It's sad and bad but in a country of 60 million people this is the first time its happened, hopefully the last too. Must keep things in perspective.
The fear is, of course, that although it is the first, it may not be the last. Where the US goes, we seem to follow shortly afterwards.......
Very sad news that Bob Hoskins has passed away. Great actor who although will be rightly remembered for films like The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa and even Roger Rabbit - we has brilliant in Pennies in Heaven. Apparently we has a cracking man who gave a lot back by supporting low budget British films...RIP Bob
He is one of a very few "celebrities" that I can honestly say, his passing has made me sad! Pennies from Heaven was 30 years ago!
Agreed - very sad news indeed. The Long Good Friday ranks as one of my favourite films and Pennies from Heaven is my number one TV series ever - I can watch it over and over and still be enthralled . Bob was about the only actor who could lure me into watching a production simply because he was in the cast. RIP
It's not actually the first though, unless you quibble about how Phillip Lawrence's death was in a different category. And then there was Dunblane... Personally I've viewed this sort of scenario as a ticking time bomb, something just waiting to happen and getting ever more closer to being a regular occurrence. I'm not sure that it's generally known how high the incidence of serious violence against teachers actually is - the last time I looked, the UK figure was around 100 a day. Those were just the figures for pupils expelled for assault causing serious injury too - I think the authorities stopped reporting on the incidence of minor assault. I'm not sure of the details of how this death occurred, but I'm sure that the rules imposed upon teachers on how they handle this sort of violence will only lead to an eventual increase. Not being allowed to touch in any way, or even fight back to protect yourself if being attacked, makes it hard to handle such incidents - they are lose:lose situations for teachers, touch a kid and lose your registration as a teacher or don't touch a kid and die are hardly the sort of working conditions you want imposed. Neither is the one that requires you to step in between fighting children to keep them away from each other - step in and simply take the beating that inevitably follows without attempting to stop them, or risk losing your registration for not having protected them from each other. We do live in an odd society...
I take my hat off to you BB (or would if I could find my old Watford beanie). I could never be a teacher because I do not have the patience or tolerance needed to cope with the little brats. I'm afraid at the first sign of trouble from them I would find the nearest chair leg or baseball bat and mayhem would ensue.
Just what is happening to the school kids of today is something that puzzles me. In some way society has changed since I was at school which was a few years ago. When I was at junior school there was a teacher with a deadly aim with the blackboard rubber. Misbehave and it would land on your desk from a distance, probably hitting you as it bounced on its way. There were a number of boys who came from the local council home who sometimes were there because they were out of control and their parents could not cope with them. The school had a very strict code of conduct that helped keep order, but woe betide you if you stepped out of line, a visit to the head with his cane was promised. A degree of fear perhaps, but to a large extent we were in a classroom where learning could take place. When my kids were in primary school the head was a fierce Scottish lady who was intent on making sure that the children left with a good knowledge of the three R's. One evening she came to our house to apologize because she had slippered our son because he had chosen to ignore her her warnings about kneeling on his chair, gone through the back, became stuck and had to be sawn out. She had support from us and we didn't think for a moment about reporting her. By the time they went to secondary school it was becoming the thing to call the teachers by their christian names. It seemed to me that the teachers wanted to be one of the youngsters rather than someone to look up to and respect. There in the word respect is where I suspect things have gone wrong. We had respect for many people, teachers, police, adults in general, but somehow that has been lost. My wife who worked in school for many years believes that teachers lost much goodwill with parents when they went on strike and the children resented the fact that they were not in school. From my perspective it is unfair on teachers to expect them to instill decent behaviour in their charges when the parents make little effort to do it, but taking a few of the shackles off and allowing teachers to show who is boss would not really be a backward step.
The 15 year old boy has been charged with murder at last. Why was it so difficult when there was 30 witnesses ?
The incident in Leeds is dreadfully sad but is not an indication of what is happening in schools at large, any more than the sensational media reporting is a fair picture. When I was a boy, many years ago, there were dreadful schools, abusive teachers and plenty of illiteracy and innumeracy if you looked for it. My generation and the next do not show higher levels of education overall, despite our occasional claims, than younger ones...only perhaps evidence of different subject focus. In my thirty years as a teacher and education advisor I worked in and visited schools all over the country (as well as in Russia, Hungary, USA, Hong Kong and South Africa) and our own media and politicians' persistent attempts to attack the quality of education here and imply its decline are supported neither by statistics nor reality. I've lost count of the number of times a journalist or a politician whose only knowledge of teaching was their own schooldays and yet who feels qualified to tell the teaching profession how to do its job. Equally, I've lost count of the number of times employers have told me 16-year-olds have not acquired a full range of technical and personal skills when their own more senior work forces show plainly it was always so and that many have acquired few since! If you add the cycle of lurching from highly prescribed national curricula to more freedom for schools and back to more prescription again, the improvements I've witnessed in the management of schools...the training of teachers, the behaviour management techniques, the learning initiatives, the industry links, the special needs support - to name but a few...during my lifetime are quite remarkable. And on a minor point, I never came across a school where students called teachers by their first names...not to their face anyway! There, that's better...profound apologies for the rant...it's not directed at anyone on here
My sentences are always the same. I found English boring and spent most of my time down the snooker hall. I have actually improved over the last few years.
I gave it up and went on the pool tour. Gave it up about 18 years ago because I needed to work full time.
Can't dispute anything you say there Theo - and wouldn't be disrespectful enough to decry your experience anyway. I would add to the mix that you have offered my opinion that today's problems in schools have also arisen through a sort of process of 'osmosis'. Successive governments have progressively taken to publicly denigrating the teaching profession to an alarming degree - this government particularly so with their moves to put non-qualified personnel into schools on the grounds of cutting costs and persistent fascination with teacher bashing via 'league tables' and school inspections. That, coupled with the increasing 'parent power' that has been sanctioned - not a bad thing in the right hands, but not every parent has the right hands - at the expense of teacher/school power, has caused an across the board, downwards filter of that poor attitude towards those in the profession. Parents and children alike now appear to to consider that 'they know better', parents and children alike constantly question whether or not what teaching is happening in the classroom is 'appropriate', parents constantly take the attitude that any educational failings their children may have are entirely the fault of teachers, rather than be caused by their children's' unwillingness/inability to study, work or behave in an acceptable manner. I honestly don't know how or why anyone is attracted into the profession any more. That's my rant over - it's now gone midnight & I have to get back to preparing resources for tomorrow's maths lesson...
Morning all from a damp & miserable West West London - Rabbits, Rabbits, Rabbits... Thanks in advance for the frothy AK
