Monday Teeny Poll
By Glinda
Aaaah, ladies after my own heart! 57% of you never pay retail if you can possibly help it, and 28% say more than they would like, which could be that they don’t pay retail 8% of the time, but that’s still too much for them. 9% say quite a bit, and 4% of you say almost never. I would say that usually the only thing I pay “retail” for is groceries, but I try to be a bargain shopper as much as possible. But, I don’t clip coupons.
Now, I’m sure all of you have at least heard about the incident of Karen Klein, school bus monitor, being horribly bullied by some tween and teen boys. I watched a bit of the video, but had to turn it off after just a few minutes. People are calling for the kids’ heads, and Karen now has over $500,000 in donations to her name, as well as a trip to Disneyworld. There is much debate as to who is to blame for what happened, ranging from the parents to the kids to the school district. What do you think?
June 25th, 2012 at 7:53 am
It’s a sign of how little people understand about what goes on in schools that this was news at all. This sort of thing happens every day. The kids who have never been taught any respect for adults behave in precisely the same manner when they get to school. A large portion of your time is spent dealing with problems caused by just a few students.
There is next to no recourse. Parents of these types of students are unreachable until the end of the year; at that point they will run in demanding to know why they were never told (3 report cards and 4 progress reports notwithstanding) that their child was failing. Any suspensions are treated as holidays (you often see girls returning from suspensions with new hair, new shoes, etc). If you call a mother because their daughter is dressed like a 20-year old at a nightclub, they will generally come in dressed like they are working the pole at that club.
It’s not the kids’ failt – they are kids. I have seen the eyes of kids who are trying to do the right thing, despite what their parents are telling them.
Private schools and charter schools have the ability to select students and to remove them. Your standard public school does not have this power – they are forced to take whatever students the district sends, regardless of the effects on other students. If you want to know the real reason so little learning is going on, there it is. It only takes a few children to make a large difference. Until parents start arguing that it is a violation of their children’s rights to be forced to share a room with children who are disrupting their learning environment, nothing is going to change.
June 25th, 2012 at 9:46 am
There is a family story — perhaps apocryphal — about my grandfather’s grandmother, the teacher of the one-room school house in her small farming community. The mother of a misbehaving child was called down to the schoolhouse for a conference. The mother claimed that her child had not done what the teacher knew the child had done. The teacher (my grandfather’s grandmother) slapped the mother for calling her a liar.
Those were the days.
Not that physical violence is necessarily appropriate, but there was a time when it was understood that teachers needed some authority in a classroom to teach, and that parents were supposed to back the teachers up, and misbehaving children were to be corrected, not indulged.
And you’re right Obi-Wandreas — it isn’t fair to the other kids.
June 25th, 2012 at 9:55 am
My great-uncle used to drive a school bus in Milwaukee. When the kids would act up, he would pull the bus over and make them say the rosary – in German.
Of course, that would not fly today.