Celestial Marriage
The Force is Strong With This One
Hello. This thread is meant as a philosophical discussion about reality in schools nowadays. Below I give a real life example of the most severe behavior at my school. All school staff, besides me, has already given up.
If you are a parent or you know/knew a child with a behavior like this, please comment. How did the person turn out in adulthood? What helped him/her?
Mods - if this thread about schools and children fit somewhere else, please move it. I posted this here, because it concerns mental health of children. But it
also concerns society as a whole.
Preface – my country 4 years ago shut down almost all special schools. I teach in a “normal” high school and my main class (7th grade) has 25 pupils, but 10 of them are special needs children. Most of these 10 are ADHD, few are with ASD and some have other needs. I teach math.
There is one boy who is trying to hold both his classmates and teachers hostage.
He is calculating, knows all the school rules and how to avoid truly getting punished. He doesn’t physically bully anyone, but he always tries to be the center of attention and disrupt the class, no matter the subject. He conjures up any kind of problem just to draw attention. He “feels cold” and teacher has to undress and give him her jacket. He “feels bad in stomach” and goes to bathroom for 15 minutes to relieve himself twice a week during subjects he hates the most. If teacher is a pushover, he just starts walking to and fro during class, because he has ADHD and it is his “right” to get rid of excess energy. He doesn’t write down much if anything during classes. He has failing grades in several subjects, but gets passed anyway, because he shows up during extended academic year in summer. He almost always tries to cheat during tests using his phone.
In our school we have social educator who is technically responsible for him, but his behavior is so bad that if teachers would try to send him out of the class to this social educator, they would have to do it weekly, and they have given up. So teachers, for the most part, try to ignore him, but the more they ignore him, the more tricks he thinks up.
I arrived in this school 2 months ago and I have more than 15 years of teaching experience, but even for me, this is only 2nd boy with behavior like this in my career.
The social educator tells me she has informed police, parents, district’s social service, but they haven’t found a solution to make him respect teachers and stop disrupting behaviors.
I contacted people from local medical university, child psychiatry department, and while they categorically do not speculate any diagnosis, the calculating, cold, manipulative, no remorse, no conscience behavior could be connected with child psychopathy or, umbrella terms in USA, Conduct disorder and callous-unemotional traits.
As a teacher my duty is to enforce rules and safe environment in class and this boy uses every loophole in school’s rules to make each class his personal circus.
In state gymnasiums children like these get sent to social educators for a few months and, if behavior doesn’t improve, they get expelled for “deliberate disruption of the learning process”, but since this is just a high school, they don’t have such strict school rules there.
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As far as I know, they expect him to get to 9th grade, graduate and leave. Because his marks and zero effort lifestyle is probably unfit for high school.
As for me, I’m one of 3 male teachers in whole school, so he shows me more respect, meaning he doesn’t walk around during class, but he still tries to cheat/ go outside the class, and he writes down literally one or two sentences during 40-minute class.
I don’t feel like a victim, because it was my own initiative to take the hardest class in school and try to teach it, but where I miscalculated was that I thought that 10 special needs children would nowadays mostly mean ADHD, autism, dyslexia and, maybe, child depression. I was aware of rowdy sociopathic children, to some extent there are dozens of them in every school. But they, in many cases, respond positively to positive encouragement, comradery and mentorship. While this boy doesn’t, according to his class teacher.
So far, my greatest obstacle seems to be school rules which indeed are permissive. For example, in other schools pupils must hand in their smartphones at school door to be held in special boxes until classes are over. This school permits 7 – 12th grade children to have phones with them all the time, hoping that they would be so wise as to keep them in their bags. Hint – they, for the most part, play with their phones the moment teacher looks away.
My own understanding is that you need to enforce very strict rules which children can’t negotiate, but this school doesn’t have any, unless it is physical harm.
Also, this boy would need a male psychologist/mentor to guide him during his puberty years, someone this boy would respect.
There were no such figures in this school before me, and our country has little resources to provide children with age appropriate therapy. Some parents report waiting times up to a year if they apply for district funded therapy for their children.
I also understand that if the boy plays both his parents like a fiddle, we at school have less chances of success. Social educator tells me that his parents know that their son is lazy, harmful and toxic, but they hope it is puberty related issue, and he will grow out of this.
If you are a parent or you know/knew a child with a behavior like this, please comment. How did the person turn out in adulthood? What helped him/her?
Mods - if this thread about schools and children fit somewhere else, please move it. I posted this here, because it concerns mental health of children. But it
also concerns society as a whole.
Preface – my country 4 years ago shut down almost all special schools. I teach in a “normal” high school and my main class (7th grade) has 25 pupils, but 10 of them are special needs children. Most of these 10 are ADHD, few are with ASD and some have other needs. I teach math.
There is one boy who is trying to hold both his classmates and teachers hostage.
He is calculating, knows all the school rules and how to avoid truly getting punished. He doesn’t physically bully anyone, but he always tries to be the center of attention and disrupt the class, no matter the subject. He conjures up any kind of problem just to draw attention. He “feels cold” and teacher has to undress and give him her jacket. He “feels bad in stomach” and goes to bathroom for 15 minutes to relieve himself twice a week during subjects he hates the most. If teacher is a pushover, he just starts walking to and fro during class, because he has ADHD and it is his “right” to get rid of excess energy. He doesn’t write down much if anything during classes. He has failing grades in several subjects, but gets passed anyway, because he shows up during extended academic year in summer. He almost always tries to cheat during tests using his phone.
In our school we have social educator who is technically responsible for him, but his behavior is so bad that if teachers would try to send him out of the class to this social educator, they would have to do it weekly, and they have given up. So teachers, for the most part, try to ignore him, but the more they ignore him, the more tricks he thinks up.
I arrived in this school 2 months ago and I have more than 15 years of teaching experience, but even for me, this is only 2nd boy with behavior like this in my career.
The social educator tells me she has informed police, parents, district’s social service, but they haven’t found a solution to make him respect teachers and stop disrupting behaviors.
I contacted people from local medical university, child psychiatry department, and while they categorically do not speculate any diagnosis, the calculating, cold, manipulative, no remorse, no conscience behavior could be connected with child psychopathy or, umbrella terms in USA, Conduct disorder and callous-unemotional traits.
As a teacher my duty is to enforce rules and safe environment in class and this boy uses every loophole in school’s rules to make each class his personal circus.
In state gymnasiums children like these get sent to social educators for a few months and, if behavior doesn’t improve, they get expelled for “deliberate disruption of the learning process”, but since this is just a high school, they don’t have such strict school rules there.
***
***
As far as I know, they expect him to get to 9th grade, graduate and leave. Because his marks and zero effort lifestyle is probably unfit for high school.
As for me, I’m one of 3 male teachers in whole school, so he shows me more respect, meaning he doesn’t walk around during class, but he still tries to cheat/ go outside the class, and he writes down literally one or two sentences during 40-minute class.
I don’t feel like a victim, because it was my own initiative to take the hardest class in school and try to teach it, but where I miscalculated was that I thought that 10 special needs children would nowadays mostly mean ADHD, autism, dyslexia and, maybe, child depression. I was aware of rowdy sociopathic children, to some extent there are dozens of them in every school. But they, in many cases, respond positively to positive encouragement, comradery and mentorship. While this boy doesn’t, according to his class teacher.
So far, my greatest obstacle seems to be school rules which indeed are permissive. For example, in other schools pupils must hand in their smartphones at school door to be held in special boxes until classes are over. This school permits 7 – 12th grade children to have phones with them all the time, hoping that they would be so wise as to keep them in their bags. Hint – they, for the most part, play with their phones the moment teacher looks away.
My own understanding is that you need to enforce very strict rules which children can’t negotiate, but this school doesn’t have any, unless it is physical harm.
Also, this boy would need a male psychologist/mentor to guide him during his puberty years, someone this boy would respect.
There were no such figures in this school before me, and our country has little resources to provide children with age appropriate therapy. Some parents report waiting times up to a year if they apply for district funded therapy for their children.
I also understand that if the boy plays both his parents like a fiddle, we at school have less chances of success. Social educator tells me that his parents know that their son is lazy, harmful and toxic, but they hope it is puberty related issue, and he will grow out of this.
