Darwen teachers vote to strike over 'unruly' pupils (From Lancashire Telegraph)

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  Dai Darwen wrote:
  

  MJT wrote: I am behind the teachers all the way on this one. Whilst it could be a result of poor management in the school, the point is that teachers have to put up with more on a daily basis than most other workers do in a month. People often say to me that they dread having to make presentations at work. Now imagine having to make about four or five a day, to an audience that will swear at you, possibly threaten physical violence, and will do anything to ensure that your presentation doesn't run smoothly. Teenagers (not all of them, granted, but a significant number) tend to be very difficult to deal with anyway. This is a biological and social fact. Schools have had corporal punishment for centuries precisely because of this. It is the adults, not the kids, who need to be in control. Funny how societal values broke down at more or less exactly the same time as people started to say "you can't smack children".

  On the point of the teachers, I agree they should not have to put up with inappropriate behaviour and language. I do think though that if a teacher cannot control a class they are in the wrong vocation. Why do all the etachers have to strike ? Is it every class that they cannot control ? However I do agree with you completely on the corporal punishment statement. Not only have the values broken down they are in freefall and with all the goody goodies there is no way back. As for the parents, well that is another matter, probably the first generation of untouchables resulting from the lack of discipline.

  Thanks, Dai, you raise some good points. On the subject of corporal punishment, I was doing a PGCE some years ago and I read a book by a classroom discipline guru, who was widely respected in the teaching community. He spent the majority of the book detailing strategies teachers should use in classroom management. He said that corporal punishment was totally wrong. However, he also mentioned that there was a class he went back to teaching after a sabbatical that he found himself totally unable to control. If a classroom discipline guru can't control a class, we've clearly got a problem. And if he can recall that incident in the same book in which he mentioned that corporal punishment is wrong, I'm left thinking how such an idiot can have managed to be regarded as a "guru". I hated my teaching experience, and got out of it, so I think all of what you said is sensible."
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