Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I wish we had these as kids. The number one problem with education in the US is the lack of discipline in the class room. Teachers spend all their time babysitting problem children instead of helping everyone else learn. Parents of problem kids do everything they can to push their children’s behavioral issues back on the teachers. Cameras in the classroom could go a long way to helping schools build record evidence that can be used against such students.

View on HN

> Parents of problem kids do everything they can to push their children’s behavioral issues back on the teachers.

Whew. That's a lot of labeling! And the solution is to build evidence to be used against these tiny criminals.

Rather than just presume the kids are little shits on purpose and recording them to prove it, why not ask the kid what's going on at home? I'd bet real money that "lack of discipline" maps pretty closely to "lack of a stable home environment".

Well, yeah, but calling a parent in and saying 'you need to stop partying until 3am with your boyfriend of the week so Timmy can get some sleep and not be an impulsive little monster with no respect for his female teacher' does not go as well as you'd think.

Doesn't mean it's not true.

I don't see how this scenario is changed by having video of the child's misbehaviour.

Because discipline can be made to stick- Timmy can be suspended and when Mom comes in to say it can't be his fault, because that would imply it was her fault and she's never been held responsible for her actions before, oh well too bad video doesn't lie. Otherwise admin backs down about 50% of the time.

If you want to point out that this doesn't help Timmy, I'd agree. It does help the other 29 kids in the class, their parents, the teacher, and admin though.

It helps the other 29 kids in the class until there are altercations involving 5-7 of those.

Then it helps the other 22 kids in the class. What's the endgame? Do you suspend half the kids in the classroom because they're causing a disturbance for the other half?

Something this whole argument misses is that school is a great mechanism to teach kids to interact with each other and learn to solve problems.

It's a bad idea to teach kids that everything is always black and white.

> Do you suspend half the kids in the classroom because they're causing a disturbance for the other half?

Yes, you do!

> that school is a great mechanism to teach kids to interact with each other and learn to solve problems.

What kind of utopian school did you go to? None of my schools did this, at _all_.

Perhaps you could find a way to articulate your point about irresponsible parents without so much sexism. Or even better, without any sexism.

Because the teacher's job should be to teach, not to be a social worker.

Teachers in K-12 have never been focused on solely dispensing academic knowledge. Acclimation, acculturation, socialization; the list goes on of what they've always been expected to do. My MIL always said that her job (K-4) was to teach the little monsters how to be civilized. If they learned the three Rs, that was a bonus.

My mom's a K-12 teacher too. Not only should it not be their job to be a social worker, they're not qualified to do that work, either.

They end up having to do it anyways.

True, but they should also not be required to secure surveillance infrastructure and purge collected data at regular intervals.

Why would they be?

What do you think teachers are actually teaching? One of the very, very important skills kids learn is how to be socialized - how to behave with others in a social setting, how to be quiet and pay attention when that is appropriate, how to settle conflicts. These are all skills you can and should be learning in school. This is what teachers do, they don't just drill you on the three Rs.

There's a difference between teaching kids to socialize and serving as a de facto social worker.

Yeah, past a certain age almost all the problem kids have parents enabling them and/or causing tons of problems for them at home. You can't fix that in school, certainly not as long as parents are allowed to have any say in what happens there (which seems like something we should maybe not just get rid of), and if teachers start having to regularly go on home visits with the very parents who are accusing them (the teachers) of all kinds of nastiness because they sent precious little Timmy to the office for calling a fellow student the C-word and using their phone in class to post same on Insta, say goodbye to most of your teachers. They didn't sign up for that.

[EDIT] incidentally I'm baffled that so many schools allow phones in the building at all, let alone students to carry them to class as they're every bit as disruptive as one would think, but I gather that's another "pressure from loud, shitty parents" decision.

This is true, but it's not teachers who made the decision to spend resources on classroom surveillance. That's a call made at the administrative level, be it in the school or the district as a whole--and that's ultimately where the decision of how to approach problematic classroom behavior is being made.

Sure, because children don't have personality or autonomy. You only get that when you turn 18. /s

I don't think the cameras are a net win as the acclimation of the students to a total surveillance state has broader consequences.

What we really need is the ability for teachers to evict unruly students without having to build a multi-month evidence file. A classroom is a place to learn and there should be zero tolerance for repeat offenders. We're putting so much in the hands of teacher's as it is; giving them the option to judge behavior isn't a stretch.

To people who say that's too much power for the teachers (ex: "It's not fair! She had it in for my kid from day one!") I say phooey. Odds are your kid really is a disruptive jerk. And if a teacher truly is the problem the answer to that is to be able to fire teachers as well.

>The number one problem with education in the US is the lack of discipline in the class room.

Surely lack of adequate funding, crumbling infrastructure, out-of-date textbooks or lack of textbooks, bad curricula, a highly regimented and normative model of education (with "normal" kids and "problem" kids) and many other things could be judged to be more significant issues than "lack of discipline", which might be slapped on as a label to basically any issue that causes conflict. "Well, if only the children [ i.e., non-adults who literally lack executive function and cannot control their behavior ] were more disciplined, things would be fine."

US schools are very well funded. Adjusted for purchasing power, US educational spending is up there with Switzerland and Norway as the highest in the OECD for primary and secondary education, and is the highest for tertiary: https://www.oecd.org/education/EAG2014-Indicator%20B1%20(eng....

Primary school aged children have plenty of executive function. We’re not talking about daycares for toddlers. Americans just have very low expectations for discipline. Have you ever seen the inside of a classroom in Asia?

There's a gap between schools being well-funded, and the money being well-spent.

Administrative bloat's pretty bad, and from what I've seen a serious audit/investigation of every district in the country would turn up north of 50% being full of corruption—padded stipends, kickbacks for building contracts, hiring the spouse of an assistant super to do nothing, promoting "favorites" to higher paying positions (exactly what it sounds like, happens all the time), that kind of thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com