Classroom battles

Over the past five years I have worked in education, I have seen a vast increase of children, who are bad mannered, violent and obnoxious, entering the school environment.

These types of children are making the job of a teacher unbearable. Being faced with children who are unwilling to conform, unresponsive to discipline, and disruptive, they are now turning the once joyful teaching day into a constant battle.

Every school and every teacher will be able to relate to what I am trying to highlight.

I ask, why should teachers have to be subjected to this? Why are procedures for exclusion so difficult?

Why should we risk our own safety with such challenging situations?

Ninety percent of the time the schools faced with such problem children do not receive the support from parents, who believe that their child is always the innocent party. I believe that the attitudes of children are acquired by the role model their parents set, which relates to the article in the BEN, dated March 22, about irresponsible parents being the root of the children's bad behaviour.

For some reason, parents don't seem to take the job of a teacher seriously any more. Gone is the back-up we once had, where both teachers and parents were working to achieve the same standards of behaviour at both home and school. They prefer to come into the schools calling the shots about what right we have to discipline their child, when, if they had been doing that sufficiently in the first place, none of these problem children would ever exist.

I understand that we should not pass the problem from school to school, but we should be drafting more money into the Behaviour Management Teams, which are there to help support schools with these types of children in them.

At the end of the day, we are here to teach, not to be challenged by such problematic children.

A concerned member of the Education System. I AM writing this letter to voice my opinion about the 'problem children' teachers have to face each working day.

Over the past five years I have worked in education, I have seen a vast increase of children, who are bad mannered, violent and obnoxious, entering the school environment.

These types of children are making the job of a teacher unbearable. Being faced with children who are unwilling to conform, unresponsive to discipline, and disruptive, they are now turning the once joyful teaching day into a constant battle.

Every school and every teacher will be able to relate to what I am trying to highlight.

I ask, why should teachers have to be subjected to this? Why are procedures for exclusion so difficult?

Why should we risk our own safety with such challenging situations?

Ninety percent of the time the schools faced with such problem children do not receive the support from parents who believe that their child is always the innocent party. I believe that the attitudes of children are acquired by the role model their parents set, which relates to the article in the B.E.N, dated March 22, about irresponsible parents being the root of the children's bad behaviour.

For some reason, parents don't seem to take the job of a teacher seriously any more. Gone is the back-up we once had where both teachers and parents were working to achieve the same standards of behaviour at both home and school. They prefer to come into the schools calling the shots about what right we have to discipline their child, when, if they had been doing that sufficiently in the first place, none of these problem children would ever exist.

I understand that we should not pass the problem from school to school, but we should be drafting more money into the Behaviour Management Teams which are there to help support schools with these types of children in them.

At the end of the day, we are here to teach, not to be challenged by such problematic children.

A concerned member of the Education System.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.