Need some sanity - public school EFT having a bit of a moan

Today two seven year old girls walked out of my public school in the middle of Kaohsiung, they decided they were hungry and went on a very long walk to 7-11 via the entire neighbourhood. Luckily they were found about an hour later after a bunch of teachers went looking for them. I wish that I could say that this was the first time or even the second time but this is the fifth incident that I know of involving grade 1 children leaving the school / not being in the class they’re supposed to be in due to poor communication and procedures and a fence that any child can climb over…

There is no meaningful discussion being brought about by the incident, there has been no attempt to look at what went wrong or what could be fixed or changed - as there wasn’t any other time. There is also no meaningful mechanism through which decisions / discussions / policy (ha ha ha!) can be held or shaped. When we do have the occasional meeting they descend into farcical gossiping sessions in which nothing of any value is discussed at great length and the children are often not high on the agenda…

Ok folks please just give me an injection of sanity - is this a taiwanese problem or is my school particularly bad? This would never happen in school back in the UK (I’m sure it did happen in the 1960/70s which is why we now have strict policies / procedure / child proof fencing) and whilst I appreciate that I’m not in the UK - this is just something else entirely :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

What was the context of their adventure? Were they in class? Was it during the recess? Were they first offenders?

My first impression is that this is a school that is poorly organized, and regulations aren’t followed without protocol. This type of incident never happened to any of the elementary schools I’ve been in over the last seven years, and I’m talking over 20 schools.

I’ve had one incident where a particular group of junior high kids was drinking. Few empty cans of beer lead to the discovery, and school-wide meetings ensued. I thought this was pretty straight forward.

My current school holds morning meetings on Wednesday, and most of the issues are discussed and dealt with. I don’t hear or see much gossip or division amongst the teachers, though I had few of those in past schools I’ve taught. (Specifically, two schools)

While I understand the tendencies to generalize after such a series of events, the country’s entire education system shouldn’t be. While I had some bumps on the road, it’s been a great experience teaching in public schools. I would say that your school and the administration/teachers are the culprits of this particular behavior. It can also be related to the community around the school. I had heard of many incidents where the kids snuck out of schools when I was back in the US, so I think this is more of an academic problem.

So, don’t worry about it and let the school deal with it. If you’re unhappy with the school, I’m sure you can try to ask for transfer through your agent (I assume you have one.)

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So they left the school during the gap between classes when the grade 1s have to walk from one classroom to the other. This was this particular child’s 3rd such adventure.

Absolutely, this school is so poorly organised it’s unreal. Thank you for pointing out that this is not systemic in Taiwan. I wasn’t trying to generalize, sorry about that, I’m just trying to figure out how wide spread this sort of behaviour is. As this is my first year in the public school system here I have very few points of reference.

The gossip and division between the teachers at this school is shocking. There is a real lack of coordination and cooperation.

Those girls should be checked out by a childhood psychologist. Voluntarily venturing outside in the middle of Kaohsiung in the July heat is definitely a sign of insanity.

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I dunno…I think it’s a pretty systemic problem in this country (the complete lack of regard for the safety of children I mean). How many places have sidewalks that a child can safely walk more than ten steps without needing to step into the road to avoid something or nearly being flattened by a scooter roaring by at 60 kph? I mean, even in my school grounds, during this COVID “no outside anythings” restriction, I get nearly flattened all the time.

I had a student venture out on his bike without a helmet (during the school day without permission) and get hit by one of those blue vans. Blood everywhere, unconscious, woke up in the hospital and thought it was three days earlier. The school 1) said they couldn’t sue the driver because technically it happened on private property (WTF???) and 2) implemented a “no child or adult is allowed into the school grounds if they don’t have a helmet on” policy that was not enforced after the second day. I have months of videos of the top people in the school scootering into and around the school without helmets on. ‘Monkey see monkey do’, you morons.

The more WTF moment came six months later, when that same student and one of his classmates took their mother’s scooter (these are 8th graders) and, not wearing helmets, crashed it at what I imagine would have been a pretty high speed. There was no discussion about the importance of helmets or “maybe we should enforce our helmets policy instead of just putting empty words in writing”. Nope. Just “oh that’s too bad that they both broke their legs and hips and have massive gashes in their skulls and can’t remember basic information about what they did today” and “we can’t force 家長s to do things they don’t want to do.” Um, yes you can. It’s called “reporting them to the police for breaking the law”. But that would be 丟臉, so my students are constantly getting concussions from not wearing helmets and everyone thinks that’s normal. And we wonder why the kids are so bad at everything we ask them to do…

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I find this to be an isolated case. I have never heard of kids that young walking out of the school in the middle of class just to get snacks at 7-Eleven. And surely this happened in July because the first half of July 2020 were school days.
When I taught kids on an Indigenous reservations school in Canada, I would expect something like that to happen there, but in Taiwan? Eventually who run that school have proven to be lax in their ways to allow something like this to happen.