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Classroom Management
Sunday, December 23, 2007
By R.C. Murray
Government schools thrive on Orwellian terms like Separate but Equal [now Different but Equal], More is Less, Education Lottery, Classroom Management and Child [or Student]-Centered Learning. One of my favorites is Classroom Management.
Before I try to explain it, let me first show you the results of modern strategies for managing classroom behavior. Recall these tragedies:
Moses Lake, WA (1996) – 3 dead, including teacher; 1 wounded. Shooter opened fire during algebra class.
Pearl, MS (1997) – 3 dead, including shooter’s mother; 7 wounded. Shooter said to be Satan worshiper.
West Paducha, KY (1997) – 3 dead; 5 wounded. Shooter shot fellow students as they participated in a prayer circle.
Jonesboro, AR (1998) – 5 dead, including teacher; 10 wounded. Shooters shot fellow students when they rushed outside in response to a false fire alarm.
Edinboro, PA (1998) – 1 dead, a teacher; 2 wounded. Shooting took place at a middle school dance.
Springfield, OR (1998) – 6 dead, including shooter’s parents; 22 wounded. Students shot in school cafeteria.
Littleton, CO (1999) – 15 dead, including a teacher and both shooters; 23 wounded. Shooters, who were said to be “Goths,” had planned to kill more than 500 students at Columbine High School.
Savannah, GA (2000) – 2 dead. Shooting took place following high school sponsored dance.
Santee, CA (2001) – 2 dead; 13 wounded. Shooter hidden in bathroom as he shot fellow students.
New Orleans, LA (2003) – 1 dead; 3 wounded. Gang-related shooting by four teenagers who were not students at the same high school of their victims.
Red Lake, MN (2005) – 10 dead, including shooter’s grandfather and family friend, a school security guard, a teacher and shooter.
(“A Timeline of Worldwide School Shootings”)Violence has become common place in public schools, but violence isn’t the whole story. About a year ago, 12 first and second grade boys were suspended from a St. Louis elementary school after they sexually assaulted an 8-year old girl during recess. Forget about tag being too rough. What about rape?!
Who would have imagined boys as young as 6 years old would be so perverted to participate in gang rape? Who’d suspect such beastly behavior from mere babies? And where did these boys get their moral training? The sad truth is most kids learn how to be violent and/or sexual predators at home, but public schools take advantage of this moral depravity in order to turn undisciplined punks into sociopaths.
Dr. Bruce Shortt, The Harsh Truth About Public Schools
, Marlin Maddoux, Public Education Against America, and Joel Turtel, Public Schools, Public Menace
, tell us that kids are indoctrinated with moral relativism, starting as young as kindergarten. But it’s easier to brainwash some kids than others, particularly those that haven’t been taught any moral standards at home. If you’re a parent who cares about the moral values your child develops, you need to understand who opposes you – other parents and the government school system.
Brainwashing is a multi-step process. Kids want to be accepted by their peers, so they tend to conform to the social pressures of their group. This susceptibility is manipulated by public schools. Those kids left in a moral vacuum at home where the TV does the parenting are easier to brainwash. They have no imprinted values to wash away. Your Christian kids may require some work.
They begin by removing your Christian kids from your Christian home at age 5 and shoving them into an intensely anti-Christian environment. For at least six hours a day, your kids will be taught that the values they learned at home and church don’t apply at school. They’ll have to “leave it at the door” if they’ve been taught absolute moral standards. Don’t you feel better knowing your 5-year old is learning about safe sex and how homomania is perfectly normal and acceptable, and those who believe otherwise – like you – are homophobic bigots who must have their 1st Amendment rights annulled for the good of the nation?
The government says it’s okay for its schools to tell your child he or she is wrong to mention the name of Jesus or Moses but not Mohammed or Buddha. Your child should feel ashamed for believing in Jesus. That guilt will eventually beguile your child into agreeing with the majority, denying your value system and conforming to State-supported Humanist’s doctrines like socialism, moral relativism and Darwinism. As children grow older, their lack of fixed moral standards results in confrontations, usually with other students but quite often with The System that manufactured them. But that’s okay. They’ve been brainwashed to believe they evolved from animals, so it’s only natural that they act like beasts.
Back in the Stone Age of public schooling, or roughly 40 years ago, kids were still expected to respect each other and especially the teacher. Failure to do so prompted a visit from the original Board of Education, whose wisdom was universally recognized. I recall my 8th grade English teacher explaining her point of view to me personally. When Mrs. Hobbs finished explaining her concept of acceptable behavior, there was no ambiguity on her part or confusion on my part. She got her point across, and I resolved not to displease my teacher – the authority in the classroom in those days.
But a series of court decisions starting in the 1980’s put Mrs. Hobbs’ attention getter out of business and took her authority with it. All infractions, no matter how severe, must receive due process. The ACLU has taken over the classroom. From now on, no matter what the infraction, authority to enforce the rules is denied. Rules are nominal and discipline has gone the way of literacy. In fact, discipline has been re-defined – reformed. Now we have Classroom Management.
The experts talk in circles and never really define what they mean by classroom management. They’ll say that effective teachers manage their classroom while ineffective teachers discipline their classroom. They fail to explain who manages the discipline when discipline is what’s needed most to get certain students to sit down, be quiet, be respectful and do their assigned work. One thing is certain; the teacher has no authority to do anything! His or her classroom does not belong to him anymore. Besides, he is not a teacher anymore but a facilitator – one who facilitates endless classroom discussions, occasionally discussions that appertain to the information that used to be taught back when teachers were allowed to teach.
I’m not saying the teacher can’t do a lot to set up his classroom in an orderly way to alleviate possible disruptions in the daily routine. And I agree with the concept of displaying a list of academic and behavioral expectations – call them rules – so that students understand what is expected of them. But what do you do with those students who defy the rules? They know from kindergarten, no rule is absolute. Lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, even murder are justifiable, depending on the situation. [See situation ethics.]
Here’s what the experts will advise you to do if a student breaks a nominal rule:
Verbally warn that student not to break the rule again. [Try not to shake your finger as you issue this verbal reprimand.]
If student persists, give the student a written warning not to break the rule again. [Please use recycled paper but save a copy for your records. You’ll need it in court.]
If student persists, call mom and/or dad. [This is more fun than plucking nose hairs.]
If student persists, refer student to an administrator. [First update your resume.]
Usually, the administrator will respond to your referral form in two or three days. Meanwhile, the student brags there is no consequence for violating rules. If the administrator decides in the teacher’s favor, the student may get a written warning from the administrator, be assigned to ISS [In-school Suspension] or OSS [Out-of-School Suspension]. The latter is used sparingly for doing so makes the student absent from school, causing the school system to lose funding, which is based on the average number of students present for school each day. Yet another option is to send serious offenders to an Alternative School, sort of a mini-prison for students who’ve committed violence or found in possession of illegal drugs. The school system keeps its funding, and these students get hands-on experience at the prison life many of them will come to know before they reach 18.
Quite often the administrator does not decide in favor of the teacher. Teachers who refuse to follow modern, multicultural teacher strategies [The Seven Deadly Sins of Public Education] will not get cooperation from administrators, parents or school boards. These teachers are targeted for elimination for not being “team players.”
One afternoon as I was monitoring the hallway between classes, a wanna-be gang member stepped in front of me. He asked me what I’d do if he spit in my face. Without hesitation, I told him I’d rip his lips off. He tried to smile and look tough. His buds laughed at him as he stepped back, turned and slumped away. Since we were having an English department meeting with the principal that afternoon, I relayed the almost-incident. My principal took a deep breath, shook his head and stared across the room. I was one of those teachers he and his assistant wanted to make unpersons, so I suspected he was going to vaporize me. Instead, he said he couldn’t blame me if I reacted that way, but if it ever really happened, please report to his office immediately and bring the punk’s lips with me.
I was glad his assistant principal wasn’t there. She’d have had me shot. She was the reason the aforementioned young man thought he could be so disrespectful in the first place. When I referred him and a few of his buds for disrupting my class one day, she went after me, not them. She claimed their behavior was my fault, that because I was expecting them to actually read their literature assignment, something diverse learners are never required to do, I was “frustrating them” and “they were simply acting out their frustrations” in my class. Classroom management skills – that’s what I needed, not the authority to deal with undisciplined punks before they hurt someone. That dear lady is the reason I decided to quit teaching and a major motivation behind my writing Legally STUPiD:
. Thanks, Brookie.
Christian parent, you love your kids and try to teach them right from wrong. Please understand though that most parents only teach their kids wrong, and so their children are going to be the perfect bad example for your kids to follow or be injured by. Please understand too that public schools are going to go beyond bad examples and brainwash your children to believe what the State wants them to believe. Finally, please understand that when you turn your kids over to government schools, you forfeit your parental rights. Maybe you shouldn’t put them in public schools in the first place.
R.C. Murray is a disabled veteran and former public school teacher. He left a good job as a technical writer for a satellite manufacturer in order to teach high school English, only to immediately be told he could not expect, much less require his students to read their literature assignments. After four years of fighting The System and having a stroke then a mini-stroke, he decided he was safer in the airborne infantry and returned to being a technical writer for a military contractor.
He has also dedicated the rest of his life to exhorting parents about what’s really going on in their local public school, the one they think is a good school. R.C. Murray is the author of two books, Golden Knights:
History of the U.S. Army Parachute Team and most recently, Legally STUPiD:
Website: www.voicefromthepews.com
E-Mail: bakea3@aol.com
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