WGU Master's in Elementary Education - Progress Thread

[nykorn]

I have never seen kids ripping up their own textbooks or climbing on top of library bookcases. Maybe this was because we allowed the school to spank kids.

Additionally, if a child was acting up, they were usually put out in the hallway for the rest of the one-hour class period, with the door shut. Kids were often more afraid of being bored out there alone, so they behaved well.

This school is very "progressive" and "modern" and so they do the opposite.

- Kids with autism or learning difficulties are generally NOT put into a separate special ed class. This means multiple times a day, an autistic kid has a "meltdown" in the general classroom, a kid with mental issues refuses to do work, etc. The other kids see this behavior and start to copy it. I have had parents tell me personally that their kid comes home and tries to throw tantrums like what they saw a certain classmate do earlier that same day. When I was a kid, any kid who regularly refused to do their work got transferred out and sent to a special ed class regardless of if they had an actual mental issue or not.

- When a kid is having a "meltdown" we call on the walkie talkies and another teacher comes into the room. All other kids leave the room and either sit out in the hallway or go to recess until the coast is clear. It is the total opposite of having the tantrum kid leave the room.

- Even when a kid is sent to the office, the kids have told me "We don't get punished, we just play games. So we like going to the office." When I was a kid if you were sent to the office you were staring at a blank wall!

- The teachers regularly try to use "talk therapy" with the kids. They don't say "That was wrong of you" or "That was bad", they say "That was a red choice" (as opposed to a "green choice"), and verbally try to explain to the kids "We don't hit people" and so on. All I can say is, it is certainly not working in class. Sometimes the teachers put on little plays and show examples how to act or how not to act, the kids don't seem to learn anything from that either, if anything it demeans the teacher because all they get out of it is seeing the teacher acting like a 4 year old. That is the big so-called "millennial parenting strategy" you see people posting about on places like FaceBook - yeah it's really occurring. From the teachers I have talked to, all of them are older and hate this strategy and know it doesn't work, but it is being imposed on them by the big bosses.

Note that I have been at schools in Taiwan, Japan and Sweden, where the kids are all really well behaved. Handling a class of 40 kids is no problem there compared to here where just 15 is difficult. Those countries all use different techniques. In Taiwan a lot of parents and teachers still hit the kids even when it's illegal, and they make the kids get up as early as 4am and go to bed at 11pm - cram school in the morning, then normal school, then cram school in the evening... even for 5 year olds. They just exhaust and scare the kids into behaving. 

In Japan they constantly say stuff like "You are a part of this class and this school and our society whether you like it or not", and they reprimand even the slightest inattention even if it wasn't disruptive to the class, plus any answer (such as an essay) which is not to their exact specifications is never displayed on the wall with the other students' (this leads to 15 essays that all sound exactly the same being displayed on the wall). If a student asks a question improperly, such as impolitely, they tell them the correct way and make them re-ask it before they give an answer. They do a lot of whole class or whole school activities, such as tsunami disaster drills complete with passing buckets full of water across the school (activities that last over half the day), or taking a map with a compass and walking around outside the vicinity of the school, which is to build teamwork into the class but also to build the idea that all of them are members of an outside, bigger society as well.

In Sweden they model "calmness" and explain the potential consequences of everything and lead the kids to make their own moral judgements. As an example, a toddler at a clinic was trying to stand up on a rocking horse. The dad said calmly "You can stand up on it, but I think you'll fall and hit your head, and that would hurt." The dad made no move to actually stop the kid. The kid, who couldn't have been more than 6, stopped to think about it and then didn't stand up after all. Saw plenty of parents in Sweden just letting their kids climb fences and stuff without saying anything and just waiting for them to figure out how to climb down. Swedish parents also generally speak to their toddlers as if they are adults and have them help out around the house as early as possible - kids who can't even speak yet are given money to hand to the cashier and are asked to take the receipt from the cashier back. 5 year old kids are taught to light matches, make campfires, carve stuff from wood (they don't use "safety scissors" or "children's knives" either) and can camp out in the yard.

Back to this US school:

- Students are called "friends", not "classmates", "kids" or "students". Some teachers make threats like "If you can't sit quietly you won't get a snack" but they never actually go through with it. Students are being raised to believe that they can just go home early if they throw a tantrum because the school will just contact their parents, who will leave work to pick them up.

- Depending on teacher and grade level, 1/3rd to 1/2 of the school day is actually performed on the computer via "educational" software programs. These programs send a report to the teacher to let them know where students are struggling, but 1) the kids cheat, they do work for each other on each other's accounts, 2) the admin, who is the only one in the whole school with real access to the computer settings - including allowing installations - seems to know little about computers. They haven't installed an adblock or locked the computers down - kids can still access YouTube and Google, and ads targeted towards adults appear on YouTube while adult images make it past the safe search on Google. There is also no timer, for example in an ideal world the computer would say "11:00 to 11:30, only the math program can be opened. After 11:30 the system automatically logs you out and will not let you enter again until the next computer session time". My dad actually had a timer like that on our computer when I was a kid (we could only use the computer for 20min a day). When I was a kid in the 90s, there was only one computer in the classroom, it wasn't hooked up to the internet and it was only for letting kids with some types of disabilities write essays on it instead of handwriting essays, and then the teacher used it to make documents she turned into overheads. We had a computer lab with maybe 10-15 computers which was available to use at recess, again there was usually no internet.

- There is no actual punishment whatsoever for a kid not doing their work. The kid will get sent to a separate class for around 20-30min a day for tutoring... where they probably won't do any work there either. The schools have made it almost impossible to fail or punish kids.

- The kids have been taught that not being "neurotypical" is an excuse to act rowdy, be rude or not do any work. So they say stuff like "I have ADHD so (excuse for behavior)", or "I'm on the spectrum so (excuse for not doing any work)". ADHD may explain why you are getting distracted every 2 seconds, and you may need more reminders to go back to the worksheet, but it does not mean you get an excuse to sit there and purposefully choose to not do your math homework from the very second I hand it out. I feel like kids don't realize that no matter if you have autism, ADHD or something else, as an adult you're still going to need to get and keep a job and take care of your health, social circle and finances. The alternative is homelessness or even death. I am saying this as a person who is visually disabled from birth, there is no one else with vision impairments in my family so I was raised to be completely unaware of how hard it would be to get a job as an adult due to not being able to get a driver's license or not being able to see signs on the wall and employers being unwilling to accommodate or give me a shot. If I had known, I would have planned my whole life and career differently, and people just give lip service "we don't discriminate" or "this field would be good for you". So it took me 20 years to find a career where hiring managers are usually willing to give me a shot despite visual impairment. But the disability does not excuse me. If I show up to work and don't do anything, my boss won't accept "I am blind, I couldn't see what to do" as answer. If I don't have a paycheck to pay my electric bill, the utilities company is not going to accept "I couldn't find a job / I lost hours, as I'm blind" as an answer.

I think that kids should be shown alternative ways to live which will help them with whatever mental or physical issue they have - you don't need a big $400,000 house with a white picket fence, maybe a $40,000 tiny home or a $20,000 one room condo is better, or maybe you want to move to a country where $2 buys a week's worth of groceries and you can legally build a house out of mud. But you will still need to at least get to the point where you can manage that much. I dunno, I have a lot of thoughts on all that stuff. Actual experience working in American public schools was honestly making me rethink continuing to get this degree. But as I'm disabled and teaching is one of the few jobs that I can do and that will give me a chance, I have no choice but to continue really. I will try to just move elsewhere after I get my license.