Students in Great Valley Middle School created twenty-two fictitious TikTok accounts of their teachers and received barely a slap on the wrist. By Beth Ann Rosica
Richard T. Beck’s Response on July 15, 2024, at 10:57 am
The
behaviors of these Great Valley middle school students doesn’t surprise me.
Long before AI, I listened to my high school sophomore students brag about
getting one of their middle school teachers fired by harassing him. These were
nice kids from nice families who had no clue as to the consequences of their
actions. I taught middle school for four or five years before I was paroled to
the high school.
The
only place on earth where insane behavior is normalized is middle school. If
you doubt what I’m saying, make an appointment to observe a middle school
cafeteria during 7th or 8th grade lunch period. It reminds you of the movie
Snake Pit when Olivia de Haviland finds herself lost in the asylum amongst the
crazies. But do not interfere with the kids after all like a guidance counselor
once told me, “This is their social time.”
There
are three reasons that I can think of at the moment, why this insanity goes
unchecked:
First,
the middle school model is more of a social club where students cultivate peer
relationships at the expense of family relationships. Rather than seeing adults
like their teachers, parents, and other authority figures as role models,
friends become the utmost and the highest. This model is compatible with those
you don’t feel that parents have a right to know anything about what goes on
once the schoolhouse doors close.
The
old junior high school model is better, in my opinion, because academics is a
priority and bad behavior is called out as bad rather than excused as
developmental. All kids go through a stage where they revolt but kids who
aren’t punished never develop a moral compass.
The
sign that was required to be posted in our classrooms was “Self-Esteem The
Right of Every Child.” That sign meant that if you ever made a kid feel bad,
you were hurting their self-esteem. You couldn’t reprimand a disruptive kid in
class. You’d have to wait until after class. Our pedagogical goal was to make a
kid feel good. A kid who felt good meant his/her parents felt good and parents
who feel good mean the building principal feels good. All the way to the bank,
baby!
Second,
parents still believe their kids in 7th and 8th grade. They still view them
through an elementary school lens. The kids know this and are keen to take
advantage of it. Parents stop believing their kids around the second semester
junior year in high school when they realize that they’ve been lied to since
7th grade. They’re ashamed about all those times they slapped around their
kid’s teachers at parent teacher conferences or 504 conferences, but they never
apologize and neither do their kids. All those bodies strewn along their path
were just taxpayer cannon fodder. 11th grade is about the time that they know
their kid is not Princeton bound but would be best served at DCCC.
Third,
the teachers’ union embraces the middle school model and condones this kind of
student behavior because it means that more non-instructional personnel will be
hired like counselors, psychologists, caseworkers, and aides adding to the
retirement coffers.
Many
teachers wouldn’t teach anywhere other than the middle school. They love it. As
long as you have a knack for making emerging pubescent people happy and for
getting 13 and 14 year olds to like you, middle school is the place to be.
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