Students all around the country are staging a school walkout at 10:00 this morning, including those at our Morris area high school. I approve. Unfortunately, this is just a protest with training wheels, tightly circumscribed by the powers-that-be — the students are only walking out for 17 minutes (in memory of the students killed at Parkland), and school administrators have hedged them in with stern warnings about how they will be penalized if they skip school.
It’s a start, though. Look at it as the school’s allowing a little bit of practical learning that will serve the students well in these Trumpian times.
Next step: make your parents and school officials intensely uncomfortable, throw off the chains, and fight for changes they dislike. Vote. March in the streets. Say rude words to old white men in power. Flip the bird at the president of the United States — he does not deserve respect. Question everything.
It’s the only way we’ll make this country better.
Baby steps today, but it’s a rehearsal for grander progress tomorrow.
WTF? Aside from its social aspects and the context of violence, organizing and attending protests is a great educational experience. School administrators should encourage that.
Many of these marches are reportedly featuring voter registration drives. I imagine those may have the larger impact, hopefully for a few decades.
rietpluim, #1
Yeah, but that would be political and we can’t do make things political. Unless it’s punishing students protesting against a particular thing that goes against the political leanings of the school administrators, which would be totally not political.
Look, the main point is… don’t be political. The only thing worse than children’s dead bodies strewn all over their school floors is children making things political.
Don’t be political. Also, don’t push too much against the powers that be. Can’t upset the status quo and we need to mold these young minds into upstanding worker bees.
I would like to hear the argument for why a student should be penalized for skipping school. I thought the criteria for success was passing scores. If that’s the case I don’t see why students can’t do whatever they want so long as it is not disrupting classes.
I remember something similar from my schooldays. We protested and then we were supposed to bring a note from our parents, in German an “Entschuldigung”, an excuse or apology (same word in German).
My mum wrote “I refuse to apologise for my daughter doing the right thing”.
Goddammit!! I just learned that Stephen Hawking has passed away.
The collective IQ of the World just dropped a long way.
(Going off on a tangent) …on the bright side, Pennsylvania special election: Democrats declare victory in setback for Trump https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/14/pennsylvania-special-election-too-close-to-call-saccone-lamb-trump
The voters as well as the schoolkids are waking up from the dormancy that more or less has lasted since Ronald Reagan was elected.
Well done, USA!
“Baby steps today, but it’s a rehearsal for grander progress tomorrow”
…it is assumed that a Democrat victory in Pennsylvania will have many more Republican congressmen retiring rather than risking getting humiliated.
You have the momentum now. Don’t screw up and turn it into a false dawn.
When I was in high school, I brought in a note excusing me from school the next day as I would be attending a nuclear freeze rally in Washington, DC. I went to the rally, made my voice heard, and then walked into a shitstorm back at school. Of my seven teachers (I was taking calculus which happened before school started), five accepted the absence as excused. Two wanted to know what the principle was thinking to allow a student to attend a commie-inspired un-American thing like a protest march and wanted me marked as an unexcused absence (which means I could not make up any tests, quizzes or homework). Apparently, the whole problem eventually migrated up the ladder to the county board of education who, in a very narrow and very acrimonious decision, decided that if the student’s parents were willing to let the child do this (I was 18 at the time, legally an adult, but to them I was, just as all students, still a child) then the absence had to be excused. I had real problems with those two teachers the rest of the year and ended up quitting marching/concert band.
Off topic but man I’m disappointed you didn’t have anything to post today about Hawking’s passing. Whether you agreed or disagreed with him on some topics, what his value to the atheist community was, or Texas State Rep. Briscoe Cain’s christian trolling of his death; I’m always interested in what PZ has to say.
What I’m about to ask may sound smart-alecky but I’m genuinely curious about your POV on this. When you say “Say rude things to old white men in power” does that include you?
In general, there are several reasons.
1. It IS disrupting classes, because those students will not know what you did and as a result you lose time by having to explain things again and again. Even stupid administrative stuff takes so much time.
2. Progress is not possible. Schools are not like university lectures where a sage on a stage is telling you what’s right and what’s wrong. They’re much more hands on, leading students to work out the solutions themselves. If you are not there, you will have a harder time catching up. It also means that if you show up next time, you will probably not be able to follow class. And kids who cannot follow class usually compensate by being disruptive.
Same goes for homework. Now, if it’s one kid, that’s not a problem. The others can pull them along so they can catch up, but once you reach a critical mass, progress in class stops. You cannot work on advanced stuff with kids who are lacking the basis. Right now I’ve got a class where 14 of 18 students think that homework is optional. They think that if they just copy what we say at the start it’s enough, but of course it’s not, because having copied the results of somebody’s analysis is not the same as doing the analysis.
You can say that this is the problem of the kids who don’t do their homework, but it also hinders those who do.
3. Supervision and liability
At least in Germany children need to be supervised, the more the younger they are. Some responsible adult must be around to make sure they don’t kill themselves and each other. Two weeks ago I had to loudly yell at some 5th graders and write them a reprimand because they were jumping on the surface of the frozen pond in the schoolyard. If a minor skips school and then gets into trouble an adult would have kept them out of, who is responsible? At least my society says that kids are not adults (we therefore don’t jail and execute them), but if they’re not adults they also cannot be left to decide for themselves if they need to go to classes or not* and what they do in the meantime.
Now, none of this applies to protest, it’s just a general explanation why attendance is usually mandatory.
*My oldest students are legally adults. They can write their own notes and of course they will occasionally decide that they really cannot participate in (your) class today. That’s OK if you do that occasionally and then catch up on their own. I did that as well. So what. But some of them just don’t manage, they skip more classes than it’s good for them. I just had a student who did not get his high school diploma because of that. Sure, you can say that it’s their problem, but as a teacher I want to educate, raise, nurture ans help students, not watch the fail and shrug my shoulders.
@marcus, #5
I certainly had that option of skipping class when I was at university, but I found that it really helped to attend the lectures…
I suppose the basic argument is that school pupils (uk: pupil = primary or secondary education, student = tertiary education) on the whole have not reached the appropriate age of majority, while students have. In that regard, the schools have a greater duty of care towards pupils, compared with a college or university.
Also, now that I’ve written the above what Giliell said in #13.
Oh wow… this:
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/973984356023853056
The administrators are furious with the lapse in authoritarian indoctrination.
This is what history is made of. Now let’s hope like hell it doesn’t end up being stomped flat or ignored.
I really hope someone (obviously the schools wouldn’t teach this) is teaching these students about how their fellow students in South Korea demonstrated their anger towards their government on several different occasions. Because I fear their cause will demand that level of commitment if they really mean to bring about change.