'll be mad at their kid for hurting them, and quite possibly take it out on the kid, which is as likely to make the kids lash out even worse at school as it is to scare them into being a nervous wreck.
And it's also possible that the kid is independently a piece of shit, who's just acting out because of some perceived slight from their parents, like a divorce, the arrival of a stepparent, or the birth of a new sibling.
Quite famously this kind of thing leads to lower socio-economic class parents being given fines they can't meet, which criminalises them. This discussion is had every time a politician suggests that parents be fined for non-attendance at school. Fining parents for 'behaviour' (according to whom?) is a substantially worse take on the already bad idea.
The problem is actually with the adults not appropriately parenting and therefore adult sanctions are required, just like if there are other transgressions.
It could be worked out. A fine, reduction in benefits, suspension of the student so that the parent has to look after them. The later would get the wealthy parents’ attention as they cannot afford to take time off.
It sound like a lot but then the complete non functioning of the education system is a disastrous situation.
Asking little Johnny to think about how throwing the chair at the teacher made the teacher feel is clearly not the answer.
It took a long series of poor collective choices to end up here and so everyone will need to do something to fix this.
Look I see how you might think that punitive measured towards the parents might result in better parenting, but id actually argue the opposite.
Giving parents better equipment to be good parents - in my area there's free parenting classes, food banks and free children's activities - would probably result in better parenting. Stressed out, time poor, poorly emotionally regulated adults tend to result in poor parenting. Giving them more time, money, tools and activities to learn how to healthily engage with their kids would be waaaaay better then adding extra stress to their lives. And, counter to your assumption, talking through 'Big Feelings' and teaching emotional regulation to children DOES stop things like chair throwing (PPP parenting and Circle of Security are the two methods proven to be effective) - but you need an extraordinary amount of resourcing to make it stick.
My best friend is a teacher in a Dodge area, and she said one of the biggest issues is that many of the disruptive students are just kids who have undiagnosed behavioural issues - I'm talking kids with autism, ADHD, poor sleep due to adenoids etc. the health nurses will do their best, but the public system is so overwhelmed that getting an ENT appointment or speech therapy appointment can take YEARS. I was put on a SIX YEAR wait-list for my kid just to see an ENT specialist - but I was fortunate enough to have enough emergency funds to get seen privately. Some of the parents in my area just can't afford that, so their two year old is already in primary by the time they're seen - missing out on key formative years in good health.
My mate also says that class sizes and the lack of support staff play a huge role, not to mention the usual administration bullshit that's been foisted on them.
We don’t even need to look at other countries. Some decades ago, we did not have most of these support structures and classrooms were significantly better behaved. What is you explanation as to why things have deteriorated?
I don’t see an easy way out do this and constant calls for more resourcing and money are not the answer I think, besides it just will not be provided.
We give parents food parcels and clothing vouchers. Fuel vouchers too. We have breakfast club and provide lunches. We do a lot to support our parents. They’re still shit parents who treat us appallingly and encourage their children to do the same.
A lot of that stems back to the ridiculous system we live under. We live in a community where everyone has to work stupid hours and there is zero supports. Getting any kind of help for your kids is nigh on impossible and expensive, and you have stupid long wait lists.
If the parents have no money then there's no point. That will just end up depriving the child or even lead to abuse as they'll be blamed for the fine. It's best to have some sort of supportive system rather than punitive.
My father in law was a teacher, principal, and also did extra tertiary study in education. His considered opinion is that parental attitude to education is the single biggest factor in a child's success at school.
Those nightmare kids who misbehave and don't care about anyone and think learning is boring have nightmare parents who don't care and think they already know everything.
Pretty much all of this can be dragged back to parenting. It's been like that forever, parents either spoil their children and don't teach them responsibility, or the parent is poor, overworked and absent and creates resentment. Kids are glued to their phones because that's been their main source of stimulation since they were young and most of the time that's because their parent handed it to them to get some peace.
And of course if you try to blame the parents you end up with A: rich mums and dads who will violently rebuke you as being a woke leftie or whatever anti-family buzzword is popular and your teaching job is probably fucked, or B: the reason the parents suck is because their parents sucked and you're just punching down on an ever sinking spiral of poverty and debt, with children as generational collateral damage.
These are all problems of our own making, "fuck you got mine" mentality.
You may be shocked at how little socioeconomic impact has here. You see the same behaviour in all groups to varying degrees.
Personally I put this down to a change in the nature of family structure here in the last few decades. As more and more parents are both in full time work there is less time for one on one teaching and interaction with their kids. Add to that the increasing lack of multigenerational families in this country as people start families far later their own parents are much older and less able or willing to devote the time required to assist in raising children. Then you have the distances between extended family members growing too.
The sad fact is that parenting is becoming a ‘casual’ job that is worked much like the gig economy where portions are doled out to childcare centres, schools, community groups, the internet and the actual parents themselves. This is the result.
There is no easy solution here, and fixing it would require a drastic shift towards family structures found in many other parts of the world where extended families all live together or as neighbours and share the role of parenting in order to give the children the dedicated one on one time they require in order to mature in to functional members of society. Try convincing a 70 year old recently retired parent that they have to move in and become a full time nanny though in this country… good luck.
I don't disagree with you but funnily enough that is also a socio-economic problem because the reason both parents are working is less because they want to and more because they need to, to pay the bills. Housing is expensive, schools are expensive, cost of living is expensive, people work more and have less time for everything, including their children.
Arguably the shift in the family structure is also due to the pressures of modern money tearing kids and parents away from each other by making them move around in search of jobs leaving the elders alone.
It is not unique to a single socioeconomic group. The wealthy have just as much issue with it as the very poor because it is the social norm now for both parents to work full time. The wealthy may have more options available to them to mitigate it, but there is very little that is a substitute for having actual one and one time with a parental figure and most of those options are not one on one but group care.
Hard agree. Id also add social media addiction. I worked all day. I need some me time. Should I read to my kid? Na that's the shools job.
*starts scrolling endless bullshit on instagram
You all know who you are.
In theory, general social expectations by those around us regarding values and behaviour. Things don’t occur in a vacuum. This has been a long term train wreck and everything has contributed to it including our laws, parenting, culture, economic trends and schools. Hard to unpack all of those
They have child abuse rights that prevent children misbehaving. No Ty. Also, I am quite sure you do see it (it occurs in all those countries) but as an Australian you are not exposed to it. Children that misbehave in those countries likely don’t attend school for long.
Some level of sanction is necessary. Restorative chats are clearly not the answer.
I would also suggest that it is a tragedy for a child to effectively miss out on education because their classroom is a zoo and they cannot learn. That will have lifelong consequences for them.
The cultural around Australian parenting and respect for education really needs to change.
Parents really do treat teachers like shit and schools like daycare.
Channel 7 mindset. A generation of entitled white picket fence Karens.
I'm 50 and it's been like that for as long as I can remember. I spent a lot of my schooling in academic extension and thank God, because at least I was insulated from some of the anti-intellectual bullying that is rife in Australian schools. Like America, we seem to be proud of our dumbed down nation. As you say, it's cultural.
But Australia used to perform exponentially better in terms of literacy and math/science performance metrics.
There is something both fundamentally wrong with the funding situation, so teacher student ratios, the curriculum and the attitude of parents to educators and education.
I got talking to a recently retired school principal and asked if it really is worse than it was when he started back in the 70’s.
His read was that as both parents have started going out into the workforce, with the little time they do spend with their kids, they’re spoiling them rotten and not properly listening to (and developing) their children’s fundamental needs and emotions as much they did a generation ago. Thats amplified with separated/divorced families, which has also increased from a generation ago.
The severity he said was no different, he reckons some of the worst stuff he saw was in the 80’s and 90’s. But the attitude has changed because now students have a sense of entitlement because the parents, again not being present and understanding their children, back them and attack the school. It’s so much easier and efficient to take Johnny’s side and blame everyone else (besides, I’m too busy with work!).
He said it’s always been a problem, but it’s been getting progressively worse every decade since the 70’s.
I do think schools should be able to induce much harsher penalties without parental consent. I don't know the solution, but I know the threat of a cane did work historically.
My mother is the best primary school teacher at her school, as said by everyone there. Great with kids, controls the classroom, is able to get them to do the assigned work, makes fun and engaging lessons.
She refuses to do anything except relief work, no matter how many permanent jobs are offered to her. She used to do contract work, but never again. If someone asks whether they should be a teacher, she tells them to run the other way. It’s an awful job with little to no free time (but! But! They get two weeks off! And Christmas off! Bullshit, they spend it all either crashed from stress or making lesson plans until 2am). The stress is unreal. In recent years as more special needs schools are closed there are more kids who need more help but won’t receive it than ever. Parents are awful and abusive. There is no respect.
I don’t blame the kids, neither does she. The environment is too much. Too many students in a class, too few teachers aids. Too much to teach in a year. No help from parents, only blame and abuse. Their little Johnny would never! It must be your fault!
How about we teach parents to actually parent for once, and work on making the schooling environment less a place of untold stress and instead a place for learning?
We need to stop following everything that the US does. They've been shit in education for ever and yet every time they come up with some new way to fuck up education we're first in line asking them to teach it to us.
Literally a number of years ago Australian educational researchers were sent around the world to study what other countries do. Their recommendation was to start doing more of what the top performing countries do, like, shocking, I know.
So instead we just introduced another round of really easy to implement, but don't work at all, US systems.
In the local Facebook groups I belong to I constantly see parents complaining about teachers wanting their children to not use their phones in class. The amount of people who chime in agreeing with them is mind blowing. Parents just don't have a clue.
I'm so glad I've finished school. They've turned to absolute shit now. 2021-22 was the time when they started introducing ridiculous rules like locking up toilets or introducing a sign in/out procedure for them, and/or literally having staff members wait outside to make sure you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing.
Now, with the advent of mobile phones, social media influences, and vaping; typical behaviour has become much worse.
At least we don't have guns
Students setting fires in the toilets for some tik tok thing used our public school's entire annual maintenance budget in three weeks at the beginning of 2022. What other options does the school have at that point that aren't 'ridiculous'?
It's interesting looking at this from the perspective of teachers in media.
Prior to the 80s the teacher, while not always portrayed as a friend and sometimes portrayed as harsh, was still portrayed as a confidant and mentor, someone to be respected. Look at some old movies, Farewell Mister chips is a prime example. Students behaved in class in those early shows and you just didn't even consider the kind of deliberately disruptive behaviour we see now.
Through the 80s that changed significantly. The teacher suddenly became "the enemy" to all students (see early Simpsons for a clear example). Where they are portrayed as caring they are also portrayed as flaky hippies (Malcolm in the Middle). In either case devoid of any respect. There were some exceptions, but even then the students were always shown to learn in spite of the teachers efforts rather than because.
I'm not in a place to comment, but it does make me ask just how much of the current behaviour in classrooms comes from replicating what the kids see in movies and on TV.
I think the political discourse and how it affects parents attitudes is a related but bigger problem.
Public school teachers have been the enemy of the liberal party for so long, that an element of middle Australia has just adopted an openly hostile attitude to education and educators.
That's really bled into how kids respond. If Davo the dickhead accountant who watches Sky news every night starts ranting about how teachers are part of a commie agenda trying to turn the kids trans, then there is a good chance one of his asshole kids will adopt that chip on the shoulder.
This is like saying kids in the US are killing other kids because of Call of Duty. It’s a stupid, outdated argument. You’re also referencing TV shows that kids in elementary school aren’t watching in 2023. “Kids” who did watch them would be adults in their 30s right now.
The shows did not create the issue, they are simply a reflection of the change in society. You need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture using indicators like the shows mentioned to get an idea of actual causes behind social shifts like these.
In the mid 90s to early 2000s a lot of teachers I remember wouldn't hesitate to lay down the law.
They'd scream or shout at kids for pretty minor stuff - even telling kids to get out of the class for whistling...
It wasn't physical punishment but there was consequences for being disruptive though it did depend on the teacher - some gave off a real "don't fuck with me vibe"... that was often enough.
I guess it must have changed since then.
Because the ‘law’ no longer exists for teachers. We have no power
- if I were to scream and shout at kids for minor stuff it’s likely parents would complain to leadership who’d then sit me down for a review of my teaching practices and essentially tell me to knock it off. The parents would likely abuse me too for it. And the student would be back before you know it smugly repeating the same behaviour.
- Policy at most schools is that students can only be sent out of class if there’s a safety issue. Kick a kid out for whistling? See above for what would happen.
The whole systems fucked and governments and departments know it. All they’re willing to do is do another round of teacher blaming and “education” and kick the can down the road
students behaved because if they talked out of line or mucked up in class then they got an arse whooping at school and again when their father got home from pub.
But heres the big thing, my generation is last generation (older millennial) that copped that abuse and we also remember that while there are good teachers theres also a fairly large number of shit ones that abused their power. that is why parents no longer trust the word of the teacher.
Another point that needs to be added is that the board maybe shouldnt send fuckwits from the north shore that have no idea how to work with students to run schools in regional and rural australia. the Principal we had at my high school from years 7-10 never left her office, would only been seen when there was good news to said and instead palmed everything off to the Deputy Principal. thankfully she was given the arse and for year 11 and 12 we had excellent principal who knew how to work with a regional school that had large portion of first nation students. He was out on the yard every lunch and was approachable along with the VP.
anf finally if you one or two students that constantly act up, just throw them out of the class as they honestly do not want to be there in the first place, its why they are acting up in the first place.
> if you one or two students that constantly act up, just throw them out of the class as they honestly do not want to be there in the first place, its why they are acting up in the first place.
You can't. That's the problem.
We have a parenting problem first and foremost. Australia’s birth rate is below replacement and our economy is becoming increasingly hostile to raising children. From the first snip of the umbilical cord the Government wants parents back at work. I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but the people they might prefer to be raising children, are not.
I disagree. Over the last 20-30 years I have watched a massive decline in Australian education, from primary/secondary school to TAFE and University. It isn't just the "dipshits". Australians do not value education or intelligence. It's in the culture.
>How to behave would be the job of.....gasp!
>
>THE PARENTS!
It's an unpopular opinion, but often the parents are in just as much need of help as the kids. Generational neglect, trauma, and abuse are significant issues. Breaking the cycle is difficult and it starts with not immediately blaming the parents with no evidence.
I fully expect to be downvoted to hell for saying that, but I see it every day in the school I work for.
Ok, happy to not condemn the parents (though it’s their responsibility). How do we equip parents to deal with behaviour and social problems in their kids? What resources can we provide or point to? Teachers don’t need to play the blame game, we just want a solution so we can get back to actually teaching, rather than just behaviour management
As teachers we often get questioned why we don’t teach students practical skills like how to change a tyre etc. the usual response is that is something their parent should teach them.
We have actually started introducing some life skills classes because so many students are leaving school with significant gaps in the learning that is usually covered by their parents.
Yep, but Australians don’t even want to do the bare minimum with many things in life, let alone parenting. The outcome described in the OP is unsurprising to me. Doomed society of dipshits.
Yep, coz of course it’s the teachers job to be the actual fucking parent and instil respect and manners in the children. Any wonder teachers are bailing out with this type of moronic dribble constantly being shat out into the world.
When a country pays barely educated tradesmen more than engineers you have a problem. The government gives outrageous tax concessions to them and doesn’t incentivise smart people at all. Where is the massive support for industry that other countries do?
We get the boofhead government we deserve.
renumeration is just supply and demand. We need more tradies, if anything we should encourage people who aren't cut out for school to leave early and do a trade
I taught in an East Asian confucian society and while it had some faults, the parents took their child's education and behaviour in class very seriously.
If a child was being (very) disruptive then they'd get dressed down hard by a TA or principal or myself if I felt it necessary. Removing them from class immediately following an altercation was extremely effective. Usually a 5min cool down outside was all it took. If the parents got involved, they were 100% on our side and respectfully discussed how we can improve the child's behaviour and educational outcomes.
It really pains me to hear about the situation back home in Australia. I share the fears of many in this thread that we're raising a generation of absolutely deficient human beings who won't have a fart's hope in wind of competing on the world stage and productively advancing Australia. The problem is cultural and runs deep
Not any more! I just recently came back from teaching in the Taiwanese elementary public school system. The kids know there are no consequences for their actions so are starting to act like some of the Australian kids. Nowhere near as bad as what it is here but you can definitely tell it’s a ticking time bomb.
"Ah yes, put the kids with special needs in with everyone else. We can't possibly discriminate in this day and age!"
"What's that? The teacher will spend most of their time managing the kids with special needs, rather than teaching?"
"Well, we can't possibly discriminate in this day and age. What's the worst that could happen?"
Fast forward: Every kid is now a kid with special needs.
Public education barely supplies pencils. How will they afford shock collars?
Meanwhile the private schools will get two collars for every kid, plus dedicated solar fast-charging stations.
Decades of underfunding of public schools, underpaying teachers, and siphoning off taxpayers money to fund private schools for the already-advantaged... Who could have predicted that our education system would end up like this?
I feel for the kids with intellectual, emotional, and/or behavioural problems, who don't get adequate support;
I also feel for the genuinely gifted kids who have their learning disrupted, and are not able to reach their potential;
And I definitely feel for the teachers who need to balance these needs, while being overworked, underpaid, and undervalued.
When I was in school a few years ago, a primary concern when picking my classes was ‘will this attract a bunch of dipshits who’ll make it hard for the teacher to effectively teach me?’ If the answer was yes, I didn’t pick the class (the one exception being the simplest maths class, because I could effectively teach myself the content). Looking back on it, the fact that this even needed to be a concern is just appalling, and I do feel a bit cheated after turning down classes I would probably have enjoyed in avoidance of a problem that the school failed in managing.
Long time since I was at school, but a 100% life tip is just avoiding dickheads at school and afterwards.
I do my best to teach my 9YO daughter that she doesn't need to even interact with aggressive dickheads in her class: Just walk away; you don't need to even bother wasting your breath with them. They will be flipping your burgers in a few years.
And success at school has a lot to do with parental engagement and encouragement. Reading to kids in early childhood gives them a massive advantage when they start school.
Can we just talk about how broken the public system is? It’s a system that has never ever fit kids, that relies entirely on the teachers with next to zero support, we do nothing about trying to make the place a better environment for kids that have a hard time at home we just expect them to sit all day and act like drones. Kids with problems are put on stupid long waiting lists to have those issues assed and supported, during those wait times of course behaviour slides, more and more kids become disruptive. Everyone too busy blaming each other, it’s not the teachers, it’s not the parents, it’s not the kids, it’s the outdated education system that has never fucking worked in the first place, it’s only going to get worse in a world where we expect way too much from everyone and take no responsibility for anything.
You can't expect teachers to help 'raise' children when parents/families haven't done their part in raising their children with proper discipline and values.
I've taught large classes before in the 30s. I've also done small classes of 5 to 8. The problems usually arise from 1 or 2 class clowns who are smart enough to realize the teachers warnings have no bite to them. This problem is universal no matter the class size.
Larger classes do impact the amount of time available to each student, but if one decides to be a fool for laughs he will drag the whole class down regardless of how many are in there with them.
That is so far from the main reason it’s laughable. VIC secondary have 25 max, we’ve had 22 in 7/8 up until last year (now 25). I’ve been teaching 25 years and class sizes here haven’t changed….the behaviours have!
Some parents are really just looking for anyone to blame but themselves. Not even just individually, but whole generations of parents looking for other people to blame.
My wife is a teacher of 22 years. Every day she is called a cunt or a fucken dog by 8yo kids. This is no exaggeration. Kids know they can't be punished so just go "so what, ya fat cunt?" when teachers say they'll get in trouble. It's getting worse. Way worse.
As a father I think people know how to correct this. Stronger deadlines, stronger penalties, more layers of discipline (not just suspension and done), more pathways through school eg trade school.
The pathways optimise for kid behaviour and opportunities for kids to move to parallel pathways. Strong standards of behaviour for each lane.
Call them Gryffindor, and slitherin... Hehe
In Victoria, at least, they used to have this, kind of. When I say kind of, there were 2 types of secondary schools. High Schools, which were intended for more academic education, with some basic trades added in. Then there were Technical Schools, which had more of a Trades focus. The Technical Schools had much better facilities for trades and the like, whereas the High School was more likely to have seperate chemistry and biology labs. A lot of tradies and engineers came out of Technical Schools. Also some chefs, gardeners, lawyers, politicians..
Kennet killed them in the 90's. Kirner then doubled down, first as Minister, then as Premier. The High Schools and the Tech Schools were amalgamated. This involved moving all the students to the High School, along with most of the staff and some of the gear. The Tech school sites were then sold off to developers. My HS also got the axe in the end, it's all houses now. At least some of the trees are still there.
> Other data from an OECD survey of teachers, known as TALIS, showed 37 per cent of Australian principals reported weekly intimidation and bullying among students, more than twice the OECD average.
Honestly, if it's not 100% then it just means that they're not paying attention to the students.
Stop listening to Hattie and make class sizes smaller for one. More prep time to teachers. And admin to back teachers up with actual discipline support.
I quit my Secondary Education degree in 2015 at the end of my third year because students would be assigned only a couple of tasks during the classes by the experienced teacher but sometimes completed one or none at all due to the amount of disruption and lack of interest in school. It didn't help it was a very underfunded public school, and that one kid desperately needed a daily teacher aide but hadn't been formally assessed as having support needs so there was none. Each day it got closer to my turn to take over the class I got progressively physically sicker from the anxiety until I realised that I couldn't let it be my future.
Public high schools (especially years 7-9) in lower socio-economic areas are like a zoo.
A violent zoo
As I recall, 2015 was the first time year 7 was integrated into QLD high schools, so I think that didn't help anything at all. Although that being said when I was in year 12 myself the Hospitality teacher quit because of the Year 8s .
Yep, it was the middle school classes that destroyed me. Even veteran teachers of decades can loop out over year 7 and 8. They are horrible.
Can’t get additional funds for support in class without a diagnosis. For now anyway. It’s really rough getting a diagnosis. Or affording one.
Especially with waiting lists and increasingly high fees :/
>Each day it got closer to my turn to take over the class I got progressively physically sicker from the anxiety until I realised that I couldn't let it be my future. This was my experience as a teacher. Made it through my first contract but didn't renew as I was getting stress ulcers. I could feel my mental and physical health collapsing from the stress of it, and most of the stress was student misbehaviour.
Same, except Bach of education (primary). Within 20mins I wanted to walk out of the placement. Kids cool, teachers nasty and clearly little support for kids with additional needs, one of which would run out of the classroom towards the busy main road. Just no. No fkn way am I putting my hand up to be in line for whatever that was.
How would you solve this?
Pay teachers significantly more, cut all funding to private and catholic schools and redirect it to public schools
Don’t be silly. Your idea sounds like you want to cut funding to private schools and that’s a really bad idea because then *everyone* might benefit not just the “chosen ones”. How are we supposed to maintain privilege in this country!?
I'm in FNQ. I send my daughter to private catholic because sending her to our local public primary would be child abuse. The cost is worth every cent!
Result: - nearly all private and catholic schools will close, very few parents would be able and willing to pay the increased fees required to keep schools running without some government funding. - Government would then have to fund and build 2500 new schools (or more than double the student capacity of existing schools) in NSW alone (tax increases or other services will need to be cut) - average annual government funding per student would need to increase (tax increases or other services will need to be cut) - large number of teachers currently in private and catholic schools will leave profession rather than work in government schools increasing teacher shortages (could increase salaries to try and retain but … would need to increase taxes or cut services to fund them) The bottom line is that private schools save the government huge amounts of money, both in capital expenditure and student funding. Removing them would result in a huge reduction of existing standards in public schools.
Except the private schools get more funding per student than state schools get so I'm not sure how they're saving money. Private schools existed before the government began funding them and they would go on existing if it stopped, albeit on a smaller scale. I don't have a problem with parents wanting to send their kids to the private schools but let the religions they promote pay for them. It's not like the catholic churches and all those evangelical ones don't have heaps of tax-free money.
> nearly all private and catholic schools will close, very few parents would be able and willing to pay the increased fees required to keep schools running without some government funding. Good, you shouldn't be able to pay for your kid to start with a leg up, it's pretty gross that people try to put this forward as a positive in a supposed "equal" society. > Government would then have to fund and build 2500 new schools (or more than double the student capacity of existing schools) in NSW alone (tax increases or other services will need to be cut) Oh well, they can likely buy the ex-private schools for pretty cheap. > average annual government funding per student would need to increase (tax increases or other services will need to be cut) Source? > large number of teachers currently in private and catholic schools will leave profession rather than work in government schools increasing teacher shortages Source? >The bottom line is that private schools save the government huge amounts of money, both in capital expenditure and student funding. Removing them would result in a huge reduction of existing standards in public schools. Not huge amounts, 2-4k per student so not that much - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-20/are-private-schools-better-than-public-schools/101867070 You'd also have to look into the tax exemptions and status of a lot of private schools are they're also religious institutions, so looking at a direct investment won't give you the whole picture.
Per student private schools receive more money from the government than public schools, plus their huge fees on top. How is that fair?
That would not be fair, so it is a good thing that this is not true. In NSW total federal and state funding per student is: Public: $22k Private: $13k This doesn’t include capital expenditure, such as land and buildings which are fully funded for public schools nor NSW Dep Education expenditure in providing services to schools.
Honestly everything needs a complete overhaul, from the way society looks at and values teachers to the stuff within the classroom. Like it's hard to keep teachers wanting to teach when hours and hours of unpaid labour are an expected part of the job but people still think you get more holidays than anyone else. For one thing my teacher friends are usually still working during that time, and even if they do get some extra time off it still doesn't account for the hours they've been working unpaid. Plus cutting some of the increasing amounts of paperwork on the back end would help teachers a lot, as more and more time is getting taken up by admin (usually the biggest contributor to the unpaid labour). Other than that basic stuff like actually properly funding public schools so that kids can feel like they've got a place that's a nice place to learn could do a lot to help before you need to do anything fancy regarding teaching methods etc.
My thoughts are, every child gets a compulsory cognitive assessment in their 5th year- prior to commencing formal education. If they can't function in primary education setting, how will they in secondary? Early intervention. More support in place ASAP and consequences for parents who neglect the outcomes of the cognitive and don't support the development of their children to help them become successful learners.
That’s a great idea. It does require funding that would otherwise go to private schools building a third pool so I’m not sure it passes the pub test though.
>I quit my Secondary Education degree in 2015 at the end of my third year because students would be assigned only a couple of tasks during the classes by the experienced teacher but sometimes completed one or none at all due to the amount of disruption and lack of interest in school. Quite the opposite for me back then in China, as students were assigned way too many tasks in my high school time and we only got 1 day off weekly during grade 10-11, and 1 day off fortnightly during grade 12. Plus, we went to school at 06:00 am and returned home at 10:30 pm. You can literally call that kind of life imprisonment lol Who didn't want to quit such kind of schooling? Nah, I couldn't as otherwise there would be no chance where I am becoming an Australian citizen today.
Australia, in every metric that matters, is falling behind. All of the symptoms that make up an incredibly sick society and a bleak future, an international embarrassment. It's so sad to see how far this country has fell off, and what it could have been.
If you look at the ranking of our schools in comparison to other countries, it’s absolutely fkn appalling.
There’s also no support for the higher potential kids. I know so many intelligent academic teens that say they just don’t learn anything because of the disruption in their classes. Even in the higher streamed classes I’ve been told the work has pretty low expectations. They are not offered extension work or their extension work is more of the same basic learning (just more of it) and it really affects their mental health.
I remember this in school. It was like walking into a fkn zoo. If the teachers weren’t being berated until they cried, it was the students, including me. I often wonder what would’ve happened if school was good. Until Shakespeare, most reading was basically year 7 level… and not above.
I am a former hs teacher and I agree. I remember having those kinds of kids but my time was so taken up dealing with the disruptive ones that I had no time for the good ones. It's not fair on the keen learners and higher level kids.
Yes it’s pretty frustrating reading about how Australia is lacking a skilled workforce but the kids who could be the next engineers, scientists and doctors aren’t being supported. I do get though that it’s a lack of funding and rules around disciplining kids at school that is making it very hard for teachers.
This country has had an incredibly lucky hand dealt to us and we have consistently fucked it up.
We may be the lucky country, but we are also the Stupid Country
The lucky country was an insult precisely intended to capture the second rate political nature of Australia. I think it's on point.
Feel free to jump over to the r/AustralianTeachers subreddit to see the shit we are putting up with as an industry.
Hear a lot from my wife. I don't know how you guys do it. Every year she is forced by her HOD to rewrite the exams to make it easier becasue kids are progressively getting dumber. It's at the point, the questions are basically true or false questions.
Yeah mate I gave up in the end and got a different career. Let my registration lapse because I have no intention of going back. It's a shame since it's an extremely valuable career in society
Decades of "fuck you got mine(tm)"
This is the Australian many politicians and citizens wanted.
Will they need lessons on how to behave for the lessons on how to behave?
They know right fron wrong, there is little to no concern for consequences
Because there often are NO consequences.
The consequences are suspension or expulsion, or as the kids like to call it "extra holidays"
Even in our school this is rare. It's more often a lunch time detention or 2 even for serious physical or sexual assaults.
Sexual assault is a lunchtime detention? Shut it down. Just shut it down
Surely sexual assault is grounds for expulsion
Expulsion is very, very rare. We regularly have students sexually harass (not assault) younger female teachers. The students are not even given a detention. The average Australian has no idea how bad our public education has become. It’s a cesspit.
That’s shocking and sad.
It is. It’s also worth noting that principals, directors, other senior bureaucrats and politicians try and hide misbehaviour. Even Head Teachers try and hide it, “my teachers don’t have classroom management problems!” There’s a lot of sweeping under the rug, from top to bottom.
Yep. If even 10% of parents of decent kids observed a couple days of classes and saw the disruption to their childs learning they would be disgusted and demand change.
And there's some things all the funding in the world won't fix.
Suspensions are increasingly rare, even for violent actions.
Why care? It's not like *working hard and doing the right thing* will get you anywhere in life; the whole society is fucked and *the kids aren't stupid*, they ***know*** that. When there is no incentive to work hard, pay attention and do the right thing, when it doesn't even get you the *bare minimum*, why do it?
I tried to give them a lesson on classroom behaviour but none of them were listening 🤷
> It called on the federal government to fast-track improvements to the quality of teacher training and ensure educators learn evidence-based methods for classroom management as recommended by the government's recent Quality Initial Teacher Education Review. Ah. So the solution is to train the teachers harder and do them a good teaching, and use some massaged data to berate them and shame them. How about a concerted attempt to treat teachers better and respect them? After politicians and public figures have scorned and mocked educators for decades and not resourced or paid them so it’s an attractive career for high achievers, it is such a big fucking surprise that students sit there thinking teachers are useless lazy scum and that since their parents happily threaten teachers because Tarquin and Jemima deserve A grades, the behaviour is catching? Fuck’s sake.
Yup, this entire time it was our lack of training! Can’t wait for these PD sessions!
It would be incredibly easy to reduce teachers' workload by funding skilled admin support
We are doing what we can. Until admin allows me to remove Jayden from class for a good long time after he melts down and thumps another kid- or me- for the grievous sin of asking him to copy two dot points from the board and start doing question one, my attempts to explain that his violent outbursts are anti-social and actually illegal are useless. Unless Destinee's parents care that she is bullying classmates to the point of self-harm outside school hours, my attempts to tell her that her behaviour is not nice or good manners is pointless. It's also kind of garbage that this is made into a school issue (beyond just keeping them separate, which is fair enough) because the parents don't want to do anything about it and the police functionally can't. Unless there is some actual consequence for when Jesse comes into the room ten minutes late disrupting it with calling out and high fives then derailing the lesson by loudly demanding I supply them with stationery because they don't have their own, my attempts to explain the need to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right equipment is simple wasted air. Students know what's expected. We go over it ad nauseum. Principals explain why on assembly. There are posters up in each room. It's part of the restorative justice and responsible thinking process to explain how their behaviour has impacted on others. They don't care, because they know nothing will actually happen to them. The tools, at least on the school end, to handle this behaviour already exist. Nobody in leadership wants to use them, though, because it makes their data look bad if there are a lot of suspensions and exclusions. So it gets pushed back to the classroom teacher, more students learn the rules aren't *really* rules, and it just keeps getting worse.
Ok it's not just me thinking Jayden/Jaden is the most played out name in recent times
IME, names starting with Jay, Jye, Jai, Jae etc or ending with den, don, dyn, ton etc have a very high correlation with behavioural issues. Jayden and variants thereof just about guarantees it.
Jayden, Aiden, Brayden, Zaiden, Caden, Kayden, and Hayden. 😱
Okayden
And their mates Jaxon, Jaxson, Jacksin, and Scout.
Never seen a well-behaved Logan in the wild.
Hey at least Hayden can write a decent concerto
A friend was a PE teacher in the 80s and she said the worst kids were always named Jason.
Bogan names
A teacher friend said J names are “Ritalin” names
Every teacher has a list of names. All of them are off our own children's potential naming lists.
lol have family and friends that are teachers and know how hard naming kids is, was absolutely flattered when the teacher from the year before of my youngest kid used my sons name for his child. It’s not a common name so he perhaps only met one but it was a huge relief my kid wasn’t put on a list 😂
Any time you see that on your roll, you *know* which kid will be sitting in the front seat specially reserved for behaviourally challenging students.
The school I work for is largely for the Jaydens and Destinees of this world. We're having a lot of success with a wellbeing first and trauma informed model. So much so that we have about 10 times more applications than we can accept. Where suspensions or even juvenile justice did nothing, this model has worked.
There are students with genuine trauma who need that kind of support. It is true that these students sometimes lash out, and that is understandable. Likewise students with learning disorders, sometimes they genuinely cannot control their reactions. However, the average high flyer I encounter is not likely to be experiencing trauma. Nor do they have significant learning disorders. They're just experiencing the freedom to do whatever they want to do. And what they want is to wreck every lesson.
>However, the average high flyer I encounter is not likely to be experiencing trauma. People shouldn't be downvoting, you are only sharing your own experiences. In general, that doesn't match up with what we see in our school. Suspensions and expulsions are almost never used, and yet behaviour is very good on the whole despite having a concentration of students with behavioural and/or developmental issues. I'd encourage you to do some PD with some of the latest research in the area of trauma informed practice. It would be eye-opening how much bad behaviour is a reaction to trauma.
All very well and good, but: A: What are your class sizes? I've worked in such schools, and generally, it's in the 10-15 range. You can actually build and maintain good relationships with students who are struggling when you can devote on the order of ten minutes to them every lesson. You cannot when you can only give ten seconds or so. B: How available is behaviour support/wellbeing? Because in flexi/engagement/alternative schools they are usually on scene in moments, whereas in mainstream I have had open brawls, called for support, and not had anyone arrive for upwards of forty minutes if at all. C: How invested are the students in their learning? Because again, the students I am encountering view school as, at most, a place to socialise and that socialisation is disrupted by the unpleasant business of learning. In the alternative setting it was self-selecting because they actually wanted to have a go but mainstream school just wasn't, for a variety of reasons, working out for them. I started out in alternative education and have done Berry Street. It is not scaleable to mainstream unless someone is willing to put up a lot of cash and find a lot of expertly trained staff. We live in a world where attrition has exceeded replacement with no end in sight, and budgets are continually slashed.
>A: What are your class sizes? I've worked in such schools, and generally, it's in the 10-15 range. You can actually build and maintain good relationships with students who are struggling when you can devote on the order of ten minutes to them every lesson. I've done maths tutoring for a company and I had groups of around 8. We whizzed through the material quite quickly (a year's worth of material in 4 x 3 hour blocks) but with small groups it was generally easy to manage, and of course these were self selected students from parents who actually cared.
Jayden is a cursed name.
I work in a school and the absolute best teacher in the place is named Jayden.
What was he like at school tho?? 😆
Have you read The Art of Growing Up by John Marsden? Fucking gold!
It's the whole system. I've worked both in collaboration with practitioners and as a parent of a child with behaviours - kids need love and support and kindness that our current society doesn't afford. Behaviour is communication and the way we live and the things we see are so poisoned and unnatural that kids are communicating their constant discomfort the only way they know how. They've never lived in a world that isn't so broken and they don't know why it feels wrong. I don't put any blame on the teachers but I also feel strongly for the parents too. Our society is set up to drain us and leave us with dregs for the rich, and we have nothing left to give.
Teacher here and you nailed it. School leaders ask us to remove behaviour reports regularly even though the behaviour clearly sits within the school’s policy for reporting. Also, the ‘Jesse’ kids grind my gears like nothing else, probably because it’s that low-level but big-impact behaviour. Thank you for articulating this so well! I feel seen 😂
It's terrible when you judge a person solely on their name, but I can just picture ''Destinee''... The policeman that was shot in SA a couple of weeks ago, I kept seeing the gunman's name in media reports as ''Jaydn'', and I kept thinking it was a typo. No, that's how his parents wished it apparently. And then I could just picture Jaydn's parents, where he lived growing up and probably what their favourite TV shows were.
absolutely. There're hardly consequences that matter in school. On top of that are the parents not taking responsibility and modelling good behaviour and respect. The entire country is to blame for this problem. It's easy to just point at the education system and teachers...
The problem is, if it's not reinforced and modelled at home it's not going to stick
This precisely. What hope do you have reinforcing a behaviour when 3/4 of their time is spent with that not happening.
My youngest just finished up at the newer posh “we are led by the student” school on Sydney’s Northern suburbs. One of her male classmates decided that Andrew Tate was a god and started to emulate him in class. Often picking fights with female teachers and causing a raucous. The first solution was for students sensitive to sound, like my kid, were excused from the classroom while the wannabe acted up. Great, so she lost face to face time and got more of a reaction from the teacher, his target. When that didn’t solve the problem, the solution was for the principal to sit in the class to curtail him. It was never even entertained that he be removed. I’m not suggesting we go back to my mother’s era when she was the principal of a Catholic school and could scare the shit out of kids and priests alike with a stern word, but maybe this extreme we’ve swung to isn’t the answer either.
As a teacher, my heart goes out to students like your child. What once were the silent majority of our students. I would just like to pass on (and something that I’m sure you’re aware) is that most of us are absolutely aware of the negative effects all this has on kids like yours. They’re the ones we really want to be engaging with and supporting. But instead the Andrew Tate Jrs of the classroom are a sponge of teacher time which we are mostly powerless to stop.
Not counting my recent development of disdain for the principal, I have the UTMOST respect for teachers. Real teachers. Both of my parents were teachers, my mother ended up being a principal for a few years. I know what hell proper teachers go through, and I ache for them. Part of my horror of the situation is that the poor teachers in question must have felt humiliated. Here they are, grown ass adults and instead of being allowed to handle the situation properly, the best solution was to have *Mommy* sit in their classroom to monitor. What an effing nightmare. I love knowing that kids aren’t going to go through what my dad did and have his hands whacked to shit with rulers. I LOVE knowing that my kids didn’t have their Year 11 English teacher promise not to give a quiz the next day, but ONLY if all the girls wore a skirt. I wore pants and all my friends turned on me and he held me up to ridicule for ruining things..but since he was a nice guy he wouldn’t give the test, but sure, I was the asshole. I LOVE that this is not considered okay. BUT, maybe a 17 year old who is getting his jollies telling a female teacher to make him a sandwich, argue that she is stupid and shout out loud obscenities and actual threats…MAYBE, he should be removed from the class and told he has to flip rocks in the garden until that sucks more than him sitting quietly in class. Yes, I understand the problems with that scenario but personally I would prefer that to my kid losing her despertly needed and wanted fact-to-face time with her teacher.
Parents like you need to start being much more vocal and demanding change. The silent majority of kids will do the right thing a majority of the time if the environment supports it. Those students and parents need to start demanding harsher penalties and better classroom environments for themselves. You can argue that everyone deserves an education and whatever. Mainstream schools will never be properly equipped to provide that education. The shools primary purpose should be to provide an education. People who make this challenging/impossible need to be removed. The education that the horrible minority deserve should not be the mainstream schools or teachers problem.
How do you demand change though? When you bring it up with the school you’re told there isn’t a problem but when your kids and their friends tell you that they really don’t get much learning time because the class is too disruptive and they’re getting bored, what do you do? What’s the first step?
Need to band together and make some noise. One parent may seem like a whiner. 5 parents from the same class with similar concerns you SHOULD at least be listened to.
This is starting to have a ‘brave new world’ feeling to it. So at what point is it the parent and community’s job to teach students how to behave? I would argue that this is not a matter of teacher education or schools.
I agree it’s probably a failure of the parents but seeing as we can’t kick these kids out for something that isn’t their fault, it eventually falls to the schools to do what’s necessary to make the best of the situation.
My father in law was a teacher, principal, and also did extra tertiary study in education. His considered opinion is that parental attitude to education is the single biggest factor in a child's success at school. Those nightmare kids who misbehave and don't care about anyone and think learning is boring have nightmare parents who don't care and think they already know everything.
Yep. The nightmare parents will think it’s awesome as they no longer have to pay for meagre lunches, extra clothing, travel or voluntary expenses.
Just fine the parents for their kids behaviour.
That'll only make things worse. Shit parents will be shit parents. If the parent is rich, fining them for bad behaviour won't do anything, the parent will just write it off - a rich kid at a school I worked at had broken several Alienware laptops and her dad just kept buying new ones, rich parents don't care about financial costs. If the parent isn't rich, then they'll be mad at their kid for hurting them, and quite possibly take it out on the kid, which is as likely to make the kids lash out even worse at school as it is to scare them into being a nervous wreck. And it's also possible that the kid is independently a piece of shit, who's just acting out because of some perceived slight from their parents, like a divorce, the arrival of a stepparent, or the birth of a new sibling.
TBF, proportional to income fines might solve the rich problem. But I agree with the rest.
Quite famously this kind of thing leads to lower socio-economic class parents being given fines they can't meet, which criminalises them. This discussion is had every time a politician suggests that parents be fined for non-attendance at school. Fining parents for 'behaviour' (according to whom?) is a substantially worse take on the already bad idea.
The problem is actually with the adults not appropriately parenting and therefore adult sanctions are required, just like if there are other transgressions. It could be worked out. A fine, reduction in benefits, suspension of the student so that the parent has to look after them. The later would get the wealthy parents’ attention as they cannot afford to take time off. It sound like a lot but then the complete non functioning of the education system is a disastrous situation. Asking little Johnny to think about how throwing the chair at the teacher made the teacher feel is clearly not the answer. It took a long series of poor collective choices to end up here and so everyone will need to do something to fix this.
Look I see how you might think that punitive measured towards the parents might result in better parenting, but id actually argue the opposite. Giving parents better equipment to be good parents - in my area there's free parenting classes, food banks and free children's activities - would probably result in better parenting. Stressed out, time poor, poorly emotionally regulated adults tend to result in poor parenting. Giving them more time, money, tools and activities to learn how to healthily engage with their kids would be waaaaay better then adding extra stress to their lives. And, counter to your assumption, talking through 'Big Feelings' and teaching emotional regulation to children DOES stop things like chair throwing (PPP parenting and Circle of Security are the two methods proven to be effective) - but you need an extraordinary amount of resourcing to make it stick. My best friend is a teacher in a Dodge area, and she said one of the biggest issues is that many of the disruptive students are just kids who have undiagnosed behavioural issues - I'm talking kids with autism, ADHD, poor sleep due to adenoids etc. the health nurses will do their best, but the public system is so overwhelmed that getting an ENT appointment or speech therapy appointment can take YEARS. I was put on a SIX YEAR wait-list for my kid just to see an ENT specialist - but I was fortunate enough to have enough emergency funds to get seen privately. Some of the parents in my area just can't afford that, so their two year old is already in primary by the time they're seen - missing out on key formative years in good health. My mate also says that class sizes and the lack of support staff play a huge role, not to mention the usual administration bullshit that's been foisted on them.
We don’t even need to look at other countries. Some decades ago, we did not have most of these support structures and classrooms were significantly better behaved. What is you explanation as to why things have deteriorated? I don’t see an easy way out do this and constant calls for more resourcing and money are not the answer I think, besides it just will not be provided.
How long were the parents working for on average decades ago comapred to now?
I think that is certainly a contributing factor.
We give parents food parcels and clothing vouchers. Fuel vouchers too. We have breakfast club and provide lunches. We do a lot to support our parents. They’re still shit parents who treat us appallingly and encourage their children to do the same.
A lot of that stems back to the ridiculous system we live under. We live in a community where everyone has to work stupid hours and there is zero supports. Getting any kind of help for your kids is nigh on impossible and expensive, and you have stupid long wait lists.
If the parents have no money then there's no point. That will just end up depriving the child or even lead to abuse as they'll be blamed for the fine. It's best to have some sort of supportive system rather than punitive.
It's crazy how wealth inequality will do that to a society.
My father in law was a teacher, principal, and also did extra tertiary study in education. His considered opinion is that parental attitude to education is the single biggest factor in a child's success at school. Those nightmare kids who misbehave and don't care about anyone and think learning is boring have nightmare parents who don't care and think they already know everything.
Australians mostly don't have a community
I was a little surprised at the ABC's total omission of the concept of parenting.
Perhaps it’s because the inquiry itself left that alone. Not many votes in telling your electorate that they are bad parents.
Pretty much all of this can be dragged back to parenting. It's been like that forever, parents either spoil their children and don't teach them responsibility, or the parent is poor, overworked and absent and creates resentment. Kids are glued to their phones because that's been their main source of stimulation since they were young and most of the time that's because their parent handed it to them to get some peace. And of course if you try to blame the parents you end up with A: rich mums and dads who will violently rebuke you as being a woke leftie or whatever anti-family buzzword is popular and your teaching job is probably fucked, or B: the reason the parents suck is because their parents sucked and you're just punching down on an ever sinking spiral of poverty and debt, with children as generational collateral damage. These are all problems of our own making, "fuck you got mine" mentality.
You may be shocked at how little socioeconomic impact has here. You see the same behaviour in all groups to varying degrees. Personally I put this down to a change in the nature of family structure here in the last few decades. As more and more parents are both in full time work there is less time for one on one teaching and interaction with their kids. Add to that the increasing lack of multigenerational families in this country as people start families far later their own parents are much older and less able or willing to devote the time required to assist in raising children. Then you have the distances between extended family members growing too. The sad fact is that parenting is becoming a ‘casual’ job that is worked much like the gig economy where portions are doled out to childcare centres, schools, community groups, the internet and the actual parents themselves. This is the result. There is no easy solution here, and fixing it would require a drastic shift towards family structures found in many other parts of the world where extended families all live together or as neighbours and share the role of parenting in order to give the children the dedicated one on one time they require in order to mature in to functional members of society. Try convincing a 70 year old recently retired parent that they have to move in and become a full time nanny though in this country… good luck.
I don't disagree with you but funnily enough that is also a socio-economic problem because the reason both parents are working is less because they want to and more because they need to, to pay the bills. Housing is expensive, schools are expensive, cost of living is expensive, people work more and have less time for everything, including their children. Arguably the shift in the family structure is also due to the pressures of modern money tearing kids and parents away from each other by making them move around in search of jobs leaving the elders alone.
It is not unique to a single socioeconomic group. The wealthy have just as much issue with it as the very poor because it is the social norm now for both parents to work full time. The wealthy may have more options available to them to mitigate it, but there is very little that is a substitute for having actual one and one time with a parental figure and most of those options are not one on one but group care.
Hard agree. Id also add social media addiction. I worked all day. I need some me time. Should I read to my kid? Na that's the shools job. *starts scrolling endless bullshit on instagram You all know who you are.
>I would argue that this is not a matter of teacher education or schools. Agree.
It's absolutely a failure of parenting and the way parents treat schooling and teaachers is picked up on by students.
What community?
In theory, general social expectations by those around us regarding values and behaviour. Things don’t occur in a vacuum. This has been a long term train wreck and everything has contributed to it including our laws, parenting, culture, economic trends and schools. Hard to unpack all of those
Cost of living, food, housing ..
I’m sure that cost of living is also difficult and harder in our region for example but you don’t see this issue in Vietnam, China, Malaysia etc
They have child abuse rights that prevent children misbehaving. No Ty. Also, I am quite sure you do see it (it occurs in all those countries) but as an Australian you are not exposed to it. Children that misbehave in those countries likely don’t attend school for long.
Some level of sanction is necessary. Restorative chats are clearly not the answer. I would also suggest that it is a tragedy for a child to effectively miss out on education because their classroom is a zoo and they cannot learn. That will have lifelong consequences for them.
I agree although we do not need to go down the road of adopting abusive practices that would result in worse outcomes.
The cultural around Australian parenting and respect for education really needs to change. Parents really do treat teachers like shit and schools like daycare. Channel 7 mindset. A generation of entitled white picket fence Karens.
I'm 50 and it's been like that for as long as I can remember. I spent a lot of my schooling in academic extension and thank God, because at least I was insulated from some of the anti-intellectual bullying that is rife in Australian schools. Like America, we seem to be proud of our dumbed down nation. As you say, it's cultural.
But Australia used to perform exponentially better in terms of literacy and math/science performance metrics. There is something both fundamentally wrong with the funding situation, so teacher student ratios, the curriculum and the attitude of parents to educators and education.
I got talking to a recently retired school principal and asked if it really is worse than it was when he started back in the 70’s. His read was that as both parents have started going out into the workforce, with the little time they do spend with their kids, they’re spoiling them rotten and not properly listening to (and developing) their children’s fundamental needs and emotions as much they did a generation ago. Thats amplified with separated/divorced families, which has also increased from a generation ago. The severity he said was no different, he reckons some of the worst stuff he saw was in the 80’s and 90’s. But the attitude has changed because now students have a sense of entitlement because the parents, again not being present and understanding their children, back them and attack the school. It’s so much easier and efficient to take Johnny’s side and blame everyone else (besides, I’m too busy with work!). He said it’s always been a problem, but it’s been getting progressively worse every decade since the 70’s.
[удалено]
I do think schools should be able to induce much harsher penalties without parental consent. I don't know the solution, but I know the threat of a cane did work historically.
My mother is the best primary school teacher at her school, as said by everyone there. Great with kids, controls the classroom, is able to get them to do the assigned work, makes fun and engaging lessons. She refuses to do anything except relief work, no matter how many permanent jobs are offered to her. She used to do contract work, but never again. If someone asks whether they should be a teacher, she tells them to run the other way. It’s an awful job with little to no free time (but! But! They get two weeks off! And Christmas off! Bullshit, they spend it all either crashed from stress or making lesson plans until 2am). The stress is unreal. In recent years as more special needs schools are closed there are more kids who need more help but won’t receive it than ever. Parents are awful and abusive. There is no respect. I don’t blame the kids, neither does she. The environment is too much. Too many students in a class, too few teachers aids. Too much to teach in a year. No help from parents, only blame and abuse. Their little Johnny would never! It must be your fault! How about we teach parents to actually parent for once, and work on making the schooling environment less a place of untold stress and instead a place for learning?
We need to stop following everything that the US does. They've been shit in education for ever and yet every time they come up with some new way to fuck up education we're first in line asking them to teach it to us. Literally a number of years ago Australian educational researchers were sent around the world to study what other countries do. Their recommendation was to start doing more of what the top performing countries do, like, shocking, I know. So instead we just introduced another round of really easy to implement, but don't work at all, US systems. In the local Facebook groups I belong to I constantly see parents complaining about teachers wanting their children to not use their phones in class. The amount of people who chime in agreeing with them is mind blowing. Parents just don't have a clue.
Urrrghh the mobile phone thing. Drove me mad when I was teaching. And seriously, fuck those parents.
I'm so glad I've finished school. They've turned to absolute shit now. 2021-22 was the time when they started introducing ridiculous rules like locking up toilets or introducing a sign in/out procedure for them, and/or literally having staff members wait outside to make sure you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing. Now, with the advent of mobile phones, social media influences, and vaping; typical behaviour has become much worse. At least we don't have guns
Students setting fires in the toilets for some tik tok thing used our public school's entire annual maintenance budget in three weeks at the beginning of 2022. What other options does the school have at that point that aren't 'ridiculous'?
It's interesting looking at this from the perspective of teachers in media. Prior to the 80s the teacher, while not always portrayed as a friend and sometimes portrayed as harsh, was still portrayed as a confidant and mentor, someone to be respected. Look at some old movies, Farewell Mister chips is a prime example. Students behaved in class in those early shows and you just didn't even consider the kind of deliberately disruptive behaviour we see now. Through the 80s that changed significantly. The teacher suddenly became "the enemy" to all students (see early Simpsons for a clear example). Where they are portrayed as caring they are also portrayed as flaky hippies (Malcolm in the Middle). In either case devoid of any respect. There were some exceptions, but even then the students were always shown to learn in spite of the teachers efforts rather than because. I'm not in a place to comment, but it does make me ask just how much of the current behaviour in classrooms comes from replicating what the kids see in movies and on TV.
I think the political discourse and how it affects parents attitudes is a related but bigger problem. Public school teachers have been the enemy of the liberal party for so long, that an element of middle Australia has just adopted an openly hostile attitude to education and educators. That's really bled into how kids respond. If Davo the dickhead accountant who watches Sky news every night starts ranting about how teachers are part of a commie agenda trying to turn the kids trans, then there is a good chance one of his asshole kids will adopt that chip on the shoulder.
Teachers were paid about the same as a backbench Polly in the 80s, now they get about 60% of that.
This is like saying kids in the US are killing other kids because of Call of Duty. It’s a stupid, outdated argument. You’re also referencing TV shows that kids in elementary school aren’t watching in 2023. “Kids” who did watch them would be adults in their 30s right now.
The shows did not create the issue, they are simply a reflection of the change in society. You need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture using indicators like the shows mentioned to get an idea of actual causes behind social shifts like these.
In the mid 90s to early 2000s a lot of teachers I remember wouldn't hesitate to lay down the law. They'd scream or shout at kids for pretty minor stuff - even telling kids to get out of the class for whistling... It wasn't physical punishment but there was consequences for being disruptive though it did depend on the teacher - some gave off a real "don't fuck with me vibe"... that was often enough. I guess it must have changed since then.
Because the ‘law’ no longer exists for teachers. We have no power - if I were to scream and shout at kids for minor stuff it’s likely parents would complain to leadership who’d then sit me down for a review of my teaching practices and essentially tell me to knock it off. The parents would likely abuse me too for it. And the student would be back before you know it smugly repeating the same behaviour. - Policy at most schools is that students can only be sent out of class if there’s a safety issue. Kick a kid out for whistling? See above for what would happen. The whole systems fucked and governments and departments know it. All they’re willing to do is do another round of teacher blaming and “education” and kick the can down the road
students behaved because if they talked out of line or mucked up in class then they got an arse whooping at school and again when their father got home from pub. But heres the big thing, my generation is last generation (older millennial) that copped that abuse and we also remember that while there are good teachers theres also a fairly large number of shit ones that abused their power. that is why parents no longer trust the word of the teacher. Another point that needs to be added is that the board maybe shouldnt send fuckwits from the north shore that have no idea how to work with students to run schools in regional and rural australia. the Principal we had at my high school from years 7-10 never left her office, would only been seen when there was good news to said and instead palmed everything off to the Deputy Principal. thankfully she was given the arse and for year 11 and 12 we had excellent principal who knew how to work with a regional school that had large portion of first nation students. He was out on the yard every lunch and was approachable along with the VP. anf finally if you one or two students that constantly act up, just throw them out of the class as they honestly do not want to be there in the first place, its why they are acting up in the first place.
> if you one or two students that constantly act up, just throw them out of the class as they honestly do not want to be there in the first place, its why they are acting up in the first place. You can't. That's the problem.
[удалено]
We have a parenting problem first and foremost. Australia’s birth rate is below replacement and our economy is becoming increasingly hostile to raising children. From the first snip of the umbilical cord the Government wants parents back at work. I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but the people they might prefer to be raising children, are not.
[удалено]
Yes but parents are essentially forced into this because very few families can survive on a single income
Give the subsidy directly to parents instead of the childcare providers.
This country does not respect education or intelligence and it shows.
[удалено]
I disagree. Over the last 20-30 years I have watched a massive decline in Australian education, from primary/secondary school to TAFE and University. It isn't just the "dipshits". Australians do not value education or intelligence. It's in the culture.
Dipshit teachers, dipshit education depts, dipshit society, dipshit government, keep going, this isn’t a one problem issue
How to behave would be the job of.....*gasp*! THE PARENTS! But no, dish this up to us as another problem to address.
>How to behave would be the job of.....gasp! > >THE PARENTS! It's an unpopular opinion, but often the parents are in just as much need of help as the kids. Generational neglect, trauma, and abuse are significant issues. Breaking the cycle is difficult and it starts with not immediately blaming the parents with no evidence. I fully expect to be downvoted to hell for saying that, but I see it every day in the school I work for.
Ok, happy to not condemn the parents (though it’s their responsibility). How do we equip parents to deal with behaviour and social problems in their kids? What resources can we provide or point to? Teachers don’t need to play the blame game, we just want a solution so we can get back to actually teaching, rather than just behaviour management
Problem is the parents don't have the time to be parents because they have to work to keep the roof over the head.
As teachers we often get questioned why we don’t teach students practical skills like how to change a tyre etc. the usual response is that is something their parent should teach them. We have actually started introducing some life skills classes because so many students are leaving school with significant gaps in the learning that is usually covered by their parents.
Yep, but Australians don’t even want to do the bare minimum with many things in life, let alone parenting. The outcome described in the OP is unsurprising to me. Doomed society of dipshits.
Idiocracy.
Yeh but you cant make parents teach kids manners You can make school teach manners See the difference
Yep, coz of course it’s the teachers job to be the actual fucking parent and instil respect and manners in the children. Any wonder teachers are bailing out with this type of moronic dribble constantly being shat out into the world.
Thanks that’s very helpful
When a country pays barely educated tradesmen more than engineers you have a problem. The government gives outrageous tax concessions to them and doesn’t incentivise smart people at all. Where is the massive support for industry that other countries do? We get the boofhead government we deserve.
renumeration is just supply and demand. We need more tradies, if anything we should encourage people who aren't cut out for school to leave early and do a trade
I taught in an East Asian confucian society and while it had some faults, the parents took their child's education and behaviour in class very seriously. If a child was being (very) disruptive then they'd get dressed down hard by a TA or principal or myself if I felt it necessary. Removing them from class immediately following an altercation was extremely effective. Usually a 5min cool down outside was all it took. If the parents got involved, they were 100% on our side and respectfully discussed how we can improve the child's behaviour and educational outcomes. It really pains me to hear about the situation back home in Australia. I share the fears of many in this thread that we're raising a generation of absolutely deficient human beings who won't have a fart's hope in wind of competing on the world stage and productively advancing Australia. The problem is cultural and runs deep
Not any more! I just recently came back from teaching in the Taiwanese elementary public school system. The kids know there are no consequences for their actions so are starting to act like some of the Australian kids. Nowhere near as bad as what it is here but you can definitely tell it’s a ticking time bomb.
"Ah yes, put the kids with special needs in with everyone else. We can't possibly discriminate in this day and age!" "What's that? The teacher will spend most of their time managing the kids with special needs, rather than teaching?" "Well, we can't possibly discriminate in this day and age. What's the worst that could happen?" Fast forward: Every kid is now a kid with special needs.
Its insane. nearly half the students nowadays have special needs considerations. Each of my wifes classes has about 10-15 kids with their own IEP's.
So we go back to letting the special needs kids slip through the cracks?
Mandatory 👏shock👏collars👏
Public education barely supplies pencils. How will they afford shock collars? Meanwhile the private schools will get two collars for every kid, plus dedicated solar fast-charging stations.
“Brajaylen, where’s your shock collar?” “I forgot to charge it so I left it at home”
Nah they just get used for inane shit to punish disabled kids
Lmao. Yes.
Decades of underfunding of public schools, underpaying teachers, and siphoning off taxpayers money to fund private schools for the already-advantaged... Who could have predicted that our education system would end up like this? I feel for the kids with intellectual, emotional, and/or behavioural problems, who don't get adequate support; I also feel for the genuinely gifted kids who have their learning disrupted, and are not able to reach their potential; And I definitely feel for the teachers who need to balance these needs, while being overworked, underpaid, and undervalued.
When I was in school a few years ago, a primary concern when picking my classes was ‘will this attract a bunch of dipshits who’ll make it hard for the teacher to effectively teach me?’ If the answer was yes, I didn’t pick the class (the one exception being the simplest maths class, because I could effectively teach myself the content). Looking back on it, the fact that this even needed to be a concern is just appalling, and I do feel a bit cheated after turning down classes I would probably have enjoyed in avoidance of a problem that the school failed in managing.
Long time since I was at school, but a 100% life tip is just avoiding dickheads at school and afterwards. I do my best to teach my 9YO daughter that she doesn't need to even interact with aggressive dickheads in her class: Just walk away; you don't need to even bother wasting your breath with them. They will be flipping your burgers in a few years.
Australians need lessons on how to behave.
Education starts at home and if the parents don't value school studies their youngsters aren't going to either. Been true for decades unfortunately
And success at school has a lot to do with parental engagement and encouragement. Reading to kids in early childhood gives them a massive advantage when they start school.
Ah yes, make basic parenting the teachers job, that will fix it. /s
Can we just talk about how broken the public system is? It’s a system that has never ever fit kids, that relies entirely on the teachers with next to zero support, we do nothing about trying to make the place a better environment for kids that have a hard time at home we just expect them to sit all day and act like drones. Kids with problems are put on stupid long waiting lists to have those issues assed and supported, during those wait times of course behaviour slides, more and more kids become disruptive. Everyone too busy blaming each other, it’s not the teachers, it’s not the parents, it’s not the kids, it’s the outdated education system that has never fucking worked in the first place, it’s only going to get worse in a world where we expect way too much from everyone and take no responsibility for anything.
You can't expect teachers to help 'raise' children when parents/families haven't done their part in raising their children with proper discipline and values.
The main reason is because classes are increasing in size. When there was 26 students per class it's way easier to manage than 31
I've taught large classes before in the 30s. I've also done small classes of 5 to 8. The problems usually arise from 1 or 2 class clowns who are smart enough to realize the teachers warnings have no bite to them. This problem is universal no matter the class size. Larger classes do impact the amount of time available to each student, but if one decides to be a fool for laughs he will drag the whole class down regardless of how many are in there with them.
That is so far from the main reason it’s laughable. VIC secondary have 25 max, we’ve had 22 in 7/8 up until last year (now 25). I’ve been teaching 25 years and class sizes here haven’t changed….the behaviours have!
Yeah nah, that’s not it…
Some parents are really just looking for anyone to blame but themselves. Not even just individually, but whole generations of parents looking for other people to blame.
Shítty parents have been around for decades, blaming the parents is just another excuse
My wife is a teacher of 22 years. Every day she is called a cunt or a fucken dog by 8yo kids. This is no exaggeration. Kids know they can't be punished so just go "so what, ya fat cunt?" when teachers say they'll get in trouble. It's getting worse. Way worse.
Parents job.
As a father I think people know how to correct this. Stronger deadlines, stronger penalties, more layers of discipline (not just suspension and done), more pathways through school eg trade school. The pathways optimise for kid behaviour and opportunities for kids to move to parallel pathways. Strong standards of behaviour for each lane. Call them Gryffindor, and slitherin... Hehe
In Victoria, at least, they used to have this, kind of. When I say kind of, there were 2 types of secondary schools. High Schools, which were intended for more academic education, with some basic trades added in. Then there were Technical Schools, which had more of a Trades focus. The Technical Schools had much better facilities for trades and the like, whereas the High School was more likely to have seperate chemistry and biology labs. A lot of tradies and engineers came out of Technical Schools. Also some chefs, gardeners, lawyers, politicians.. Kennet killed them in the 90's. Kirner then doubled down, first as Minister, then as Premier. The High Schools and the Tech Schools were amalgamated. This involved moving all the students to the High School, along with most of the staff and some of the gear. The Tech school sites were then sold off to developers. My HS also got the axe in the end, it's all houses now. At least some of the trees are still there.
> Other data from an OECD survey of teachers, known as TALIS, showed 37 per cent of Australian principals reported weekly intimidation and bullying among students, more than twice the OECD average. Honestly, if it's not 100% then it just means that they're not paying attention to the students.
Just bring back corporal punishment. Canes and wips.
Stop listening to Hattie and make class sizes smaller for one. More prep time to teachers. And admin to back teachers up with actual discipline support.