Dear Penny Wright
"There is no place
for violence in our schools."
That's your quote.
Firstly if you can recall having gone to school or taught in one you
would know that violence is a subtext everywhere that you have more
than one young person thrown together with another. Politically
correct fine feelings, modern computers and massive expenditure on
amusements like touch- sensitive whiteboards; bombing the kids out
with sensory overload as it were hasn't made it any easier for
teachers in classrooms nor are we graduating kids who are more
numerate, literate, or possessed of the confidence and self-discipline
they will need for their adult lives.
I hired a couple recently
for one day and although their thumbs can move like lightning on palm
pilots beneath their non-violent school desks, splattering the
oncoming zombie hordes, they were otherwise useless. I am a damaged
old man and shouldn't be able to outwork three times my weight in
young human flesh. And it wasn't because they couldn't, rather they
didn't give a damn and spent unsupervised time contriving amusements.
Nor could they cope with honesty and now they are afraid to speak to
me and the self- confidence of at least one is such that he can't
apply for a job without being accompanied by his mother. I foresee
many hundreds of thousands of public dollars here on housing and
related support over his lifetime, far more than the nation has ever
gleaned from me.
And weaker boys are still
being bullied in the toilets, about which they dare not tell. The
girls carry on their underhanded and arbitrary vendettas against the
more vulnerable and needy; highly sophisticated programs of sniping,
undermining and misrepresentation turbocharged by social media. The
sisterhood seems so much less concerned about this kind of
viciousness; (non-violence?) perhaps because they are so much better
at it than males whose oafish physicality is more immediate and
confrontational but usually transitory and sometimes even
good-natured.
In my short teaching
career I would estimate that a quarter of the teachers in the
staffroom had the major ambition to grow old so they could retire.
It is just too stressful and nobody else in the workplace has to deal
with the volumes of crap they are exposed to every day. And this is
not only my personal opinion: they told me at teacher's college that
I was being prepared for the worst job in the world. Well maybe it
shouldn't have to be that way. So what do you do when a kid
contemptuously tells you to "stick your pink slip up your arse."
Bring out the big guns and give him a red one? And so the
confrontation drags on unresolved with all the widening ripples of
stress; angst, personal ill-will, attendant paperwork, administrative
back-up, threat of suspension, parental involvement, and several
expensive man-hours.
And the teachers who can
do other things. Many of these are the people that need to be
retained. Not hugely long ago I was on the street in town during
school hours and I met the maths master from a highschool where I did
occasional relief work. He was beaming.
"What are you doing
out of class this time of day?" I asked.
"That's all over for
me," he said, "and I am over the moon. I'm selling life
insurance and have just made my first superannuation millionaire!"
He had sold a plan to some
bright new entrant to the workforce who had a lifetime ahead of him.
I was profoundly shocked and all I could think of was the 'f' word.
He was one of the most effective people I knew at that school, and if
he couldn't or wouldn't do it who would? And simultaneously I
realized that he was barely numerate, a babe in the woods. To put it
into context 'there is many a slip' - the bloated share market still
had a few months of life in it and the fallout - the property bubble
and ZIRP were all pending. Not to mention the multinational
corporate fee structure on top of all that.
You are quite dismissive
of Kevin Donelly's anecdotal and so 'last-century' outmoded sallies
toward possible improvements to the teaching process. Here is
another anecdote from the dark past when everyone in my (Canadian)
school was literate and numerate. I recall my grade 9 manual arts
teacher, his back turned while writing tech drawing notes on the
blackboard even as young larrikin Alan Mansell was slowly screwing
his vise up on a large percussion cap from an antique black powder
firearm. When it inexplicably failed to go off he removed it, and
placing it on top of the vise, hit it with a ball-peen hammer. The
plan was of course to replace the hammer in its place and regain an
angelic and uninvolved pose before the surprised teacher could turn
around. It was ear-splitting, like a pistol shot and he did turn, to
see the kid standing in a perfect halo of dense white smoke, his
mischievous smile melting to chagrin.
It might surprise you that
there were almost no instructional delays, no coloured slips, a
runner was not sent to the office for back-up or guidance, the police
were not called to investigate the posession of dangerous goods, and
the boy's parents weren't informed unless he told them himself years
later. Rather my teacher Mr. Wapple, a faint smile on his lips said
"Mansell, come forward. Bend over." And he applied a
single good whack from a piece of dressed 1x2 that he kept for the
purpose. The kid walked back to his desk rubbing his backside and
smiling ruefully and everyone was a winner: Authority had withstood
the challenge, there was universal admiration for the teacher who had
shown coolness, restraint and applomb, there were no hard feelings or
recriminations, and no-one did anything to bring similar down upon
themselves for the whole year, at least in my class. Mansell did
not begin his career with question marks on his record. He had
achieved some celebrity and even got to sign his name on the stick.
And 50 years later I still do great tech drawings having been
motivated to pay close attention at most times.
To label that as violence
is a gross and Kafka-esque misrepresentation if you balance it
against the wasteful, gut- churning, draining, sh**storm that would
be the likely outcome of the boy's act in our enlightened new
century. And regarding the stick, a fine teacher would lose his job
and that self-confidant little monkey who had been so pleased with
himself transformed to a pathetic victim. All this is not to say
that institutionalizing the strap for kids is a good idea. Firstly
it is cruel because it lacks immediacy and justice. Secondly it is
arbitrary. Once I put on a fierce face and turning the joke back on
them, I sent three boys to a relatively benign principal with a note
they had been passing regarding me and oral sex. But he wasn't in
and they came back in tears having been caned by the vice principal.
"I owe you one, sir,"
snarled the one partial innocent in the affair.
And finally, when
something passes from the imagination through institutional culture
to pedestrian reality it loses so much of its compelling power and
risks becoming a professional badge of competence, a childhood status
symbol or right of passage to somewhere you really don't want to go.
But at the same time lets
consider the possibility that our deep instincts -if we are well-
meaning, well- adjusted people – just might be more correct than
some 'so this season' ideology. Especially when it is going so badly
that the major defense is the standard fallback - we must stay the
course or throw even more money at it; so like your political
adversaries squandering our billions /millions on Joint Strike
Fighters or the oxymoronic 'clean coal.'
Every young animal has to
find its boundaries which are a big part of who we are. And an
adult authority figure who fails to supply even this basic
information is weak and not worth a cracker in the eyes of a younger
generation. That is essentially why relations are so strained in
classrooms these days. Sorry, the kids can't help it; that's just
how we are programmed. So a friendly or restraining hand on a
shoulder is not an assault. A flick on the ear or loud whack with a
rolled exam paper or even a rare ritualized public smack on the
backside with a cane is not an act of violence and trusting our
natural, immediate responses to classroom management could save
countless careers, ulcers heartaches and billions of dollars in
wasted and drawn-out confrontation; time that should be spent
delivering the syllabus.
Regards
GS
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