Posts Tagged → Student Behavior

Troublesome times & behavioral defiance

At the end of last semester — just before winter break — a troublesome student of mine handed in his final assignment and told me, “I’d better pass this class. Otherwise, I’m coming for you.”

I didn’t feel particularly threatened by it. This student talks a lot, but they’ve never been violent, so I didn’t think there was any substance to what they’d said. However, you don’t get to threaten people.

So, I took the student into the hallway and explained it to them. “You can’t talk to teachers — or anybody, I guess — like you just did. Making threats like that is very serious.” I sent the student to his admin and wrote them up.

All of this happened literally 15 minutes before school got out for winter break.

I took some time before leaving for the day to speak to administration about it; I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for threats, so I wanted to cover my bases and make sure I’d informed everyone who needed to be informed. Admin told me not to worry — that particular student was being moved out of my class. So, I thought, problem solved. Hopefully the student will be put someplace where they can find success.

Except, of course, that wasn’t the end of it. That student simply got moved from one class of mine to another class of mine. So, I’m still teaching them, but at a different time of day.

(Thanks for the help, admin! Shuffling students around like troublesome Catholic priests is sure to solve this issue.)

Yesterday, this student got in some more trouble. They were late for class without a pass, lied about where they’d been, lied about talking to an admin when told to get a tardy slip, lied about having their phone, lied about using their phone while they were supposed to be reading, and refused to stop using their phone multiple times. All of this was within the first 10 minutes of class.

I called for security to get an escort to take this student to the administration office. The student said, “I don’t need an escort. I can walk to the admin office by myself.”

I said, “I’d like to believe you, but you’ve lied pretty consistently today and you have been caught walking the halls several times this week. We’ll just wait for an escort to make sure you get where you need to be.”

Only no escort showed up. We waited for over an hour, but … nothing. The student just sat at his desk. I carried on with the lesson and emailed admin to ask what to do in this situation but heard nothing in response before the end of class.

It is incredibly disheartening. I’m not mad at the student, just as I’m not mad at admin for keeping this student in my class, just as I’m not mad about no security escort showing up.

The cold, hard truth of it is that security was probably busy with other problems and didn’t have time to send an escort. Admin probably kept the student in my class because there was no other choice with scheduling — every student takes English and there are only so many English classes. And this student has problems of their own — I’m sure their propensity for lying is learned behavior that has helped the student in the past. They need more help; they need a classroom with fewer students and a different structure.

This is the kind of student who, if I asked them, “Please write your name on this piece of paper,” would fail the task. Not because they can’t write or anything; it’s more likely something along the lines of behavioral defiance. The student opposes anyone in authority “just because.”

I wish I could say I didn’t have other students with the same issue, but it’s actually pretty common.

Who would’ve thought a country like ours would produce so many people with behavioral disorders?

Tick tock on a clock dj blow up my speakers

I downloaded TikTok a while ago (I’m awfully late to the party; sue me) mostly because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I’ve found it hard to interact with students on a personal level if I don’t spend some time checking out what they’re into. You’ve got to watch the shows, listen to the music, play the dumb phone games (and, yes, download what is possibly the most insidious app ever devised).

I’m not saying you’ve got to become all about those things — five minutes with Block Blast, I think, is more than enough — but you should spend enough time with them that, when you see little Timmy trying to sneakily make a little square jump over some spikes under his desk, you can know which particular culprit has stolen Timmy’s attention.

Of all the apps that students regularly use, TikTok is far and away the worst. Good lord it is addicting. The more I use it, the more I come to think that it is both reckless and stupid to allow teenagers unrestricted access to apps like TikTok. We’re creating an army of little dopamine mind-slaves. Australia has the right idea in banning that shit.

(Sure, that “mind-slave” bit is an exaggeration — I’m a writer, I exaggerate perpetually — but you’d be hard-pressed to find a single long-term benefit provided by TikTok.)

Sure, but what news is being delivered at laser-fast, fiberoptic speeds? What, exactly, is the content being bounced around satellites and into my little glass rectangle? That’s the problem I have with this whole thing. I ask myself the same question I ask when I watch cable news: “Who decided that I should see this?”

For cable news, the answer is easy: It’s decided by corporations who will show you whatever “news” they think will most benefit their bottom line. (As evidenced by cable news shows actually turning into the home shopping network.)

For TikTok (and YouTube and Instagram…), we’ve instead got something people are oddly okay with calling “The Algorithm.” (What the fuck kind of sideways-ass timeline are we in where our “information feeds” are controlled by “The Algorithm” and we’re all like, “Yeah, that’s fine, Imma go to Starbucks.”)

The scary part (well…one of the scary parts) is that nobody, not even the creators, can fully tell you how the goddamned algorithm works. It’s complicated as all hell and tracks so much of your information it is absolutely astounding.

So, basically, we don’t know how or why we’re being fed the stuff we see on these apps. We don’t know if we’re all seeing the same stuff, or if we’re all in little bubbles being spoon-fed what The Algorithm wants us to see. (In some cases we’re being shown different angles of the same event — actually spinning reality in real time, creating different “versions of the truth.”)

I mean. This all sounds a bit like I need to tighten my tin foil hat, but… How many more times this morning do I need to see a guy in Minnesota being murdered? How many more times do I need to zoom in on that shooting with super slo-mo?

And how many times does every teenager in the country need to rewatch it? No, really, what’s a healthy number? What do you think? They say you have to experience something 33 times for it to enter long term memory, which seems a little high to me, so maybe we can start there and work toward a reasonable number? /s

Shit’s bananas.