I completed a top secret project for the state (cut scores!) a week after I had four days of circle training in restorative practices. One of the other teachers in my grade-level committee mentioned that her school was moving away from using circles because, in her words, "it turns out kids need consequences."
I wish I'd had time to properly respond to her, but I just said that circles were a great success in my school, but they do require buy-in. I didn't add that...
1. Consequence is not a synonym for punishment. I think you were using it to mean punishment, because there are always consequences to everything, both positive and negative. Teaching kids that consequences are only negative external impositions only encourages them to avoid accountability.
2. Punishments don't prevent disruptive or harmful behaviors. They don't address the root cause of the behavior, and they don't teach kids how to make better choices. THEY DON'T WORK! The kids who get detentions and suspensions KEEP getting detentions and suspensions because punishments only increase negative emotions, which in turn increase disruptive and harmful behaviors. Also, no kid has ever called a teacher a bitch just because they didn't know they'd get in trouble for it.
3. If you're only using circles for repair, yeah, they're gonna fail. Restorative practices are about systematic overalls to how we approach student behavior. Circles are not a panacea. Try using them for community building first. Try teaching kids about their own emotional needs (see Choice Theory by William Glasser). Try addressing the root cause of the behavior BEFORE it becomes disruptive or harmful. Try, Idk, empathizing with students, even (especially) the ones you don't like.
4. For repair circles to work, you have to believe in their ability to work AND you have to take the time to practice until they do. Ffs, you teach literacy, you know how long it takes for communication skills to develop. Why do you think the circle process is somehow magically different? Maybe circles failed because you weren't good at them and needed better instruction and more time to practice. Maybe you need to put your ego aside and realize you are learning to do better right alongside the kids. Maybe you could be, Idk, a fucking role model in learning? Or is that too much to ask your over-burdened self-identity?
I was trying not to be a too much of a bitch so I'd have leverage to get my way in the work we were doing, but it sure did piss me off.
Ok but when you say "restorative justice" do you mean "hegemonic power structures need to provide ways for people who've done bad things to reintegrate into society" or do you mean "you, personally, someone with no hegemonic power whatsoever, need to keep forgiving people who've hurt you forever" because those are like. Pretty different.
don’t just scroll past this actually watch it, it’s only 2 minutes long. If you re-recorded this today word for word with modern actors and places, it wouldn’t even look out of place as a PSA
Speaker: “I see negroes holding jobs that belong to me! And you! I’ll ask you, if we allow this thing to go on, what’s gonna become of us real Americans!”
Hungarian man with clear foreign accent: “I’ve heard this kind of talk before, but I never expected to hear it in America.”
Young man: “This man seems to know what he’s talking about.“
Speaker: “What are us real Americans gonna do about it? You’ll find it right here in this little pamphlet—the truth about negroes and foreigners! The truth about the Catholic Church! You’ll find…” [audio grows quieter as camera shifts to the onlookers]
Hungarian man: “You believe in that kind of talk?“
Young man: “I dunno, it makes pretty good sense to me.“
Speaker: “And I tell you, friends, we’ll never be able to call this country our own until it’s a country without… without what?“
Other man: “Yeah? Without what?“
Speaker: “Without negroes, without alien foreigners,”—the young man is nodding, following along—“without Catholics, without Freemasons! You know these…“
Young man: “What’s wrong with the Masons, I’m a Mason.” Looks to European man worriedly, “hey, that fellow’s talking about me!“
Huungarian man: “And that makes a difference, doesn’t it.“
Speaker: “These are your enemies! These are the people who are trying to take over our country! Now you know them, you know what they stand for. And it’s up to you and me to fight them!” A bunch of the onlookers in the vicinity wave him off like he’s crazy and turn away, “fight them and destroy them before they destroy us!”
Speaker: “Thank you.“
One man in the now somewhat awkward crowd: “claps“
Young man: *is visibly uncomfortable*
Hungarian man: “Before he said Mason, you were ready to agree with him.”
Young man: “Well yes but, he was talking about… what about those other people?“ *the pair sit down on a park bench*
Hungarian man: “In this country, we have no ‘other people.’ We are American people, of course.“
Young man: “What about you? You aren’t American, are you?“
Hungarian man: “I was born in Hungary. But now, I am an American citizen. And I have seen what this kind of talk can do. I saw it in Berlin.”
Young man: “What were you doing there?“
Hungarian man: “I was a professor at the university. I heard the same words we have heard today. But I was a fool, then. I thought Nazis were crazy people, stupid fanatics. But unfortunately it was not so. You see, they knew that they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country, so they split Germany into small groups. They used prejudice as a practical weapon to cripple the nation.”
90% of Denmark’s Jews survived the Holocaust, because starting at the top, Denmark’s government and prominent citizens and all the way down emphasized this.
And all this was openly supported by King Christian. He did not, contrary to popular myth, ride his horse through Copenhagen wearing the Star of David, but he did make it clear, as he wrote in his diary, that he considered “our own Jews to be Danish citizens, and the Germans could not touch them”.
Denmark had, in essence, inoculated itself against Nazi propaganda because its citizens believed that Jews were not “other people.” As Bo Lidegard writes in Countrymen:
The Danish exception shows that the mobilisation of civil society’s humanism and protective engagement is not only a theoretical possibility: It can be done. We know because it happened.
Being a Jewish Dane or a Danish Jew might have made you a little different, but it didn’t make you other people.
Unlike Niemoller, they didn’t have to see atrocities visited on a series of Other People and only start caring when it happened to themselves. They understood it as happening to themselves from the start. Because their Jewish neighbors weren’t Other People.
As Denmark’s Jewish population sprang into panicked action, so did its Gentiles. Hundreds of people spontaneously began to tell Jews about the upcoming action and help them go into hiding. It was, in the words of historian Leni Yahil, “a living wall raised by the Danish people in the course of one night.”
Many of them didn’t even see it as “resistance work” on behalf of the Jews because it was simply fighting back against an attack on their own community.
Though there was anti-Semitism in Denmark before and after the Holocaust, the Nazis’ war on Jews was largely viewed as a war against Denmark itself. After the war, most Danes refused to take credit for their resistance work, which many had conducted under false names. Ordinary people who never considered themselves part of the Danish Resistance passed along messages, gathered food, gave hiding places or guarded the possessions of those who left until they returned home from the war.
Communities in which there are no Other People save lives.
Every time I see some moral panic article about how some alarming % of teens admit to vaping or smoking or doing drugs or whatever, I think about that time in 9th grade when school handed us a survey on substance use, told us we had to fill it out, and me and a half dozen friends reported that we’d been habitual users of heroin, cocaine, and acid since the age of 9.
“Mischievous Responder Bias” is a known problem in surveying youth but it’s annoying and expensive to overcome it so often people don’t….also the things that come up when people try to look for it are hilarious, like 99% of the kids who reported having a missing limb were lying.
It is my favorite thing about education research: that you have to remember that your subjects are a bunch of little scamps trying to prank you.
If kids report that they're transgender and have one leg and belong to a gang and have several children ... take it with a grain of salt.
This reminds me how it's difficult to do research with corvids because they know they're being tested so they just fuck with the researcher and they don't get any usable data.
I've recently been subjected to the first two X-Men movies and I literally cannot stop thinking about what a shitshow professor x's academy for mutant babies is as an actual school.
there's no way they're accredited, right? there are four teachers (three post-X2, RIP) and three of them were raised by the fourth. you clearly don't need any actual teaching credentials to work there other than a mutation and nepotism. I don't believe any of these people have a degree in the subjects they're teaching, let alone in education or human development. there appears to be a total lack of counseling services available, despite the fact that most of the student body are apparently runaways who all face heavy society discrimination. did Rogue get any support after she was kidnapped and almost killed by Magneto in the first movie or did Xavier just give her brain zappies until she was functional again.
there's no way in hell a "diploma" from the charles xavier institute for genetically anomalous youth is worth anything on a college application. do all of these kids end up having to get a GED if they want to have a prayer of accessing higher education? do they receive any support for that?
also did I mention there are four adults in this entire school. in X2 they all take off on the same night and leave the kids in the care of Logan, a famously unstable man who freaked out and stabbed a student last time he visited. it would have been lethal if it was anyone but Rogue. also in X2 half the student body has to flee in the night in their pajamas with no one to take care of them but a teenage Colossus and the adults just. do not feel the need to follow up on that. because they're busy dealing with the stupid plot du jour.
the entire setup seems like a massive lawsuit waiting to happen; while we the audience obviously know that there's nothing malicious happening to the kids (except for mutant terrorists and trained mercenaries alike regularly infiltrating the school) you have to admit that an unlicensed group home for children, some of whom are very young, masquerading as a school and staffed entirely by people with no real credentials to speak of is a pretty bad look. I think genuinely any parent would have a pretty strong case for a lawsuit here and it wouldn't even necessarily be mutantphobic of them to do it, although of course anyone with an anti-mutant agenda could have a field day here. genuinely I have to assume that the only way they've avoided it this long is Xavier lobotomizing anyone who tries it, which is so cool and normal.
Additional Reminder: Charter schools are public schools, not private. If they are not required to follow state standards and/or are exempt from any of the regulations or obligations placed upon traditional public schools, then they're not really a school; they're a scam to funnel tax money away from legitimate education and into the pockets of people who actively hate the concept of public education (like Moms for "Liberty").
I am really enjoying reading about the University of Wisconsin chancellor fired after the university discovered all the pornos he and his wife were making.
Generally when someone has a public sex scandal (or “scandal”) you get the standard “I am sorry. I regret it. It was a misjudgment on my part” but this guy is like “fuck you I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t violate conflict of interest clauses, you are violating my first amendment rights”
I want the details about how this was discovered because it has a real “I saw the professor at the devil’s sacrament” “girl what were YOU doing at the devil’s sacrament 👀" vibe
I know this is funny haha to a lot of people but I need yall to really internalize that this is a gentle example of what happens to sex workers. This is a white man in his 50s who turned to sex work for fun and lost his professional career. Now imagine how fucked it is for disabled impoverished sex workers to advertise themselves in a way that separates their identities and lives from their real ones because if they can't they're barred from most other jobs if ANYONE happens to find out. Aside from jobs, imagine how this affects custody battles and abuse cases and housing availability. Maybe it seems like everyone and their dog has an onlyfans and a pornhub channel and things are cool now, but we live under a christofash oligarchy and sex workers will always be trampled and spat on by most of society. This story is absurd but this isn't funny at all.
First addition to post: " "It's not what we're about in higher ed, to censor people," Ms. Wilson said. She added that the videos are only available to those who are looking for such content. "If they seek it out, they're free to do so," she said.
Mr. Gow, 63, said he and his wife, 56, have made videos together for years but had decided recently to make them publicly available on porn websites and had been pleased by the response. They said they never mentioned the university or their jobs in the videos, several of which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The couple also has made a series of videos in which they cook meals with porn actors and then have sex.
"We have that show, 'Sexy Healthy Cooking, where we interview performers and really humanize them in ways that you wouldn't get in their other work," Mr. Gow said. "It's an interesting process, and the people that we work with are completely professional, and very great to work with." "
Second addition, first screenshot: " Mary Anne Franks, a professor at George Washington University Law School who studies free speech and other issues, said that Mr. Gow had raised interesting questions about what kinds of expression a university feels obligated to allow.
That question has caused consternation and upheaval at colleges and universities across the country - though typically around divisive political issues."
Second screen: "Ms. Franks noted that another University of Wisconsin System college said this year that it was unable to take action against a student who had posted a racist video online.
“Whether intentionally or not, he's throwing open the idea that those people who say that they are really committed to free speech, and want discussion on every possible topic, don't really mean it," Ms. Franks said." /end ID]
and actually would like to link back here to this reply from zevveli:
I would actually argue that it is neither funny, nor absurd. This is the sort of thing that most of us in the 90's were worried about. And something that a bunch of people I knew who were studying education were concerned about as well (raise your had if you remember any of your friends or anyone ever saying "don't take pictures of me at a party, I'm studying education and next semester I start my student placement.)
But what this is, is a case that can set a precedent. If the professor, who likely has the resources for a wrongful termination case, wins, then that would be a victory, however small, for sex workers.
I got angry every time a teacher got fired for things like this. not just porn or candid pictures, but also over private consensual sex between adults.
When my ex was murdered they used his fet life profile to vilify him in the press and argue he shouldn't have been allowed to work with children even though his partners had only ever been his age or a bit older.
I am kind of amazed it never happened to me as there are nude pictures, paintings, and sculptures of me out there and were when I was teaching. Not widely distributed, sure, but there could be and i wouldn't know until it bit me in the ass.
Given the many, many consensual things I'd done with people my own age, and that period of sex work, I knew I was in violation of my license's morals clause before i even decided to get the ed degree.
I was completely safe to have around children, but that never matters when the moral panic sets in.
They hold teachers to a standard that makes no sense.
I hope this man wins as the precedent will protect so many others who have done nothing wrong.
Research on a police diversion program implemented in 2014 shows a striking 91% reduction in in-school arrests over less than 10 years.
"Research on a police diversion program implemented in 2014 shows a striking 91% reduction in in-school arrests over less than 10 years.
Across the United States, arrest rates for young people under age 18 have been declining for decades. However, the proportion of youth arrests associated with school incidents has increased.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, K–12 schools referred nearly 230,000 students to law enforcement during the school year that began in 2017. These referrals and the 54,321 reported school-based arrests that same year were mostly for minor misbehavior like marijuana possession, as opposed to more serious offenses like bringing a gun to school.
School-based arrests are one part of the school-to-prison pipeline, through which students—especially Black and Latine students and those with disabilities—are pushed out of their schools and into the legal system.
Getting caught up in the legal system has been linked to negative health, social, and academic outcomes, as well as increased risk for future arrest.
Given these negative consequences, public agencies in states like Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania have looked for ways to arrest fewer young people in schools. Philadelphia, in particular, has pioneered a successful effort to divert youth from the legal system.
Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program
In Philadelphia, police department leaders recognized that the city’s school district was its largest source of referrals for youth arrests. To address this issue, then–Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel developed and implemented a school-based, pre-arrest diversion initiative in partnership with the school district and the city’s department of human services. The program is called the Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program, and it officially launched in May 2014.
Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker named Bethel as her new police commissioner on Nov. 22, 2023.
Since the diversion program began, when police are called to schools in the city for offenses like marijuana possession or disorderly conduct, they cannot arrest the student involved if that student has no pending court case or history of adjudication. In juvenile court, an adjudication is similar to a conviction in criminal court.
Instead of being arrested, the diverted student remains in school, and school personnel decide how to respond to their behavior. For example, they might speak with the student, schedule a meeting with a parent, or suspend the student.
A social worker from the city also contacts the student’s family to arrange a home visit, where they assess youth and family needs. Then, the social worker makes referrals to no-cost community-based services. The student and their family choose whether to attend.
Our team—the Juvenile Justice Research and Reform Lab at Drexel University—evaluated the effectiveness of the diversion program as independent researchers not affiliated with the police department or school district. We published four research articles describing various ways the diversion program affected students, schools, and costs to the city.
Arrests Dropped
In our evaluation of the diversion program’s first five years, we reported that the annual number of school-based arrests in Philadelphia decreased by 84%: from nearly 1,600 in the school year beginning in 2013 to just 251 arrests in the school year beginning in 2018.
Since then, school district data indicates the annual number of school-based arrests in Philadelphia has continued to decline—dropping to just 147 arrests in the school year that began in 2022. That’s a 91% reduction from the year before the program started.
We also investigated the number of serious behavioral incidents recorded in the school district in the program’s first five years. Those fell as well, suggesting that the diversion program effectively reduced school-based arrests without compromising school safety.
Additionally, data showed that city social workers successfully contacted the families of 74% of students diverted through the program during its first five years. Nearly 90% of these families accepted at least one referral to community-based programming, which includes services like academic support, job skill development, and behavioral health counseling...
Long-Term Outcomes
To evaluate a longer follow-up period, we compared the 427 students diverted in the program’s first year to the group of 531 students arrested before the program began. Results showed arrested students were significantly more likely to be arrested again in the following five years...
Finally, a cost-benefit analysis revealed that the program saves taxpayers millions of dollars.
Based on its success in Philadelphia, several other cities and counties across Pennsylvania have begun replicating the Police School Diversion Program. These efforts could further contribute to a nationwide movement to safely keep kids in their communities and out of the legal system."
“It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it? The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society. This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.”
—
What if we talked about monolingual White children the way we talk about low-income children of color?
Excerpt from a satirical blog post from The Educational Linguist that makes a good point about which language skills we value as a society and the problems with talking about a “language gap”.
Parent-teacher conferences are always good for finding out which of my students plays fast and loose with the truth. But. Students are my new school are next level.
One of my students told me that their parent had assigned them a research project on the same topic as what we're studying. I say, cool! You can present it in class when you're done.
Tonight, their parent sits down at my table and says, "We gotta talk about this project you assigned my kid. It is stressing them out. They're spending hours working on it. They have no idea how to cite their sources. What exactly are your expectations?"
Y'all. This kid. This kid assigned themselves a research project FOR FUN, and then LIED to both me and their parent about it! And when we confronted them, they 100% tried to throw me under the bus.
Anyway, I love this kid and their parent and this school. I'm never leaving.
a lot of learning how to teach is actually just learning how to strategically not "teach" (read: tell people things outright), and instead scaffold, ask questions, and craft moments very carefully so that they figure most of it out themselves, and so you only "teach" a couple of things here & there, and they're primed to absorb it when you do.
which is why college professors (read: teachers who are not required to learn- nor provided the resources to learn- how to teach) suck absolutely massive ass.
I think the access barrier is the borderline incomprehensible amount of money you need to pay them to let you matriculate (this was about america). not the fact that you’re expected to be interested in the course once there.
The rising anti intellectualism and lack of effort when it comes to anything literacy and learning related is not in any way removing institutional barriers or mitigating access difficulties omg
1) You have read enough of what others have said about the topic to not bother reinventing the wheel.
2) You understand the issues of the topic well enough that anything you say about the topic is worth listening to.
3) You can communicate about the topic well enough that what others usually interpret is what you mean for them to interpret.
Using ChatGPT or other predictive text models directly interferes with these three purposes. It synthesizes existing texts for you, which means you haven't done the reading. It summarizes the issues for you, which means that you don't understand them. And it communicates for you, meaning you have no ability to communicate your ideas yourself. And if you could do these things, then you would have no need to rely on ChatGPT.
This isn't the matrix. Machines cannot learn for you and then download that learning into your brain. YOU must do the work of learning, or you will not learn. A degree achieved through ChatGPT is a degree that means nothing. It's like awarding you an Olympic medal because you paid someone else to compete for you.
The Wellness teacher at my new school is very adamant that what he teaches is Physical Education, NOT gym.
He is very aware of the trauma students have experienced in gym. He is very aware of the stereotypes and history of gym class and gym teachers. He wants to teach the kids good excercise habits, teamwork and sportsmanship, proper form and how to avoid injuries, and just general skills that they can use later in life.
I honestly don't understand why more PhyEd teachers aren't like him. He even got me to make fitness goals, and I didn't even realize what he was up to until after I'd agreed to it.
There are a lot of different types of parent out there, but I think one of my favorite types is the black parent with a PhD who introduces themself as Dr. Soandso and is also very connected with their African heritage. Probably has published a book and might be an activist, or at least a community organizer.
They always make a powerful entrance so you know that if you mistreat their kid they will ruin your life through entirely legal avenues, and everything they say about their kid makes it seem like their kid is a genius even they can't fully comprehend. And they're usually right, too. This type of parent almost exclusively raises kids that are geniuses or prodigies in some way.
Anyway, the parent like this I met last night came in looking like she was all set to bully me, then looked at my curriculum overview and visibly relaxed. I haven't even met her kid yet, and I can just tell the kid is gonna be one of my favorites.
One of my other favorite types is the Hmong parent who comes in pretending they don't know anything about education, but their kid has this perpetually embarrassed look about them that clues me in that the parent is only ignorant as long as I'm a good teacher. I don't want to know what happens if the parent decides I'm not. Their kids are usually either really artistic with an extremely unique style or have exceptional comedic timing.
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