At what point do the students take responsibility for themselves?
I used to feel this way. I live in a city where so many kids come from homes that don't enforce homework, the kids just don't care about education and have really bad bad attitudes. Many times the kids didn't even show up to class. I pitied those poor teachers. They spent most of the class time disciplining disrespectful students which made it close to impossible to teach a class lesson.
But then I saw a movie called Stand and Deliver, about a hs teacher in California who not only got total control of his very unruly class, and inspired them to take and pass Calculus. Many of his students didn't even understand fractions when he had them.
It got me thinking of teachers I've had and my childrens' teachers. Yes, teachers have it TOUGH today with the breakdown of family units/dysfunction and lots of other social reasons, BUT I decided it was their job to INSPIRE kids, not just to teach a lesson.
I teach religious education. Half of my class never did their homework, so I decided to give the whole class ONE question to answer for hw. I made a big deal of it, waiting until the end of class to give them the question, mention the BIG QUESTION throught out classtime to get them interested. They started looking forward to it, and over a few days, every child did the homework. Then I expanded to two questions, etc.
Also, I worked to make every child feel like they mattered, which also worked wonders even with the most unruly kids.
My point is, there are WAYS to get through to kids. If a teacher doesn't have it in them to be creative with their teaching methods, then they should be FIRED.
Yay for the board who fired all those whining Rhode Island teachers. I saw the interviews with them on the news and they were a disgrace.