So I mentioned Scott McCleod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog here the other day. The site is truly thought provoking. The current post is about students videotaping their teachers behaving badly. When I first saw the clips last Wednesday my first reaction was wow, these videos are awesome. Awesome in the original awe inspiring sense of the word. The next thing I did was to tell as many people as I could about them and begin discussing. If you haven't seen the post yet go check it out here now. Today (Sunday morning) I got back to the post to read the comments. The comments are riveting and appalling. It is sad to read some of the comments blaming the students, and wishing them ill. These comments are even more troubling when you have to figure that many of Scott's readers are probably fellow educators.
Here are a few choice comments that caught my eye:
"Fortunately most of these kids will end up in jail or dead."-Sick of rudeness
- there are sadly many responses like this and they don't deserve replies, why are teachers thinking this way? Why are these people in classrooms?
"I was pretty shocked to see that kids have cellphones and i-pods in school. They should be confiscated at the door of the school like weapons are."-June Marie
- I am not sure if the person who wrote this really meant to imply that cell phones and ipods are weapons (although I think they did). But certainly the devices are not the problem it is the classroom environment, teaching (or lack there of) and engagement. We have as much technology at my school as any in the world, and yet kids are still engaged in their classes. When I see a student surfing the web, or facebooking, or whatever in class my first reaction is to question my lesson and its relevance and certainly not to pull rank and confiscate their technology.
"You know what, those kids deserve to get yelled at. It's obvious that the teachers receive no respect, that they students are complete troublemakers, and they deserve harsh punishment. I don't think the phone was used as "journalism", it was just to record kids being bastards to their teachers as a joke."-Mandie
No one deserves to be yelled at. Many of the posts refer to respect as some sort of divine right that needs to be granted to teachers. This is not the case. Each of us, teacher or not, needs to earn any respect that we receive. Certainly sometimes getting the respect of a class of students can be very difficult work but its achievable. In his current book Letters to a Young Teacher Jonathan Kozol does a good job of describing situations where teachers in neglected inner city schools can manage to engage and earn the respect of their students. With this in mind it can certainly happen in prosperous surburban schools too and in international schools like mine.
"Its like continuously poking a stick at a helpless dog through a cage and then getting upset when the dog eventually bites back."-Sublime
-The person who wrote this comment is speaking about the teacher as the helpless dog, but I think it makes more sense viewed the other way around.
Many teachers would probably feel uncomfortable showing these clips to their students. So instead I suggest the clip A Vision of Student's Today. It is about student lives today, and is great for discussion. It was created by Mike Wesch who also did the clip related to Everything Is Miscellaneous I linked to last week. The quote at the beginning is classic. Thanks for reading and posting. More soon.
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