Student cellphone insurgency
Between the hyperventilated coverage of Anna Nicole’s autopsy today, a peculiar news story squeezed in as filler. YouTube is posting videos, taken with cell phones by students, of teachers in public school classrooms having violent, abusive outbursts. I saw this on MSNBC while I was dusting blinds, and it stopped me in my tracks.
The most remarkable thing about it, aside from the extremely brief flashes of raging teachers smashing students’ phones on the floor, was what the news personality had to say about it. She wondered aloud if this meant schools should ban cell phones. FULL COMMENTARY
pierre:
stan,
9 February 2007, 3:45 pmin my opinion your system has failed here .
I don’t think you are entirely wrong , but rather that this violence shows once more great social tensions .
Be careful not to be too dogmatic , Stan
DeAnander:
what immediately occurs to me: response of military to torture photos and other leakage of US atrocities and abuses in Iraq — banning cell phones with photo capacity among troops. CYA in action.
secondly, the low status of teachers in US today, centralisation of schools, imposition of huge class sizes and “standardised testing and curricula” all deskilling and debasing the vocation of teaching by taylorising education. certainly would produce stress, rage, low self-esteem, resentment in teachers as well as boredom, stress and contempt among students.
thirdly the low status of teaching is associated with the predominance of women in the field, as with clerical work. being a “secretary” was considered a high status middle class job until the profession becane feminised. male teachers almost certainly feel gender anxiety in addition to all the above and may be acting out aggressively in compensation.
fourthly some of these students are genuinely hard to handle and/or scary especially in such overcrowded classrooms. I have some friends who are teachers (female) who’ve experienced vile sexual and homophobic verbal attacks from grade and high school students, and so on. the dysfunction is self-feeding, not self-correcting. the more the kids are treated like thugs, criminals and rabid animals the more badly they behave and the more scared/stressed the teachers get, and the cycle of fear and repression escalates with schools more and more resembling the OT.
to break the cycle imho would re
9 February 2007, 4:31 pmDeAnander:
damn, stray keystroke and premature post. to break the cycle would imho require relocalising schools; banning junk food from schools and institution localised CSA/organic food chains for school cafeterias, which can have a startling effect on behavioural problems; banning the drugging of kids with behaviour-mod psychoactives like Ritalin; reducing class size to not more than 20/25; offering paid part time positions to parents as teacher’s aides and tutors; making the school a community resource by offering evening classes for adults and hosting community programmes; including constructive physical projects in the curriculum such as community gardening, yard work and home repair for the elderly and other public service activities for kids. in other words stop disengaging the schooling process from community and family and re-integrate it.
we “school” our kids like factory livestock and the results are similar.
9 February 2007, 4:37 pmAudrey:
I admit I spent a day last semester telling my kids that if teachers were allowed to have tasers, I would totally taser them for resizing photos and getting the aspect ratio wrong. And then I drew diagrams on the board with what I was looking for, and what I didn’t want to see – which I labeled “I will taser you.†I’m not sure they’re really frightened of me the way they would be in an ideal world; I don’t exactly have a fierce persona, but I did get some assignments turned in after that with filenames like pleasedonttaserme.psd.
I had a good lesson about cell phones the first year I was teaching. The state had banned student cell phones in public schools at that point. I ran into a student using hers – she was making an appointment to get her vaccines so the school wouldn’t expel her. Her parents weren’t around to take care of that sort of thing for her. Teachers forget that kids don’t always come from family situations where an adult take cares of their personal business. Some days they are scrambling to find transportation home. Some days they might have a sick parent in the hospital, and that connection to their family is the thing that gives them enough peace of mind so that they can concentrate in school.
There’s something very sad about trying to convince people that you’re teaching them language skills to empower them while you are actively working to undermine their ability to communicate in every way possible.
9 February 2007, 9:24 pmrequired:
There was a site that came out in Australia recently where kids could rate their teachers. The media went crazy about false allegations sexual assault even though none were reported on the site. Interesting.
9 February 2007, 9:31 pmJames M:
These links provide good real-life examples of much of what De talks about in the second comment:
Cherryland pupils starting their own garden
Students veg out — in a good way
My friend Becky runs the “Botany On Your Plate” program at one of the schools, Cherryland Elementary in Hayward, CA. It’s been heartening to hear her talk about the children’s enthusiasm for growing their own food, and to see that the “food praxis” mindset is being instilled in this new generation.
9 February 2007, 11:22 pmxenia:
I agree with DeAnander. Let me add something else which is valid for most school systems, even the ones from “real existing socialism”: grading. While it is one of the few sticks left for an instructor to wield, grading imposes a hierarchy and it has severe long-term consequences for the student’s further advancement in the system. It pretends to be objective, when in reality it is very random. I have gotten terrible grades when I had been studying for weeks before an exam and I have also gotten good grades for wearing a mini-skirt and smiling nicely at teachers while parroting them. Of course, I would never do something like that, I “merely” tend to give better grades to those whom I perceive as genuinely suffering or politically aware; this reflects my own subjectivity. Eliminating grading is impossible in a capitalist system; precisely for this reason, I think it should be a priority for us who teach to reflect upon how it can be changed.
10 February 2007, 8:38 amxenia:
To look at it from another perspective: because I love school and learning so much, I had never understood how people could hate it (not just one subject or teacher, but school itself). I did blame them for not trying and thought of them as lazy. It took coming to the US to teach me that you could go to school and not learn anything, because the teachers themselves are ignorant and struggling to survive, and many of them would rather be doing something else.
10 February 2007, 8:42 amfalloch:
I wonder if some of the problem is that people (in this case, teachers) feel they are under constant surveillance. Example: A teacher here in my town was at a private party, where a few of his pupils, children of his friends, arrived late in the evening after he’d had a few drinks. He wasn’t being offensive, just drunk and dancing with a Viking helmet on his head. The kids photographed him with their cell-phones, and started sniggering about how they were going to take them to show the headmaster the next day. After protracted and heated argument, the kids were persuaded to delete the photos from their phones. Why should a guy be in danger of censure or even dismissal because some kids crashed into his personal social life? (Incidentally, the secondary school is 20 miles away, not up the street.) Obviously, I don’t like the idea of teachers bullying their pupils, but there are two sides (if not more) to this story. The solution? Who knows. Cultivating respect is an elusive ideal, especially when politicians think it’s far more inportant to fund bombers and tanks, than schools and hospitals, and when celebrities are photographed in the most embarrasing positions possible, and the results widely distributed. Cell phones, nowadays almost all of them photo-phones, contribute to sadistic depictions that many people consider normal - witness Abu Ghraib - that make me feel incredibly squeamish. Which is why I have a cell phone from the dinosaur age, that can text, but cannot photograph.
10 February 2007, 12:57 pmCharles:
By the way, in Michigan, there is strict prohibition on bringing any cell phones with cameras’ into court rooms. There’s a specific emphasis on no cameras, even for lawyers, who other wise can bring in cell phones as long as they don’t have cameras.
12 February 2007, 11:01 amDeAnander:
the prohibition on cameras in courtrooms seems as old as the hills and nearly as durable. one of the very last professional niches for the sketch artist…
12 February 2007, 6:02 pmMark Homer:
I went through the Philadelphia public schools during the fifties and early sixties. I think the behavior of the teacher is entirely appropriate. He did not really stop his lecture for a second more than necessary, and got the message across that learning is important, power structures do exist, and that the kid was a jerk forinterfering both with the lecturer’s work and the students’ learning. He implicitly complemented the student’s intelligence by not stopping to browbeat him or explain why he did why he did–he knew the kid would get it. Which is more than I can say for much of the comments here.
22 February 2007, 1:15 pmskol:
He might not have stopped his lecture, but I doubt many of his students continued listening to it after that “necessary second”. If you think it’s entirely appropriate to prove that learning is important by violently smashing something to bits and then pretending like nothing happened…well, suit yourself. I doubt he needed any help getting the message across about the kid, either.
23 February 2007, 4:08 pmBut he sure proved the power structure! I can imagine the thrill that teacher had smashing the phone on the floor and then casually continuing his lecture… he was probably sweating furiously from the rush. And I’ll bet the students were too…
Audrey:
skol nailed it. The lesson he taught that day was that as the person in charge, he feels entitled to impose his will through violence and destruction, and he expects the others who are “less than” him to be powerless, even though they outnumber him.
It’s no more “complimented the student’s intelligence by not stopping to browbeat him or explain why he did why he did” (as Mark claims) than smacking a woman who annoys you and continuing your conversation with her as if nothing happened is “complimenting her intelligence.”
24 February 2007, 12:21 pmDeAnander:
I don’t think it’s very good paedogogical technique for teachers to throw tantrums in front of the kids.
25 February 2007, 12:26 amstacia:
teachers and students are pitted against each other in a system that oppresses and dehumanizes both of them. this guy obviously lost it, and i hope will have to pay for a new cell phone out of his pocket. but to call it an ‘insurgency’, well, there’s no case here even to overstate.
technology is aggressively marketed to young people as a way to be connected (and even liberated), but it often functions as a capitalist wolf in sheep’s clothing, and widens the generation gap by turning them into consumers enslaved to things the older generation doesn’t understand.
the generations need each other, though, even teachers and students, and mutual respect is possible. there is no learning anything useful without it.
STAN: Very good points, and I stand corrected on how cavalier I was with this topic. Youth culture, generally speaking, is consumer culture, and a creature of it.
25 February 2007, 7:25 pmspook:
for what it’s worth:
The new dropouts: teachers
Oregon looks at ways to change its rookie educators’ sink-or-swim stats
25 February 2007, 9:23 pm…
Oregon loses more than a quarter of its teachers within their first three years in a classroom, a 2002 study reported. Nearly three-quarters cited a lack of staff and principal support in their jobs, ever more challenging as classrooms become more diverse and demands for student achievement rise.
…
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/11722155637070.xml&coll=7