Cute ad hominem. My report button is currently missing, but I assure you that I am a real teacher with real students in a real classroom. I administer real tests and assign real grades that really matter in the real world.
Did I run to a country to where I don't have to deal with the students you deal with? No!
Honestly, I'm staggered that this post is allowed to fester on this forum.
Might I suggest that making things personal isn't very professional? We were talking about real issues in real classrooms, and I am somewhat nonplussed as to how the mods allowed such a gross ad hominem to stay while I have been admonished for far far far less.
I think we here in Japan can help those teachers elsewhere, just as others might be able to help teachers who teach in other countries. So far, I've been told that this hurling of chairs and other violence, both against faculty and students, is preferable to a possible alternative.
So be it...
There are many problems with the American education system, and I think that the US could learn a lot from other countries when it comes to education. My concerns about your opinions lie in a few places, namely what seems like a complete lack of understanding of how things work in US schools and what feels a lot like blame directed at individual teachers.
As mentioned many times across many threads, American schools are very different from schools in most other countries specifically in that American public schools accept all students, regardless of ability or behavior. This includes kids with very severe conduct disorders and mental illness, kids who aren't verbal and wear diapers, kids who are profoundly gifted, kids who can't read, kids with severe physical impairments, neurotypical kids, kids with drug and alcohol problems, and literally every other kind of kid you can think of. And in most cases, all those kids are in the same classes! We don't generally track kids, not to the extent that this is done in other countries, anyway. Public schools in the US don't have the option to exclude or dismiss students with these issues; even when students are expelled for egregious or illegal behaviors, the system must, in nearly all cases, find another placement for the student. I have worked with at-risk populations for my entire teaching career, and I've literally never seen a kid removed from a school without being placed into another school. That just doesn't really happen in the US.
For that reason, as well as other reasons, teachers in the US are limited as to what they can do as individuals when they encounter challenging students. It's simply not a legal option to throw a kid out onto the streets, or defenestrate them, or put them into a headlock. That is not how things are done. When you berate teachers here for not doing those things, it negates many of the positive things you might otherwise be able to share about what's good about education in your neck of the woods. We all get it:
you may not be willing to put up with certain behaviors, so you believe that teachers who do must be themselves the cause of such behaviors and therefore at fault. That isn't it, though. Just like I can't simply assign a convicted criminal to life in prison because it's beyond my scope of practice and legal ability, I can't legally do some of the things that you would or can do in the classroom.
Furthermore, the issue of poverty, while not unique in and of itself, has very peculiar characteristics in the US. Poverty plays a huge role in these terrible things you're reading about here and in the news, but it's being mistaken, by you and others, as a racial or cultural issue. Poverty is systemic and much larger than any individual teacher or school or district.
