Why do people romanticise self harm scars. They aren’t beautiful, they’re not lovely, they’re scars and unfortunately enough, they stay with you
A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln – and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country – is automatic suspension. Instead, Sporleder sits the kid down and says quietly: “Wow. Are you OK? This doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?”
He gets even more specific: “You really looked stressed. On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your anger?” The kid was ready. Ready, man! For an anger blast to his face….”How could you do that?” “What’s wrong with you?”…and for the big boot out of school. But he was NOT ready for kindness.
The armor-plated defenses melt like ice under a blowtorch and the words pour out: “My dad’s an alcoholic. He’s promised me things my whole life and never keeps those promises.” The waterfall of words that go deep into his home life, which is no piece of breeze, end with this sentence: “I shouldn’t have blown up at the teacher.” Whoa.
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Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85% (via mchotdog)
what a radical idea yo
(via matthewdgold)
Bam. Kids “misbehave” for actual, real, valid reasons. And have feelings.
(via amydentata)
For fuck’s sake, it takes the people in charge so long to figure shit like this out! Good for Lincoln High!
(via psychetimelapse)
This needs to be the policy EVERYWHERE…
(via 3dela)
Seriously.
(via iwantthewater)As much as I love this, it’s important to remember that the demands of being a teacher often extend what can reasonably be expected from a human being. We’re absurdly busy and much of our work is emotionally draining, so sometimes we literally don’t have the time or energy to act as a semi-counsellor to all (or even some) of our students, especially given that it’s not usually in our job description, and doing so can put us into complicated, high-stakes legal situations.
Students can also be disruptive for valid but dull reasons, like, “this class is boring,” “this class is poorly-structured,” “we haven’t been set any boundaries for behaviour”, “the boundaries the teacher set are unreasonable” (all of which are solvable problems), but sometimes students just don’t like you, or they’re tired, or they want attention, or they’re not very mature - all of which are understandable issues, but they’re not easily fixed and often are influenced by a metric fuckton of factors that you as a teacher have no control over. There’s a *lot* of reasons to misbehave in a class, and sometimes we just don’t have the time to figure out why a student is misbehaving.
Another potential issue is that if you go too far with the understanding-kids’-feelings approach, you can end up like Nr. O’Neill from Daria, and be completely ineffectual and disrespected by your students. It’s not fun, and it’s not nice, but sometimes you have to be a taskmaster.
This isn’t to say that teachers shouldn’t try to be patient, kind, and forgiving with their students, but sometimes it’s just not possible to take on that kind of pastoral role in the face of everything else we have to do.
(via auntytimblr)
