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My first teaching job was at a prestigious boys’ boarding school. A colleague who had the next desk in the staff room was also head of the first-formers’ boardi
by cjs_ac 9mo ago
My first teaching job was at a prestigious boys’ boarding school. A colleague who had the next desk in the staff room was also head of the first-formers’ boarding house, which meant he received an awful lot of emails from anxious parents about their not-quite-so-anxious sons. He left all these emails unread for a fortnight, because after this time the issues (or non-issues) had usually resolved themselves.
- madaxe_again 9mo agoAh, for days of yore, when if the parents wanted to talk to the school, they could… write a letter. Honestly, I see no small part of the problem here as being that communication is too easy, and it results in a lot of frivolity. Used to be that you had a problem, you figured it out - now you can send an angry WhatsApp message, and because some person hasn’t responded to you within 20 seconds, they are now your problem, and any initiative to figure it out yourself has flown the coop.
- barrenko 9mo agoI am cross-quoting from N.N. Taleb, forgive my errors, but to me it's something in the line of "If you want to be cured from reading the newspaper, spend a week reading old newspaper."
- indigoabstract 9mo agoThat's amusing. I remember there is this site where you can read 40 year old "news", as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017175 But I couldn't say how many people it cured of reading the news so far.
- rvba 9mo ago"Please help, my son is bullied" After two weeks: it solved itself, he committed suicide.
- cjs_ac 9mo agoHousemasters and housemistresses have a better idea of whether pupils are being bullied than parents, because they are physically present and receive reports from classroom teachers, tutors, games coaches, and so on. The 1970s are over and boarding schools are no longer run by rum, sodomy and the lash. The refusal of many twenty-first century parents to acknowledge that schoolteachers have at least two university degrees and consequently have expertise in their profession is the cause of the issue. If you’re not willing to trust the professional educators and administrative processes at a school, why are you spending the median income on sending your child there?
- sokoloff 9mo agoIt can be simultaneously true that 5% of educators are great, 20% very good, 60% are good, 13% are adequate, and 2% should have fired 5 years or more ago. If you’re in the first three groups, it can be hard to understand the disrespect and vitriol which is overwhelmingly directed at experiences parents have with that last group.
- cjs_ac 9mo agoPrestigious boarding schools - the schools that I’ve been writing about - need not bother with teachers outside that top 25%. Non-selective government schools, like all public services, have inevitably become largely concerned with social work; teachers in those schools, regardless of their ability, have to respond to parents immediately.
- rvba 9mo agoYes nothing bad has never happened in a prestigious boarding school, just because they charge more money, especially to kids of rich people. After all rich people and their rich kids never do anything wrong /s
- cjs_ac 9mo agoI’m talking about institutions and their internal processes, not some tedious nonsense about how money is intrinsically evil. Rich people have all sorts of problems. Part of the package in an elite education is that the school has a better capacity to sort those out by itself. Constant communication with parents undermines that. It’s a question of values and understanding what you’re buying into. These schools don’t suit all parenting styles.