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As a former teacher I 100% support surveillance (hopefully video) monitoring in the classroom. Parents need to see first-hand how bad student behavior can get.

arkades 7y ago
In both directions. The worst of my teachers' behavior when I was a kid was beyond the pale, but no one took kids at face value. Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. No one believes how bad it gets in there, and for some reason, promptly forgets what it was like in school when they were growing up. Or they just didn't comprehend it at the time.
- deogeo 7y ago
  > Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. *In the US. My own school experience in Europe could not have been more different than what you describe. When looking for a solution, we should not forget about places that have (or had) good school systems.
  - ksdale 7y ago
    It seems... wrong to reduce this to a U.S. and Europe dichotomy, there are a lot of great schools in the U.S. and I assume there are bad ones in Europe as well.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      Sorry, I did not mean to imply that. Just that school is not inherently terrible. After all, I can only vouch for a few schools in one country in Europe. And that's outdated info - I hear things have been slowly getting worse here as well. Edit: Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood. Some statistics could clear things up...
      - hombre_fatal 7y ago
        > Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood When I studied abroad in Europe, other exchange students regularly asked me how us Americans learn anything when we are constantly talking during class as seen in any highschool teen drama movie. As if Mean Girls was a documentary. I was dumbfounded.
        deogeo 7y ago
        People assume art imitates life. That, aside from a few liberties taken to make a more interesting story, movies try to faithfully represent reality. And when so many movies all share the same spin, one assumes there's some truth behind that spin. A big part of what people think about daily US life, past and present, is shaped by movies. E.g. we didn't learn about Mt. Rushmore, Drive-In theaters, the FBI, Thanksgiving, or Miranda rights in school.
        lonelappde 7y ago
        Why would you expect a movie to show all the class lectures that are totally irrelevant to the plot? One lecture would be half the length of a movie.
        deogeo 7y ago
        I wouldn't - that would be one of the "few liberties taken to make a more interesting story" I mentioned.
  - AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
    *Everywhere. My own school experience in Europe was pretty much the same as he described. And it is not only my school experience either, there were many cases of unpunished power abuse that the teachers engaged in in nearby schools.
- wildrhythms 7y ago
  I'm curious, did you attend a large(ish) school or a smaller school? I attended what most people would consider a "small" public high school in the U.S. (rural area, less than 1,000 students, one high school for the entire county), and never experienced anything like what you're describing. Teachers knew students by name (given the smaller size of their classes; for example, there was one band teacher for the entire school), as well as students' parents by name.
  - AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
    The schools that I went to had around 300 students. It did not stop the abuse by teachers nor did it stop the bullying that the teachers ignored.
    - rndgermandude 7y ago
      I never experienced or observed bad bullying or even physical violence (except for some minor skirmishes, usually between friends) during my school years. We surely had our share of social awkward people, but they were left alone unless they themselves acted out, and they usually still made some friends. We didn't have true bullies. Maybe occasionally somebody from a higher grade would tease somebody younger, but never for long let alone repeatedly. Beating somebody up would have been a great crime worthy of grave penalties in our eyes, and we would have stopped it and then have ratted out whoever it was in a heartbeat. If somebody tried to bully somebody beyond what we considered acceptable teasing or be aggessive to somebody, the class mates would protect whoever it was, even the social awkward kid. This only happened once in my peer group with a dude who had freshly transferred from another school (moved cities IIRC) trying to be the "cool" guy picking on an awkward kid, starting to slap him. He quickly learned that if you want to bully or fight one of us, you will fight all of us. Forming a crowd around him telling him to leave his victim alone, fuck off and never try it again with anybody was enough. A few years later we were buddies with him. There were some students who gave teachers a somewhat hard time, but mostly "class jokers" who probably suffered from ADHD. I only ever had one class mate who posed such a problem the teachers could not handle her within our school. She was then sent off to a special care place specializing in teens with her kinds of problems, not as a punishment or some bullshit "zero tolerance" policy but to help her. This is of course just my personal experience in the two schools I personally visited, but it makes me genuinely wonder how the dynamics in a school can change and deteriorate to a point where constant bullying and even beat ups are tolerated and common (whether it be due to obliviousness or fear). But I know it happens, and happens a lot.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  I'm curious why in such an environment even if tapes existed you believe that students and parents would have any access to such tapes even if authorities within the school reviewed such and knew what you were saying to be absolutely true.
dgzl 7y ago
I disagree with the surveillance bit, but yes parents can be pretty ignorant of their kid's behaviour outside of home.
marak830 7y ago
ESL teacher here. I agree with your comment (although not necessarily with the reasoning). This week inwasnput incharge of the whole technology deot behind out school and the boss asked me to find a way to forward the cameras to their main office. They asked it was possible and I gave a non committal answer promising to get back to them next week, purely because I know some teachers are uncomfortable about this. Personally I'm all for it. I've seen it in Korea (I'm in Japan btw), where parents can see real time feeds of the classrooms. Personally, i don't have an issue. I have a full audio and video camera in my room, and I'm willing to open that to the owner(and if they want the parents) in real time. A lot of teachers over here seem to take it as an insult though. As if their personal freedoms are being enchroached. I think there is more reason than to show how badly their children are acting though. A co worker was accused of sexually assaulting a student a few years ago (different school). They happened to still have the recordings on hand and after showing the full month in question to the oarentx the student admitted to makjgbitnuo to try and stop doing extra after school studies. That's one reason it's damn important, and the converse side of course. I'm of the mind that having a camera(and audio) in a classroom that parents can access in real time is not just an excellent safety precaution, it's also a great way for parents to learn about their children's study and learning methods!
- TravHatesMe 7y ago
  I side with the teachers on this one. Parents should not be able to watch their kids' classroom in realtime. There are helicopter parents out there, now they will be helicoptering the poor teachers and other students. I think surveillance should still be used but with limitation, similar to police bodycams. Have audio/video recording and provide it to the parents if an incident arises or if there is a reasonable request from a parent. This introduces subjectivity but if carefully implemented that could be minimized.
  - foobarian 7y ago
    I am concerned that desensitizing the future generations to constant surveillance could have bad consequences down the line, when people suddenly become ok with living in a 1984 type environment because that's all they know through their formative/school years. But yeah some kind of unobtrusive bodycam style system for forensic purposes only (no access for parents) seems a reasonable middle ground.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jancsika 7y ago
Adding technology to a social problem isn't going to fix it.
abecedarius 7y ago
As a former student I do not.
soulofmischief 7y ago
Adolescents require a sense of privacy in order to properly grow into functional and successful adults. I was under constant surveillance as a child and wasn't able to start "being me" until I'd left home. My development was straight up stunted by constant surveillance. There are too many abusive / helicopter parents out there for this to possibly be a good thing. I can only imagine what life would be like if my control-freak step-grandmother had access to tapes of me learning how to interact with my classmates and participating in cognitive rebellion against their draconian, hyper-religious control over my personality. Instead of being punished 75% of the time it would have been 100% of the time. I would not have been allowed to contact any of my friends because they all grew up in more sensible households and represented threats to my guardians' control over me. And this doesn't even touch the fact that normalizing children to surveillance is objectively a bad thing if you give a rat's ass about the future of this planet and peoples' ability to be individual. Maybe it sounds like a good idea at face value but you should resist espousing such views without thinking about every last detail.
- ddingus 7y ago
  I grew up free range. And I mean like, "going to the woods for a couple days, very back Sunday..." type free. Was not able to do that degree with my own kids, but they had considerably more than their peers did. (Yes, I had to deal with helicopter parents a few times)
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    I'm fortunate to have enjoyed similar freedoms; my guardians would throw me out the door until night time and on weekends I would disappear without communication. Luckily the only thing they enjoyed more than controlling every aspect of my personality was pretending I didn't exist. It was weird spending time with friends whose parents generally let them develop their own personalities and interests unhindered but who would have to check in or get permission every time we changed locations. Once I was out the house, I never felt the need to check in because neither did my guardians. Honestly I'm fairly certain they would hope I wouldn't come back one day. And I definitely had quite a few close calls. As for my own children, I plan to do the same; their time is their business, as long as they stay out of trouble. Hopefully while at home I manage to drill some sense into their heads.
mindslight 7y ago
There is a huge difference between what is described in the article, and a simple video recording that you're describing. A video system is ultimately a facilitator of human-scale behavior - recorded footage can be played back as objective evidence or representative examples. A proper video system would have an append-only audit log of what was accessed by whom, available to the entire community. But even without that, the limit of abuse is confined to what a petty school administration could accomplish. Whereas the system in the article is practically begging to create perverse incentives that lead to mechanized abuse ("your son has been suspended for repeated aggression incidents" - meanwhile it's simply something about their voice that sets off a poorly implemented trigger). The fallout from these problems then gets default-labeled as "nobody's fault" because the non-techie bias is to trust machines' biased interpretations as if they're facts.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Gosh,do you think there could be a bug where black males are evaluated as "more aggressive" than white females, by the AI system? Surely it would be calibrated against that, perhaps by using police officer's professional judgment as training labels...
m463 7y ago
It's really quite simple - with great power comes great responsibility.
blondin 7y ago
OMG lol i was going to agree with you with all the recent tragedies lately and then you had to drop because of student behavior. well i have seen teachers take it out on students too...
gweinberg 7y ago
And teacher behavior!

arkades 7y ago

In both directions. The worst of my teachers' behavior when I was a kid was beyond the pale, but no one took kids at face value. Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. No one believes how bad it gets in there, and for some reason, promptly forgets what it was like in school when they were growing up. Or they just didn't comprehend it at the time.

deogeo 7y ago
> Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. *In the US. My own school experience in Europe could not have been more different than what you describe. When looking for a solution, we should not forget about places that have (or had) good school systems.
- ksdale 7y ago
  It seems... wrong to reduce this to a U.S. and Europe dichotomy, there are a lot of great schools in the U.S. and I assume there are bad ones in Europe as well.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Sorry, I did not mean to imply that. Just that school is not inherently terrible. After all, I can only vouch for a few schools in one country in Europe. And that's outdated info - I hear things have been slowly getting worse here as well. Edit: Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood. Some statistics could clear things up...
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      > Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood When I studied abroad in Europe, other exchange students regularly asked me how us Americans learn anything when we are constantly talking during class as seen in any highschool teen drama movie. As if Mean Girls was a documentary. I was dumbfounded.
      - deogeo 7y ago
        People assume art imitates life. That, aside from a few liberties taken to make a more interesting story, movies try to faithfully represent reality. And when so many movies all share the same spin, one assumes there's some truth behind that spin. A big part of what people think about daily US life, past and present, is shaped by movies. E.g. we didn't learn about Mt. Rushmore, Drive-In theaters, the FBI, Thanksgiving, or Miranda rights in school.
        lonelappde 7y ago
        Why would you expect a movie to show all the class lectures that are totally irrelevant to the plot? One lecture would be half the length of a movie.
        deogeo 7y ago
        I wouldn't - that would be one of the "few liberties taken to make a more interesting story" I mentioned.
- AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
  *Everywhere. My own school experience in Europe was pretty much the same as he described. And it is not only my school experience either, there were many cases of unpunished power abuse that the teachers engaged in in nearby schools.
wildrhythms 7y ago
I'm curious, did you attend a large(ish) school or a smaller school? I attended what most people would consider a "small" public high school in the U.S. (rural area, less than 1,000 students, one high school for the entire county), and never experienced anything like what you're describing. Teachers knew students by name (given the smaller size of their classes; for example, there was one band teacher for the entire school), as well as students' parents by name.
- AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
  The schools that I went to had around 300 students. It did not stop the abuse by teachers nor did it stop the bullying that the teachers ignored.
  - rndgermandude 7y ago
    I never experienced or observed bad bullying or even physical violence (except for some minor skirmishes, usually between friends) during my school years. We surely had our share of social awkward people, but they were left alone unless they themselves acted out, and they usually still made some friends. We didn't have true bullies. Maybe occasionally somebody from a higher grade would tease somebody younger, but never for long let alone repeatedly. Beating somebody up would have been a great crime worthy of grave penalties in our eyes, and we would have stopped it and then have ratted out whoever it was in a heartbeat. If somebody tried to bully somebody beyond what we considered acceptable teasing or be aggessive to somebody, the class mates would protect whoever it was, even the social awkward kid. This only happened once in my peer group with a dude who had freshly transferred from another school (moved cities IIRC) trying to be the "cool" guy picking on an awkward kid, starting to slap him. He quickly learned that if you want to bully or fight one of us, you will fight all of us. Forming a crowd around him telling him to leave his victim alone, fuck off and never try it again with anybody was enough. A few years later we were buddies with him. There were some students who gave teachers a somewhat hard time, but mostly "class jokers" who probably suffered from ADHD. I only ever had one class mate who posed such a problem the teachers could not handle her within our school. She was then sent off to a special care place specializing in teens with her kinds of problems, not as a punishment or some bullshit "zero tolerance" policy but to help her. This is of course just my personal experience in the two schools I personally visited, but it makes me genuinely wonder how the dynamics in a school can change and deteriorate to a point where constant bullying and even beat ups are tolerated and common (whether it be due to obliviousness or fear). But I know it happens, and happens a lot.
michaelmrose 7y ago
I'm curious why in such an environment even if tapes existed you believe that students and parents would have any access to such tapes even if authorities within the school reviewed such and knew what you were saying to be absolutely true.

dgzl 7y ago

I disagree with the surveillance bit, but yes parents can be pretty ignorant of their kid's behaviour outside of home.

marak830 7y ago

ESL teacher here. I agree with your comment (although not necessarily with the reasoning). This week inwasnput incharge of the whole technology deot behind out school and the boss asked me to find a way to forward the cameras to their main office. They asked it was possible and I gave a non committal answer promising to get back to them next week, purely because I know some teachers are uncomfortable about this. Personally I'm all for it. I've seen it in Korea (I'm in Japan btw), where parents can see real time feeds of the classrooms. Personally, i don't have an issue. I have a full audio and video camera in my room, and I'm willing to open that to the owner(and if they want the parents) in real time. A lot of teachers over here seem to take it as an insult though. As if their personal freedoms are being enchroached. I think there is more reason than to show how badly their children are acting though. A co worker was accused of sexually assaulting a student a few years ago (different school). They happened to still have the recordings on hand and after showing the full month in question to the oarentx the student admitted to makjgbitnuo to try and stop doing extra after school studies. That's one reason it's damn important, and the converse side of course. I'm of the mind that having a camera(and audio) in a classroom that parents can access in real time is not just an excellent safety precaution, it's also a great way for parents to learn about their children's study and learning methods!

TravHatesMe 7y ago
I side with the teachers on this one. Parents should not be able to watch their kids' classroom in realtime. There are helicopter parents out there, now they will be helicoptering the poor teachers and other students. I think surveillance should still be used but with limitation, similar to police bodycams. Have audio/video recording and provide it to the parents if an incident arises or if there is a reasonable request from a parent. This introduces subjectivity but if carefully implemented that could be minimized.
- foobarian 7y ago
  I am concerned that desensitizing the future generations to constant surveillance could have bad consequences down the line, when people suddenly become ok with living in a 1984 type environment because that's all they know through their formative/school years. But yeah some kind of unobtrusive bodycam style system for forensic purposes only (no access for parents) seems a reasonable middle ground.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jancsika 7y ago

Adding technology to a social problem isn't going to fix it.

abecedarius 7y ago

As a former student I do not.

soulofmischief 7y ago

Adolescents require a sense of privacy in order to properly grow into functional and successful adults. I was under constant surveillance as a child and wasn't able to start "being me" until I'd left home. My development was straight up stunted by constant surveillance. There are too many abusive / helicopter parents out there for this to possibly be a good thing. I can only imagine what life would be like if my control-freak step-grandmother had access to tapes of me learning how to interact with my classmates and participating in cognitive rebellion against their draconian, hyper-religious control over my personality. Instead of being punished 75% of the time it would have been 100% of the time. I would not have been allowed to contact any of my friends because they all grew up in more sensible households and represented threats to my guardians' control over me. And this doesn't even touch the fact that normalizing children to surveillance is objectively a bad thing if you give a rat's ass about the future of this planet and peoples' ability to be individual. Maybe it sounds like a good idea at face value but you should resist espousing such views without thinking about every last detail.

ddingus 7y ago
I grew up free range. And I mean like, "going to the woods for a couple days, very back Sunday..." type free. Was not able to do that degree with my own kids, but they had considerably more than their peers did. (Yes, I had to deal with helicopter parents a few times)
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  I'm fortunate to have enjoyed similar freedoms; my guardians would throw me out the door until night time and on weekends I would disappear without communication. Luckily the only thing they enjoyed more than controlling every aspect of my personality was pretending I didn't exist. It was weird spending time with friends whose parents generally let them develop their own personalities and interests unhindered but who would have to check in or get permission every time we changed locations. Once I was out the house, I never felt the need to check in because neither did my guardians. Honestly I'm fairly certain they would hope I wouldn't come back one day. And I definitely had quite a few close calls. As for my own children, I plan to do the same; their time is their business, as long as they stay out of trouble. Hopefully while at home I manage to drill some sense into their heads.

mindslight 7y ago

There is a huge difference between what is described in the article, and a simple video recording that you're describing. A video system is ultimately a facilitator of human-scale behavior - recorded footage can be played back as objective evidence or representative examples. A proper video system would have an append-only audit log of what was accessed by whom, available to the entire community. But even without that, the limit of abuse is confined to what a petty school administration could accomplish. Whereas the system in the article is practically begging to create perverse incentives that lead to mechanized abuse ("your son has been suspended for repeated aggression incidents" - meanwhile it's simply something about their voice that sets off a poorly implemented trigger). The fallout from these problems then gets default-labeled as "nobody's fault" because the non-techie bias is to trust machines' biased interpretations as if they're facts.

lonelappde 7y ago
Gosh,do you think there could be a bug where black males are evaluated as "more aggressive" than white females, by the AI system? Surely it would be calibrated against that, perhaps by using police officer's professional judgment as training labels...

m463 7y ago

It's really quite simple - with great power comes great responsibility.

blondin 7y ago

OMG lol i was going to agree with you with all the recent tragedies lately and then you had to drop because of student behavior. well i have seen teachers take it out on students too...

gweinberg 7y ago

And teacher behavior!