It might not be easily apparent, but a lot of high school students today have a problem with the rules that govern them. It's not necessarily that they don't like their teachers or other administrators and break rules as a form of disobedience. Some students, even after receiving an explanation, simply don't understand what is expected of them. Other students, myself included, find the rules to be illogical, and though we follow them, it's an empty promise of our deference to authority. A quick Google search will bring up the definition of a rule as being "one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere." And yet, according to Henry David Thoreau, "Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
Some rules clearly do not make sense. Among the students at my school, many are irritated with the rules in place for using the bathroom or going through the halls. The first and main offender seems to be the 10/10 rule, which dictates that students may not leave a classroom within the first 10 or last 10 minutes of a class to use the bathroom, go get something from their locker, or any other activity that involves their body moving around in the hallways. At first glance, this may seem like a reasonable idea. If all students stay in their classrooms, then it's easy to tell who is actually being a truant, right? Not quite. This rule fails in several ways. Within what the rule itself says, in a roughly 50 minute period, there is a 30 minute frame of time within which students are allowed to leave the room. This might not seem like a problem, except for the fact that classes don't normally get settled down for a good 3 to 4 minutes after the bell rings, and sometimes classes finish a few minutes before the bell rings, meaning that students are only actually allowed to leave the room when there's a high chance they'll miss part of the day's lesson. On top of that, some teachers, realizing this, don't let students leave the room until even later, because the lesson "is important." Put into an even larger scale, the last and first 10 minutes of a period combined with a 4 minute passing time mean that there's actually a 24 minute gap between the times students are allowed into the halls. To this you may say, "Why not do what you need to do in the 4 minute passing time? Compared to other schools, that's actually pretty reasonable." To which I say, "The school is so large that unless you walk quickly or find a way around other students, it's physically impossible to make it from the cafeteria to the far end of the English and Social Studies wing on the second floor of the school. The school is large, and combined with packing your bag and chatting with friends after the bell, many people still only get to class with about a minute left to spare. It takes longer than a single minute to use the bathroom or go to your locker, which might not even be en route to your class."
Speaking of time, we come to another set of rules that students find disagreeable: The Absentee Policy, otherwise known as the H-policy, or simply as H-ing, because if nothing else, the English language at least allows us to turn letters into verbs. The 2014-2015 code of conduct for high schoolers defines tardiness as "not being in assigned classroom ready to do school work when the bell has rung." Which, again, is reasonable on paper but not in practice. Ask any student if they've ever had a moment when they walked into class just seconds after the bell has already rung, or make the final dash to their classroom when they realize just how much time has passed. I know I've done that, and I also know how relieved I've felt when the teacher said nothing about it, and when I would check the student portal later, nothing had been done about it, and things carried on nice and neatly. This rule is hard to enforce when
1. the school is large enough so that parts of it aren't reachable in the given passing time depending on your starting point
and
2. some teachers are stricter than others, in practice represented by some closing the door at the time the bell rings to indicate who's late and others just letting the stragglers filter in as they check homework or get everyone else settled.
(On that note, it becomes increasingly hard to take the rules seriously when even the teachers are lax about them, but this will be addressed more later.)
Since the code of conduct says "2 tardies equals 1 unexcused absence" and "2 tardies will result in detention," it would be safe to assume that most students are in class on time due to the consequences. Well, yes, to the first part at least. But don't believe for a second that students follow the tardy rules because of a fear of consequences. Unless you come to school late, are chronically tardy, or walk in halfway through a period, it is very unlikely anything will happen to you. I've never known anyone to actually suffer these consequences, even those who struggle to get places on time, and this is only the first level of punishment. To continue, every 2 tardies is supposed to result in a detention, with the magic number for credit loss being 6 tardies in a quarter, equaling 3 unexcused absences. If you're "cutting" a class, any further tardies are to result in a Sat. detention, and if you're "cutting" a study hall, further tardies will result in ISS, or In-School Suspension. In other words, it's actually more serious an infraction to cut a study hall than an actual class, when you consider that a Saturday is your free time and you're supposed to be learning while you're in school. A student would lose more from cutting a class when they don't have a class than actually cutting a class. (In other, other words, theoretically you could lose a quarter of a year's worth of credit for being less than a minute late to class 6 separate times.)
Don't get me wrong though. It's important to come to class on time in order to maximize the effectiveness of the period. When everyone is ready, you (as a class) can move through material quicker and even get ahead. It's just that these rules need revisions in order for them to also have the maximum effect.
Another serious offender also has to do with passing. This isn't a clear-cut rule, per-say, or at least it's not mentioned in the concrete rules section of the code of conduct and is elsewhere, but it has come time to address the entire pass system existence. Back in elementary school, we didn't have planners with a section to fill out passes in. Instead, our teachers had cute little blocks of wood or a piece of plastic with the word pass written on its surface. This was actually a very effective method, since you would need to physically have the pass on your person when not in the room, and return to the room in order to replace the missing pass. There isn't really a way to get around that.
Currently, students fill out their own passes, which are then signed by teachers and checked by the teacher or administrator at their destination. Choice of writing utensil is not specified. In short, the current pass system runs completely on honesty, which is a wonderful virtue and shows the trust between students and staff, but is also one of the most easily corruptible systems in the school.
Some ways of getting around passes include signing your own pass (because there's no actually way to verify a signature), simply writing passes in pencil and editing the time as you see fit so you're never "late," or even just forgoing the pass altogether (Because I've been here three years now and never actually had my pass checked by security or staff in the hallways. We exchange pleasantries instead.)
The study hall teachers who want you to have a pass one week are the same teachers who send you off on your way the next week without any passes involved. And because of that, the teachers who are sticklers for the rules and are consistent, while they seem reasonable and well-intentioned, also come off as just a little bit irritating because this is the only place you have to deal with actually following the rules.
When doing group projects, students are told that if they feel any member of the group isn't doing their fair share of work, they should tell the teacher and that person will not only not receive credit, they'll also be made to work by themselves from then on because they've proven that they can't work reliably with others. The students who did their work, and weren't the flaky kind of partner who worked on-again off-again, get the marks they deserve for their time an effort. Each person is held accountable for their actions as an individual and as a member of a group. So why do some staff, who suggest to students to hold other members in our project group accountable, not do the same thing to themselves? Students and staff must meet each other halfway in order for any kind of system to work, and when teachers don't uphold their part of the bargain, it makes students wonder: Why should we?
Bonus Content:
Verbatim from the 2014-2015 code of conduct:
"Using the study hall as a base, students may exercise several options:
1. Request a library pass- depending on library availability."
Yes, your study hall teacher can't tell you that you're not allowed to go to the library without a pass from one of your subject teachers. The more you know.
No comments:
Post a Comment