Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

I agree that "Teaching Isn't About Managing Behavior", in the same way that programming isn't about avoiding syntax errors and driving a car isn't about staying between the marked lines on the road.

I was a teacher for fifteen years. The writer of this article started about the same time I got into the profession, so has nearly 20 years of experience.

The first thing you need to do with any class is manage behavior. This can be tricky in your first couple of years, but after a while it just becomes part of who you are. You're more confident in the classroom, you have a reputation in the school, you can recognise and shutdown disruptive behavior before any of the other kids have realised something is about to kick off. At that point your classroom changes, and you can practice what the author calls "Reality Pedagogy", or any other type of pedagogy you like.

Believe me, having observed and mentored plenty of student teachers over the years, the first thing you need to tackle is behavior management. Once that is established then you have the opportunity to be the "captain, my captain" teacher, or whatever you like really.

Exactly. And winning a war isn't about feeding your soldiers, but you can't win the war without good mess hall sergeants.

One loud, misbehaving student can ruin the class for the other n-1. Idealists want to dream that there are no bad kids and it's all the fault of the patriarchy, white supremacy or worse. They may be correct, but work won't commence until everyone is sitting still.

The problem with applying your priorities (for the idealists) is that the misbehaving kids tend to come from the 'victimized' groups. This means that by enforcing clasroom discipline, they (often) feel that they are reinforcing the patriarchy, white supremacy, or other evil side.

Suppose a child disrupts class for 30 of his peers because his dad beats him. His dad has now effectively victimized 31 kids.

Wouldn't it be productive and moral to find ways to help all 31, perhaps by putting misbehaving kids in special classrooms where they can receive specialized help?

Assuming the specialised help isn’t just worse facilities somewhere else, maybe (or maybe not). In practice - who is going to ensure the other facilities are of a good standard? The abusive parents?

If you don’t help that kid, the other 30 will spend their whole lives sharing a society with an adult who didn’t get help. That’s an unfair drain on their life too (increased crime, policing costs, etc).

Putting the disruptive kids in the same place as everyone else means the incentives are right to do something useful to help them.

One of my aunts is a such a specialized teacher; her program is called "emotional support" or something to that effect. From what I understand it's a classroom in the same school building and the students sent to her classroom are troubled in frequently very sad ways which she won't discuss in specifics. She's accountable to the same principle that the normal teachers are.

From what I know of this sort of program, it seems to be a sincere attempt to help kids, not merely brush them off into a corner to forget about them. I don't know how often it's successful, but I think in that school district at least it's well motivated. From what I know of it, it seems like a much better system than allowing those kids to disrupt normal classrooms.

That’s good work your aunt is doing. Necessary work indeed, but unfortunately not academic work.

For these students who are deeply troubled, there must be healing before there can really be learning.

It would take one hell of a teacher to handle a full class of misbehaving students. I think most teachers would pass on that opportunity.

First let's hire another teacher and cut that class size down!

This is still behaviour management, but not entirely in the schools circle. Society as a whole needs to help manage the behaviour - we manage the dads behaviour by arresting him, manage the rest of the family through in person support and finally worry about the school.

That's because it's the same thing. Creating the level of order necessary for learning (or any other civilized behaviour) is the entirety of what "Patriarchy" really means. White supremacy recently got redefined to include things like punctuality and objectivity, which is even more on the nose.

I won't dispute that "patriarchy" (or even white supremecy) are forms of order, but they're order built by forcing roles on people based on gender and race. Anyone wrapping punctuality up into that is enforcing such a system by assigning someone's station based on race, not fighting against it.

Is this sarcasm? Being punctual or object is now racist?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the-sun.com/news/1149007/af...

Wow how racist is that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com