Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Kids These Days
So I have a "hypothetical" question: If, as a teacher, a student comes back from lunch, and as he/she walks by you on the way to his/her desk you catch a whiff of pot... what do you do?? And furthermore, say the school happens to have open-campus lunch hours where students leave and come back... What if the illegal activities didn't happen on school ground? In the honor of this person's privacy I'll just say that recently he/she was expelled from school for a year and won't even be allowed to go to alternative school until after six months, so he/she will be a year and a half behind in school, all because of the situation above. I'm not saying it's right or wrong... but I will say that another student who stole money from a visiting basketball team during a game only got expelled for 6 months and was able to go straight to alternative school and graduate with the rest of his/her class, although he/she wasn't allowed to walk. So the pot incident was punished more harshly than the stealing incident. I can think of some justifications for that I guess. So my real question is should a teacher really be a police dog and smell all his/her students for signs of illegal substances, and get them all expelled in some master plan to "lighten" his or her workload? I'm exaggerating a little here but I mean seriously. Also, when the student is coming back from off-campus lunch and has no paraphanalia and you have no proof that it happened on-campus or that the student was actually the one smoking the pot, should you still turn them in? This is totally off-topic for this course but I thought it was interesting. I think it's probably one of those school policy situations, but I was just wondering what other peoples' thoughts were. I think that if you're sure beyond a doubt that you should do something about it, but I think sometimes there are so many variables that maybe just giving the student some sort of warning after class when you aren't positive might be ok? Or is that a completely wrong thing to do?
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3 comments:
Let's turn the question around. If a teacher came back from lunch and the principal noticed a pot smell and/or alcohol smell on his/her breath, should anything be done? If the ingestion of the substance happened off-campus, should the teacher get in trouble? Feel free to comment on Natalie's questions--I just had a different perspective as I read her post.
I want to comment on Missy's comment. I think that the teacher should be fired. Whether we commit a crime on campus or off campus, we are held to high standards by society. We are representing our schools and communities. We live in an imperfect world, so people will judge the actions of an entire group of good teachers by the actions of one rotten apple.
This will also show the students that this type of behavior will not be tolerated by the administration whether it is committed by teachers or students.
This career is not just a paycheck and summer vacation. We are going to be looked at as role models by students and the community at large. I know that Missy touched on this yesterday. We have to be careful. I know that I would not want my child to influenced by someone who had an illegal drug addiction. That would definitely send a contradictory message to him or her.
I definitely think something should be done to the teacher, because it's illegal, they're in charge of kids, they're at work, and they should be role models for students. Even if it happened off-campus they're coming to work stoned or drunk or whatever, which compromises their ability to do their job. I'm not saying that nothing should happen to the students either, and the same thing can be said about students; being high or whatever compromises their ability to do what their supposed to be doing at school. But school isn't their job, they aren't being paid, and more than half of them are there against thier will. I guess my real question was if theres a question of it possibly happening off campus can we do anything about it?
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