Teenagers are forced into groups of the same age, within 1 year tolerance. This is the age of learning of social structures, building social ties, learning about various forms of social status, etc. They need to be inside a rich social structure to learn all that.

Instead, they are locked up with their peers, and a lonely adult. What can they do?

Of course they try to build various social structures of themselves, but since they are all peers in most regards, the only structure they can build is a gang. The more bold (and often violent) becomes a leader, others follow.

The only way to raise in status is to join a gang, and fight for a higher rung, or to start a gang. The more violent gang leaders do everything to make actual learning seen as despicable, because they'd hate to see a competing hierarchy based on academic success. Confronting the lone adult, a dangerous but not too dangerous enterprise, becomes a way to show bravery to others.

While some students may cause more problems and be more prone to violence than others, the cause is not the presence of such students, like presence of oil is not a cause of a fire. It's the system, the way classes are formed, that ignites them.

BTW 100-150 years ago high school was elective and required certain determination to get into it. This is why it did not show these problems so much: the students joined because they valued the academic success hierarchy, and could form structures along attaining better grades at the very least. (A teacher had many more violent response options, too.) But today's public high schools receive students with different incentives, even filtered against attaining academic success, because kids who eagerly want to learn go to various competitive high schools (charter, Catholic, private).

This is very sad, both because it keeps happening, and because nobody is coming up with a better structure, it's not a topic of a wide discussion in the society.

Public schools cannot expel kids. They can't even make a kid move to another school.

Denmark has also closed "special classes" for disruptive kids and classes for autistic kids and put the in the normal classes. So now you have the autistic kid who can't handle noise in the same class as pupils who like to make noise.

In addition to this, the problem kids are often made into the victims. So you are not allowed to blame them or tell the parents they need to parent their kid.

So we also have an exodus of teachers. I cannot see how you can survive as a teacher in such a situation.

In middle school I was a kind and polite person. There were a significant portion around me who were not. And more than enough who were literally underage criminals. Many abused the teachers, especially ones who were having a tough time such a chemotherapy.

Stealing by middle schoolers should result in imprisonment of middle schoolers. Same thing for locking a teacher out of her classroom.

I'm not joking. I think we need to start building more juvenile prisons. It will cut down a lot on the requirements for adult prisons. If there is any capability for reform, it is much greater when they are young.

It also needs to be clear to juveniles that they can't commit crimes and have them dismissed as "poor classroom control".

It's garbage juveniles is what it is. Take the trash out.

Generally my understanding is that children who severely misbehave is actually an indication of neglect, abuse, or something else seriously wrong with the environment that the child cannot escape.

I like how you wonder how you can educate children without making them resent it like it's the systems fault for creating a boring classroom that therefore made you terrorize some poor teacher when really you were all horrible bullies to the teachers because you chose to be that way.

I hated being in school too but what I did was show up, take notes, go home do homework, repeat until I graduated. I didn't tell the teacher to shut up or play cards or steal stuff or play cruel jokes like you.

We had "crossword puzzle school", where the soon-to-be-dropouts were sent. The only work was apparently in the form of crossword puzzles, all day, every day. You usually only got sent here if you were actually arrested by the police for something like drugs or violence, preferably on school grounds.

Back in my normal school, sometimes you got sent to the principal's office. Sometimes you get in-school or home suspension. But eventually, you were back in class. I don't actually ever recall hearing of someone getting expelled from the school system—I'm not even sure that was legal. I assumed that's because, at least in my state, education was required for all students under a certain age (apparently even if that "education" was crossword puzzles, or worse, in a juvenile prison).

Anyway, you could only be punished you if you got caught. Students were very good at not getting caught. A mentality of "us against them" took hold in many cases, where "them" was the staff. For example, I once brought some contraband to school in my backpack. An administrator found out about it, dropped into my class, called me up in front of the class and asked me about it. I lied. The administrator then went to my desk and searched my backpack. To my surprise, there was no contraband inside. He suspected that I had passed it to another friend of mine, so he searched that person. Nothing. The administrator searched several more people in class, but he came up empty. No one was ever punished.

I found out afterwards that, while the administrator was interrogating me, another student removed the contraband from my backpack. Students then proceeded to quietly pass the objects around the classroom, from student to student, so that they wouldn't be found. They returned the items to me when the administrator left, and did so in full view of the teacher. Many of the people who helped me were acquaintances at best. I wasn't even very popular—some of the people who helped me frequently beat me up.

When a teacher sends one student to the office, the student is punished. I strongly suspect that, if a teacher tried to send 50% of their students to the principal, the teacher would be punished.

> I like how you wonder how you can educate children without making them resent it like it's the systems fault for creating a boring classroom that therefore made you terrorize some poor teacher when really you were all horrible bullies to the teachers because you chose to be that way.

Let me start by saying that, if I could do my school days over again knowing what I know now, I would act very differently. I often behaved like a rude idiot, squandering more opportunities and days than I care to count now. I hope I have become a better person since then.

I'll also point out that several of the people I went to school with died before graduating high school (suicide, drunk or otherwise impaired driving accidents, overdose, etc.).

I left my first reply because I think many people grew up in schools where my stories seem ludicrous, and they can't imagine why a teacher's interview would put so much emphasis on "classroom control". Having seen or heard first-hand accounts of similarly bad behavior in so many classes and schools, I thought some concrete examples of what can happen without classroom control might be illustrative. My school might have been a bit below average in terms of student behavior, but I don't even think we were the worst school in my district.

Ultimately, I think you are trying to say that it is not the school's responsibility to make students behave and accept education, but rather the students' responsibility not to misbehave and disrupt school? If so, I understand the sentiment, but I'm not seeing how it leads to any practical solutions. Some students just don't care. I'm just not sure that's a reasonable demand of a child's brain, particularly when that child might be hungry and scared.

I express a desire for educators to find ways to engage students and make schools welcoming, exciting places to be because that's what I wish my schools could have been instead of the dismal, often terrifying places they were. I wish others would have an easier time than me in school, and as a result that they come out better than I am.

Could I have behaved better? Yes, absolutely. My question is that, if you accept that some students don't see why they should behave differently, how do you change their minds?

1. You can't send the kids home because both parents are probably working. It's more likely the kid becomes lost forever and it becomes a government problem again once that kid is now living an alternative lifestyle that consumes government resources in other ways (crime, homelessness, or health).

2. Because of the realities of (1) everyone else is now forced to asked why the kid is no longer in school and becomes a failure of the teacher that the kid is not in school. The teacher must now deal with disgruntled parents and administrators for not enduring the emotional abuse and disruption a neglected child causes while also dealing with 20 other students.

I think a lot of problems with child education and just be traced back to economic realities of many parents today. Even if you are relatively well off having your kid kicked out of school isn't financially feasible for a lot of families. Even a disruptive child might be the result of absent parents who must be at work to even afford school lunch.

This is it. Our framework for understanding childhood success is based entirely in “school quality”. If a child enters adulthood with a criminal record, without job skills, or without prospects for higher education, it is always blamed on either the parents or the school system. The only remedies anyone can imagine is throwing money at the school system or setting up charter schools, so when that doesn’t work, you’re left guessing.

But none of this addresses poverty! I am convinced that if children can go to sleep with food in their belly, stable housing, and proper healthcare, they’re much more likely to have good outcomes.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I suspect there are plenty of measures by which other countries achieve better educational outcomes with lower educational spending, in which case I'd be willing to bet that they are simply spending more in "social programs" (broadly speaking) than the United States.

You are speaking a Catholic school here. But there are a lot of other schools in 20-mile radius of my home in Silicon Valley where my wife worked.

1. Big city district with “no child left behind” policy, very stupidly executed. Never again, no matter how high the salary is.

2. A charter school chain - a commercial exercise- that has no money planned on disciplinary problems: no staff, no rooms to deal with reports and detentions. Dick drawing, chair humping - “it’s your professional responsibility to control the classroom”.

3. The Catholic school: “thank you doctor N for joining our school” - from kids! When she got all 25 answers on the first assignment- she cried. She was forced to leave the school because you can’t get California credentials in a State university in a program paid by me, not the state - while working in a Catholic school, teaching exactly the same science course.

But there is no need to brutal measures like expelling. There is say option

4. A public school in an ethnic minority suburb. Three reports - and a conference with the teacher and administrator, who is absolutely on the teacher’s side but wants to know how to improve the situation. And that actually helps - these badly behaving kids are not necessarily cruel. “No child left behind” too, but executed properly.

Teachers are left to deal with the impossible burden of raising 30+ kids and fail.

So a teacher has a choice: to be a saint (and do miracles), to be the police (with hands tied though), or to be a victim. Sadly, many end up with the third option :(