The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday and another throw a chair. Another just sat there and didn't do a thing for 7 hours. The Little House/Christmas Story model hasn't been able to work for a long time.

There was a story in the NY Times a few months back about a basically one room schoolhouse in Alta Utah. Of course that's a small and mostly homogeneous community and, as I recall, it was unclear from the article how well students were learning other than presumably becoming good skiers.

> My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday

Did she actually allow this kid to disrupt the entire class for 10 minutes? Isn't there a responsibility to all the other students that they should have a reasonable learning environment?

I remember being sent to the office for a lot less than that.

My impression is that both a teacher's power to do much anything about such behavior, and the rights of the non-problematic students to a viable classroom environment, are either gone, or "going, going", in most parts of America.

- Some schools don't have the resources to send a kid who screams for 10 minutes to the office. Schools in bad areas may have a line of battery incidents waiting for admin's attention by noon. There are schools where second graders threatening the teacher with sexual assault is just a Tuesday and basically gets ignored.

- Schools in nicer areas are sometimes in the middle of some dumbshit half-implemented (the other parts made admin uncomfortable) "discipline plan" that the superintendent got sold on at some damn district-paid drinking vacation away from the family... er, I mean, education conference, which may lead to insane crap like letting a kid scream in the classroom for ten minutes (sending them to the office might get the teacher in trouble for not following the plan). Half-implemented plainly-doomed-to-fail admin-driven plans for discipline, or for education approaches to any or all subject areas, are often a factor in stupid crap schools do.

She called for admin backup, which reacted pretty quickly, but they basically just calm him down and return him to class. And of course the screaming happened after a series of de-escalation attempts by her, which often works, but not always. He is non-neurotypical, mostly ahead of the class academically (though there are gaps), but very behind emotionally. He is the 'worst behaved' in her grade level, but every class has at least one that is liable to 'go off' as it were. It is in no way fair to the rest of the class, but while the state we live in likes to act blue, when it comes to paying for social services it's pretty red. And this is in a state with school choice, so don't think that necessarily helps either...

In the school from "A Christmas Story" that kid would have been taken out in the hallway and paddled.

> Schools in bad areas may have a line of battery incidents waiting for admin's attention by noon.

Don't kids get expelled anymore? How the hell could you feel comfortable sending your kid to a school that is so full of violence? That's crazy.

Your wife teaches in a one-room schoolhouse?

If not, then your wife's experience doesn't say anything about how well the Little House/Christmas Story model works.

Indeed, I would go so far as to suspect that this is likely a failure of the "integrate kids no matter what, and force them to learn at the exact same pace, no matter what" style of schooling that has become so ubiquitous in modern society.

Teaching has changed quite a lot since you were in school. And not for the better.