COLUMN: Glorified Babysitters
According to reports by Yahoo News, on Tuesday, a fourth-grader in Massachusetts suffered a brutal fall from her school's jungle gym, breaking her arm in two places.
To the outrage of the parents, the school called them before contacting emergency services because of a policy put in place by the school district.It's becoming more and more apparent these days that most school teachers are being bogged down by regulations and policies.
I've heard horror stories from professors on campus who have witnessed students cheating on exams and confronting them about blatant cheating, but have been backed into a corner when the parents of the student have threatened a lawsuit against the teacher for harassment because they gave the student a zero due to cheating. The teacher ended up giving the student the grade for the exam after the department threatened not support the teachers claim.
This makes me sick. My tuition is paying these professors to teach me; but that doesn't give me the right as a student to blackmail a teacher into a corner in order to avoid learning something I'm paying to learn.
Step back to middle school and in some cities a child caught cheating on a test in that scenario is the same. The teacher cannot actively do anything that can be considered as corporal punishment, which includes emotional, mental or physical abuse.
In concept this makes sense, a teacher legally cannot physically or verbally abuse a student. Yet in practice we see school reprimanding teachers for singling out a student in front of a class for cheating because it can be interpreted as mental abuse. They're told the proper way to address the scenario is to allow the student to finish the exam, then alert the school and the parents of the student.
Along with this you see schools across the U.S. taking up idiotic regulations. In some areas of Baltimore teachers aren't allowed to grade in red pen due to the negative connotation of the color red to students. Following those lines, a student cannot earn a grade below a 55 percent on any assignment, meaning if a student scores a 4 percent on anything it's rewritten as a 55 in their report card.
While all these idiotic policies are getting tossed around, you get parents who dump their children off at school and view the entire school system as a glorified daycare for their kids between the hours of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. What's worse is that as of recent years these (mostly) great teachers, who got into education to teach, end up getting pigeon-holed into this babysitter role by legislation and parents who would rather negotiate with their children instead of disciplining them.
The most ironic thing is that the U.S. regards our higher education as our prized possession, yet the road to it is filled dents and cracks.
