Mary Braselton
Director, Associate of Arts in Teaching Program
Midland College
The April 10 Education page column by Kristie Hayward relating a certain time warp caught my attention as I had already begun this article. In particular, the question of a former principal “Is that really a battle you want to fight?” sounded familiar from my own high school teaching days. I appreciated her response, “Well, yeah, it is a battle I want to fight” because I believe, like Kristie, someone has to care enough to fight for students. The surprising thing to me about that article is that Kristie is only nearing 40 years old, but she has the school memories of a much older time. As a matter of fact, that age group started school for the first time around 1978.
Let’s take a short trip down memory lane to revisit educational discipline. Remember, in the 1800s, society took for granted that the Golden Rule, courtesy, fairness and good manners were the standard of conduct. Then, fast forward to our parents who related stories like “If I got into trouble at school, it was double trouble when I got home.” My father told me that he once had to cut a willow switch for his punishment at school. Then, when he got home, he had to cut yet another switch for the second spanking from his mother. Now, I am not advocating returning to the days of sparing the rod, especially when it involves willow switches, but it is no secret that behavior and the subsequent discipline have changed over the years.
Business as usual in public education was changed forever by the 1969 court case Tinker v. Des Moines. Fifteen-year-old John Tinker wore a black arm band to his high school in Des Moines, Iowa, one day in a silent, peaceful protest to the Vietnam War. The principal told Tinker that he could not wear his arm band to school because it was disruptive and created a distraction (status quo school law at that time), and promptly suspended Tinker, his sister, Mary Beth, and a friend, Chris Eckhardt, who also wore black armbands. Their parents then filed lawsuits on behalf of their children. The rulings were in favor of the schools; eventually, the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that wearing a black arm band in protest of the war was a First Amendment right — an expression of free speech. It was a win for students and parents and a loss for public school authority.
It might be argued that this began an arduous decline in discipline in public schools throughout the 1970s and ’80s as student rights and parental rights often trumped school officials’ rights. Principals no longer could bluff students with penalties or paddling. Add the erosion of the schools’ in loco parentis power to the erosion of the nuclear family, and schools found themselves in the position of creating new and sometimes controversial policy to address an increasing number of diverse disciplinary issues. All administrators must assure that teachers’, parents’, and students’ rights are maintained while managing the heavy academic responsibilities of the 21st century.
Research indicates that new teachers’ greatest fears involve discipline, parents and motivation. Because most of these teachers are recently out of a public school setting, their collective memories cause them to choose early childhood education rather than the secondary fields that are so dramatically in shortage. Still, as the following story will demonstrate, early childhood has no guarantee of angelic behavior.
I used to teach an adult Sunday school class, and one morning a teacher asked for prayers for one of her 5-year-old kindergartners who referred to himself by an obscene word. When the teacher spoke with the boy’s mother, the woman laughed and said, “Yeah, he calls me that all the time.” The question now is not “Is this a battle you want to fight?”but “Can you fight this battle?”
Many academics choose the college/university classroom specifically to avoid these issues associated with public schools, only to find that classroom incivility is in college classrooms, as well. Certainly, college personnel do not deal with parents, but motivating students to learn (and behave) at any age is a far cry from what most of us experienced.
We understand that the classroom is a microcosm of the macrocosm. If uncivil behavior is pervasive in society (macrocosm), then it is not a stretch to understand that the classroom (microcosm) represents society at large. Members of society meet in our classes daily.
Telling stories like these almost never makes us feel good, but rudeness is a source of frustration in our daily lives, whether it is dealing with interminable telephone robots or watching in horror as a young boy tosses a grocery store basket over a ledge in a mall.
Remember when Oprah dedicated a series of shows to the topic of rudeness? After giving numerous examples, she began an “Acts of Kindness” program. Her media attention induced others to start projects such as “Pay it Forward” and “One Good Turn,” among others. Some time has passed and the media focus on kindness has faded. Most of us would agree that her attention to the topic raised awareness, but it was short-lived.
This column first appeared in the April 30, 2012 edition of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, and appears here, in its entirety, with the MRT's permission.
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