Nomaster
Guest
There is no short term fix, and I don't know any of the answers, but as a recovering secondary school math and science teacher I can point you to a couple of the problems; you've written them into your question.Scubaguy62:
We, as a society must become temporarily sane, then work toward a longer term sanity.
It is false economy to build secondary schools so big!
For many reasons, but first for this thread, the violence: the students are anonymous and have no real connection with one another (as a whole) in the student body of "Enormous High" or Huge Junior High". Factions become big and increasingly violent. Turf building, posturing, yes and drug sales and protection, even prostitution are in schools. (I first saw prostitution in a middle school on Oahu in the early 70's)
The bigger the school, the greater the market and the greater the fight for turf supply, and market share.
We've always had bullies, even small gangs of them, but the violence builds when you have competing gangs, the gangs are bigger, and in at least one of the schools where I taught, the gangs are family driven (not 'mafia' family) southwestern hispanic intercity, parents, big brothers, generations old gangs.
The family gangs weren't about markets in the school in Phoenix; they were building soldiers, through fighting for turf and position, for the next level. That school was my last, I couldn't take being part of the problem any more, it was a K-8 school, the few that graduated that school graduated to a worse school, where I knew folks who were attempting to survive, and in some cases, these heros got some teaching in! The heros and others stay.
I skulked away, a coward in the night.
Gangs carry vendetta and turf from the streets to schools seamlessly.
This is only as I perceived that world through my experience and my eyes and through the eyes of other teachers including my ex-wife whom I met while I was in the military and she was teaching in Hawaii.
I watched as good teachers retired early, caring teachers threw up their arms, as people survived only for retirement.
Most people I knew in the profession began by loving children and teaching, ended on a spectrum between merely hanging on or completely in denial. Many of us were too gutless to hang on that long.
And I skulked away...
As you teach your daughter well, so do some other parents, but not in the same direction. I saw parents covering for their children in schools who should not have been free on the streets, and others, desperate, trying to keep their kids alive and get them educated in a system they couldn't afford to get out of yet forced by law to inflict on their children.
Smaller schools will not get rid of the violence, that has seemingly always been a part of our society, and the permission to graduate from fists and knives to anything available may not go away either, but smaller schools will make the problem more manageable. Without community constabulary and security patrols roaming the halls of blockhouse prison-like structures in some communities, that are called 'educational' institutions.
And in the next session class, we'll discuss leadership training and how many class officers there are at "Huge High" versus how many there are at "Neighborhood Home High." Compare size and interaction of parents and community, dispairity in funding between schools in the same district, and other issues to keep you awake at night, sometimes for years or even decades after you helplessly, furtively sidle away from the fray.
Following discussions will be opportunities for children to be a part of their school's varsity team and theater groups and other organizations; and to achieve honest recognition for actual accomplishment at each of these schools.
Citizen building groups will be considered after day three of the seminar.
Arguments against small schools include lack of facilities; magnet schools are tried and true after more than twenty years -but they too are too HUGE, modification will create facilities for every need. Even if we stay with a current model of schooling that has students entering a campus in the morning and leaving it at the end of the school day.
The schooling model I moved through is not hard and fast either, so precedence exists for creating a better model of secondary education, some students are already allowed part of their education through community colleges and other instruction centers, including workforce experience.
The answers exist, we have to ask the questions, expend the resources, especially our own energy in oversight.
I'm back to my favorite song, the one about responsibility for our own actions, the actions TO our children, our actions for our children, and the actions of our children; Our actions for our future.
Tom
