What Pisses Me Off: Bad classroom behaviour

As I get older, I know I have become less tolerant of rudeness, selfishness and stupidity but reading a report from the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER) almost made me explode.

It has been discovered that bad behaviour in the classroom is a key cause for Aussie students’ poor performance at school.

They are kidding, right? This is what our tax-funded ACER researchers have discovered. It’s like saying if you want to lose weight, stop feeding your face with crap!

Our entire society is in crisis and one of the biggest reasons is because we have discovered individual rights. Individual rights. The millennium buzzword. It’s right up there with multi-cultural, the Stolen Generation and the non-existing level playing field. The social engineers and ‘do-gooders’ have a lot to answer for in this development of the self-centered, ‘me-first-and-buggar-anyone-else’ attitude of today’s youth.

I am sick and tired of reading about increasing gang violence, home invasions, theft and just about any other crime on can think of.

Aretha Franklin said is best – R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Today’s young people have no concept of the meaning of respect. They have no boundaries, no consequences, it is always someone else’s fault (usually teachers or the police), and everyone wins a prize, so they don’t have to give their best.

Read More: Report finds Aussie kids are running amok in classrooms

In what parallel universe do the ‘do-gooders’ think this concept is going to work? How can the individual rights override the rights of the whole community, which is exactly what is happened in the classroom?

Power and authority have been removed and replaced with wishy-washy ideals of the individual. I have just retired as a secondary school teacher, and I don’t think I could have lasted another day.

In every class, there were two or three students who constantly talked, messed around, talked back and generally interrupted the lesson. With 58 minutes of teaching time per period and 25 students in your class, it doesn’t take a genius to work out the teacher has 2.5 minutes personal minutes for each student. Now take away the 20 minutes in spend trying to sort out your troublemakers, you have 38 minutes left to split between say 20 students, and we are now down to 1.9 minutes per student. Do you see where I am going? Top students are self-starters because they know what to do, bottom students sometimes have an aide to help them, but the majority are left with less than one minute of face-to-face time. It’s a miracle students learn anything!

The majority are being robbed by individual behaviours that must be catered to, and as we are down discovering in the broader realm, this is causing a breakdown in our society. Our justice system is struggling to control the ever increasing ‘entitlement to do what we want’ consequences of this social engineering.

In a democracy, the majority rules. It is high time we went back to this thinking. While we would not want individual rights squashed, they certainly need to be put back into their box and let the majority get on with the good life.

What do you think?  Is this becoming a problem for your grandchildren?

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