I have a few friends who teach back home. And the horror stories they tell me make the Taiwanese children seem like perfect little angels. You wouldn’t see any of my students ever doing this: uselessjunk.com/article_full.php?id=3129
If that happened to me like that, either the kid would be gone or i would. Nasty. Not funny. The stuff of nightmares!
I don’t teach that age group. Too many animals. i can’t stand the smell of boiling hormones. I like the little sweet ones. They think they’re being bad if they make fun of my belly or name or something. Naughty= not very naughty.
Wear a belt and that won’t happen.
Yeah, I agree. Students in America… not appealing. Too much feeling of entitlement and too little motivation to study. Plus a total lack of the Confucian perspective on the teaching profession.
Give me Asia.
Kids don’t do that to teachers they respect. And teachers who garner respect are those who give it. I wonder how that guy had been treating his students to not only make them want to do that, but to also get it on video. I doubt that the kid was doing it to all his teachers.
If it were me, I’d be pissed off, but I’d think about what would have made a student do something that malicious.
That’s pretty mild compared to some of the stuff I had to endure. Slashing my tires, throwing chairs in class, stealing my cellphone, lovers heavy petting in the back, cursing like sailors, girls deliberately trying to pricktease me to see how far they could go, doing drugs behind the cafeteria… The kid violently tossing chairs in class because (as one of his friends explained) he hadn’t had his crack for the day, definitely was the worst experience.
BTW, it wasn’t a normal highschool, it was a vocational highschool…in other words, basically a bunch of shop classes where they dumped all the problem kids and burnouts who couldn’t hack it in the regular highschool.
I don’t believe this to be totally true.
There are some very vindictive kids out there and it doesn’t matter how much respect you give them, they will still be nasty.
Some teachers have an air of authority which commands respect - whether they give it or not. Some teachers, either by the way they look or simply because they are not confident enough in the classroom will be picked on. Lack of confidence always comes through to the kids and they take advantage of it.
I teach here in the States now -university level- and I’ve never heard of or seen anything like that before. I enjoy teaching here far more than what I was doing in Taiwan -ESL, which is tedious. In fact, ESL ‘teaching’ seemed more like ‘explaining’ than anything else. I wasn’t a teacher, I was an Explainer. Real gratifying.
Well teaching adults who want to be there…is quite different than teaching teenagers who’d rather be anywhere else.
You’ve obviously never taught in Hsin Chuang…
I had a problem child in HS in Australia - no one would believe the bizarre and dangerous things she did. One day she got completely out of control, running along desks and kicking books and students! I went and got the Deputy Principal, just as we returned to the classroom little Miss Rebel mooned the DP thinking it was me. Miss Rebel got suspended as the DP recovered from her minor heart attack. You can find loony and/or angry teenagers anywhere!
[quote=“mod lang”]That’s pretty mild compared to some of the stuff I had to endure. Slashing my tires, throwing chairs in class, stealing my cellphone, lovers heavy petting in the back, cursing like sailors, girls deliberately trying to pricktease me to see how far they could go, doing drugs behind the cafeteria… The kid violently tossing chairs in class because (as one of his friends explained) he hadn’t had his crack for the day, definitely was the worst experience.
BTW, it wasn’t a normal highschool, it was a vocational highschool…in other words, basically a bunch of shop classes where they dumped all the problem kids and burnouts who couldn’t hack it in the regular highschool.[/quote]
Where did you teach Mod Lang?
I had a friend who taught high school in Las Vegas and he told me everyone had to pass through metal detectors when they entered the schoolgrounds, but there were still serious beatings and stabbings on campus fairly regularly. He was not from LV and he hated that environment. Of course teachers would never try to break up a fight, as they might have done when I was in school, but instead would get the hell away from there for fear of getting killed. When I was in HS, I never heard of armed guards on campus; it’s my understanding that most schools in the US now have – and need – them.
school metal detectors
According to this article, all high schools in Los Angeles use metal detectors: edition.cnn.com/US/9712/02/schoo … index.html
This is what happens when one neglects to secure one’s perimeter. He should have heard that kid getting outta his chair… :saywhat:
I imagine San Chong is full of budding scholars too, as well as some areas of Taichung. Mordeth, you have a point, of course, about my students not being forced to be there. But actually, since I teach English 111 -Freshman Comp, they do in fact have to be there, unless they test out. And the univ I work for, well, not exactly Princeton.
As for high schools in the States, seems like the one’s in the cities are the worst, one’s in the suburbs aren’t too bad.
American High Schools have become something of a battleground in a lot of places – and a lot of places you wouldn’t expect.
The other thing is, as a high school teacher in the US, you may NOT touch a “child”, as they are termed. Doesn’t matter if it is a hulking 6’3" “child” or what the “child” is saying. You cannot so much as grab a “child’s” wrist to prevent him from running off after he’s done something or other. I realize there is a need to protect students but things have gone so far in the States that it borders on the ridiculous.
A few weeks back in Albany NY we had a case where four teenagers (“children”!) held a teacher hostage in her own classroom. They terrorized this teacher, yet the only penalty they got for it was to write an essay on Black History. 
They were just “misunderstood”, you see. (I’m not making this up, that is the way the Superintendent of Schools phrased it.) Another kid – I think, if I’ve got the facts right – brought a gun to school, but since HE was the son of a school board member (!), he just got suspended for a day or two. That would have been jail time otherwise (and probably should be.)
I also have to remember consciously not to tell kids to stop doing this or that in the States. In Taiwan you could give the little brats the eye on the bus and usually they would cease and desist, but here you can’t even comment no matter how heinous the behavior.
I’m not disputing in any way that American high schools are messed up -they are- Big Time. I’ve taught in two Taipei high schools as well, and there were plenty of losers there as well, though not nearly on the scale as what you’d see in the States. As for the state of affairs with screwed up kids here in the States, all I can say is…“not my problem.” To hell with them. There might well be a reason for the way they behave, but, honestly, I don’t care what it is, and I doubt future employers will either. Gonna be tough for them.
[quote]
After Gang Threat, It’s Cap, Gown and Lockdown
LEVITTOWN, Pa., June 9 — For the 415 seniors at Harry S. Truman High School, graduation day offered one final lesson — unplanned and most unwelcome — about gangs, violence and intimidation.
Members of the Bloods street gang reportedly threatened to kill the school’s class president, who was a star athlete and honor student. Besides that, given the outbreak of gang-related shootings here in recent months, the threat transformed the commencement ceremony in this Philadelphia suburb into an odd pageant of anxiety and security.
The 4,500 friends, relatives and spectators who came to the ceremony had to pass through metal detectors before they could enter the stadium, which was decorated with banners, bunting and sprays of yellow carnations. Undercover police detectives milled through the crowd.
Yet when the ceremonies began Friday afternoon, the class of '06 was missing its president, Tyrone Lewis, whom the police had banned from the ceremony because they believed that he, and his family, were in danger from the Bloods. Mr. Lewis’s sister had agreed to testify against gang members in a New Jersey murder trial, and Mr. Lewis was recently shot at by three men who the police said they believed belonged to the gang. Also absent from the ceremony was Ahman Fralin, 18, a senior who has been hospitalized, and paralyzed from the neck down since April, when he was shot in the spine as he sat beside Mr. Lewis.
Despite protests from Mr. Lewis’s mother, he delivered his speech from a secret spot as the crowd watched on a large television screen. . . [/quote]
yeah…them damn Americans…geeez…what cha gonna do…maybe join a teacher union or something…damn Americans…that place must be hell on earth…
I subbed for 2 years in Chicago. And I had a range of students. The most difficult was teaching children who were born with defects from drug addictions.
The most difficult thing about teaching in the States is not only the children that are from drug addicted parents but the laws surrounding what a teacher is allowed to do and not to do. Most laws, at least in Chicago, protect the children and prevent the school/teachers being able make effective changes and put their foot down. Example, two years ago, when my stepmother was still teaching a kid put a cherry bomb in the toliet. Of course the bomb went off when a teacher was in the stall. He’s now deaf in one ear because of it, but they couldn’t kick the kid out because the kid was in Special ed and in Illinois you can’t kick out a special ed kid. 
What did they do to the kid? Personally, I’d like to hear that they had him having to put in hours working with deaf children so he could get an idea of what he had done to that teacher or with children who were burn victims because of someone being irresponsible with fireworks like he was.