From the mouths of babes...

It’s not that pleasant being a teacher at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, the holidays are great and the hours fit around the kids’ day nicely, but there is a rather sinister side to teaching that most parents/people who don’t work in schools, don’t realise happens.

I have said before that kids are getting increasingly savvy about their “rights” in school – they have a right to be treated equally and receive an education in a safe environment, without going into the lengthy legal mumbo jumbo of the Children’s Act etc. The problem is that some are manipulating the law in an attempt to get exactly what they want in school – namely not having to do certain lessons that they don’t like/deem relevant, and in the process making life very unpleasant for staff.

Let me give you an example:

A child decides that they don’t want to do “core” PE anymore. Core PE is a legal requirement for schools to provide a certain number of hours per week for student to expend some energy through physical activity. Some students aren’t overly keen on it, and there have always been students who don’t like PE. In the “olden days” students were just told to get on with it and stop whinging, sometimes in no uncertain terms by less than politically correct PE staff. I obviously don’t condone PE staff taking the Michael out of students to make them feel small – that can haunt someone for life and is essentially bullying. This rarely happens (in my experience) nowadays, but what is on the rise are situations like this:

Student: “PE is rubbish, I ain’t doing it anymore”.

PE Teacher: “I’m afraid you have to unless you have a medical note – sorry about that”.

Students: “That’s Ok, I’ll just get my parents to write a note in saying that I feel threatened by you and then I won’t have to do it”.

PE Teacher: “Where did that come from?”

It’s not just exclusive to PE, but happened to me the other when doing one of my 2 lessons per fortnight as our PE department is understaffed at certain times. A very similar thing happened to a maths colleague of mine recently. The students know that if a letter comes in, or even a comment from a pupil along the lines of:

“That teacher’s picking on me”.

“That teacher threatened me”.

“That teacher hit me”.

Etc.

The school are obliged to investigate, whether there is any truth or evidence to back the story up. More often than not there will be no letter from the parent, but the fact that the student’s made what they regard as a glib comment is a massive worry. A throw away comment could end someone’s career and therefore livelihood with out there being any evidence of such a thing having occurred.

The annoying thing is that the child who has been refusing to co-operate and should be punished has deflected all attention onto the innocent teacher and will get off scot-free in general.

Consequences for actions are not things that can be taught in schools now due to the only real sanction being a detention (that the child will probably refuse to attend), especially when parents believe every word that comes out of their child’s mouth.

And they wonder why there are so many young people unemployed (figures came out recently) – many young people haven’t learnt to essentially take orders, and whereas schools have to grin and bear it, employers don’t, with the minority of awkward young people giving the whole group a bad reputation.