Bully victim fights back, stabs and kills attacker

[mr friendly guy]

I always wondered whether it was only a matter of time before the victim felt he had no recourse but to fight back and with tragic consequences. Well it happened.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/19/nyreg ... e-say.html

Boy, 14, Fatally Stabs Schoolmate in Bronx, Police Say
By ASHLEY SOUTHALL and COLIN MOYNIHANJUNE 18, 2014

A 14-year-old Bronx boy who may have been teased and robbed by a 14-year-old schoolmate stabbed him to death on Wednesday afternoon outside the school they attended, the police said.

The boys were students at Intermediate School 117 (Joseph H. Wade) in the Mount Hope neighborhood. The stabbing took place around 3 p.m. in front of the school building at the end of the school day, the police said.

The wounded boy, Timothy Crump, who was stabbed three times in the torso, was taken to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, where he died. A black-handled knife was recovered at the scene, the police said. The police arrested the schoolmate, who was identified as Noel Estevez of the Highbridge section of the Bronx. He was charged as an adult Wednesday night with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

Several boys who said they saw the attack said that the victim confronted the boy who had the knife as he was leaving school, punching him and kneeing him in the nose. The suspect pulled out a knife and stabbed Timothy as teachers and school safety officers ran over to stop the fight, they said.

“It was scary,” said Muhammed Ceesay, 12.

Investigators said the suspect may have been teased by and, at an earlier date, robbed by the boy who was fatally stabbed. But as of Wednesday evening, what specifically precipitated the stabbing was not known.

Marisol Perez, 43, a neighbor of Noel’s, said Timothy was part of a group of boys who had picked on him.

“They used to hit him, bother him, tell him he’s a bum, that he didn’t have nowhere to live,” she said.

Ms. Perez said that Noel had been released from the hospital a few days ago and had told her that he dreaded returning to school.

“He knew something was going to happen to him,” she said.

Ms. Perez said Noel told her that he had been bullied when he returned to school on Tuesday and that he was feeling very depressed.

On Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Perez said, she received a call from her daughter, who said something had happened to Noel. She ran downstairs and saw about half a dozen boys banging on his door. Ms. Perez said she called the police after the boys told her that Noel had stabbed one of their friends and that they were planning to kill him.

At the apartment where the victim lived on Aldus Street in Foxhurst, no one answered the door on Wednesday night. Tyrone Rivers, a neighbor who said he was friends with Timothy’s mother, said the boy often played basketball and football with other neighborhood children in a playground across the street.

“He’s not a troublemaker,” Mr. Rivers said. “Everyone is in shock.”

Carmen Fariña, the New York City schools chancellor, offered condolences to the family of the boy who was killed and said grief counselors would be sent to the school on Thursday. “We are devastated to lose one of our children like this,” she said in a statement.

Saw this first on TYT. However if you search there are a few other points of note.

1. According to the bully victim's mother, he had attempted suicide, been diagnosed with bipolar (used to be called manic depression, which should clue you in on his state of mind), and was on his first day back at school. No prizes for guessing why he missed school.

2. They had apparently asked to be transferred to another school (although the bullies knew where he lived). This was refused. Does America use a catchment area type system like in Australia?

3. On the other side its said that the bully victim had stolen the bully's iphone. According to the bully victim's mother, they used to be friend until Crump (the bully) brought a stolen iphone to the bully victim's house. At that point appalled she had confiscated the iphone and smashed it by throwing it to the floor (presumably to teach him stealing is bad) and that's when the iphone trouble started.

4. The bully victim would walk with a knife in case he was attacked. This sounds like a case the bully attacked him, kneed him in the face and then got stabbed.

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The case on face value looks to have a reasonable chance of self defence given what little I know about the laws - ie no possibility of retreat, felt he was threatened (well when you get kneed in the head, yeah that's threatening) etc. So given that, lets give the bully victim, counselling. I mean if he had killed himself from depression secondary to being bullied, the perps would have been given a slap on the wrist and counselled, I think the victim deserves it too.

[Sidewinder]

2. They had apparently asked to be transferred to another school (although the bullies knew where he lived). This was refused. Does America use a catchment area type system like in Australia?

From what I understand, the problem is one of taxation and local authority. Taxes fund public schools, and there are several government levels that impose taxes- local (city, county), state, and federal. If Child A's family isn't paying taxes to City B, why should City B allow Child A to attend schools in City B's borders? Repeat for City C, D, E...

4. The bully victim would walk with a knife in case he was attacked. This sounds like a case the bully attacked him, kneed him in the face and then got stabbed.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The case on face value looks to have a reasonable chance of self defence given what little I know about the laws - ie no possibility of retreat, felt he was threatened (well when you get kneed in the head, yeah that's threatening) etc. So given that, lets give the bully victim, counselling. I mean if he had killed himself from depression secondary to being bullied, the perps would have been given a slap on the wrist and counselled, I think the victim deserves it too.

As a bullying victim myself, it's extremely difficult to resist the urge to laugh and say, "The bullies got what they deserved!" Thinking rationality, it's tragic the school officials did NOTHING to stop the bullying, until a fatal injury was inflicted- and in all likelihood, would've done NOTHING unless a fatal injury was inflicted.

[Soontir C'boath]

2. They had apparently asked to be transferred to another school (although the bullies knew where he lived). This was refused. Does America use a catchment area type system like in Australia?

From what I understand, the problem is one of taxation and local authority. Taxes fund public schools, and there are several government levels that impose taxes- local (city, county), state, and federal. If Child A's family isn't paying taxes to City B, why should City B allow Child A to attend schools in City B's borders? Repeat for City C, D, E...

Taxation is not a problem with NYC where it's one system.

[Sidewinder]

The police arrested the schoolmate, who was identified as Noel Estevez of the Highbridge section of the Bronx. He was charged as an adult Wednesday night with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

I foresee more pain and suffering being inflicted on the bullying victim, in whichever juvenile hall he's sent to. Those places never get the funding they need to take care of their charges, for the same reasons prisons never get the funding they need. Anyone chance we will NOT read about an adult Noel Estevez committing some horrendous act of violence (rape, murder, mass murder), as a direct consequence of mental health problems acerbated by what abuse he'll likely be subjected to in juvie?

[Eulogy]

As a bullying victim myself, it's extremely difficult to resist the urge to laugh and say, "The bullies got what they deserved!" Thinking rationality, it's tragic the school officials did NOTHING to stop the bullying, until a fatal injury was inflicted- and in all likelihood, would've done NOTHING unless a fatal injury was inflicted.

And that is why shit like this continues. When you remove choices, leave victims with no real recourse (punishing them too definitely doesn't count), they will, sooner or later, take matters into their own hands, with bloody results.

[Raw Shark]

One time back in junior high, this big kid grabbed me by the neck for no fucking reason (he didn't even say anything!), no help was on the way, and I was starting to black out. I was scared as hell and fully prepared to knife the guy if punching him in the nuts hadn't worked, so I came pretty close to being in a very similar situation, only without friendly witnesses. There are probably alternate timelines where I'm still in prison.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I went through a similar situation in middle school...
For months I was picked on by two particular assholes in school, they would mock me, steal stuff from me, and mostly pick on me in public areas to get other kids laughing. I reported it several times, but the response was usually " They aren't PHYSICALLY hurting you"

The one day, after it had rained, one of the kids grabbed an art sketch book I had, yanked it away and tossed it in a muddy puddle. I flipped out, and beat the kid with the Umbrella I had that day (a very BIG Umbrella).

I got three weeks detention, and was forced to do a public apology to the bully in front of my class.

When people talk about the "problem" with bullying in American schools, this is usually what it boils down to. The School institution simply don't care most of the time unless an actual fight takes place. And even then, things are usually dismissed with a "Kids will be kids!" type of dismissive attitude. In this particular situation I have to say That I feel for everyone involved. Because of the inaction and indifference of the school, One kid is dead, and the other will probably have whatever life he would have had, utterly trashed and destroyed.

Yay American Education...

[aerius]

He's fucked. Walking around with a knife violates every school regulation I know of. They're going to throw the book at him and at the very least he's going to jail for a good long time on weapons related charges. My bet is a conviction on manslaughter and weapons charges. I don't really have much else to say, the whole thing is just fucking senseless and a symptom of a much larger problem.

[Esquire]

What weapons charges*? In the US - or at least the parts of it where I've lived - restrictions on blades are by length and style, rather than absolute, and whatever punishment the school might dole out will a), have no legal bearing, and b) have a fair chance of being overturned if the bullied kid manages to plead self-defence in court. There might be a couple of lawsuits between the latter and the former, but still.

Anyway, there's multiple witnesses who are apparently willing to support a self-defence plea, so I'd be surprised if there's much controversy on the subject.

*I think the rule in NYC is 4 inches, concealed carry only for fixed-blade knives, but it's been a while since I had any reason to know that so take it with grain of salt.

[General Zod]

What weapons charges*? In the US - or at least the parts of it where I've lived - restrictions on blades are by length and style, rather than absolute, and whatever punishment the school might dole out will a), have no legal bearing, and b) have a fair chance of being overturned if the bullied kid manages to plead self-defence in court. There might be a couple of lawsuits between the latter and the former, but still.

Anyway, there's multiple witnesses who are apparently willing to support a self-defence plea, so I'd be surprised if there's much controversy on the subject.

*I think the rule in NYC is 4 inches, concealed carry only for fixed-blade knives, but it's been a while since I had any reason to know that so take it with grain of salt.

There's zero tolerance policies, and in New York it's illegal to bring a knife onto school grounds.

[mr friendly guy]

What's the penalty for bringing a knife to the school grounds? Can't be as bad as the second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter they're planning to charge him with. Unless weapon regulations are severe, I would have thought his future is more dependent on the outcome of the murder charges. And as noted, he has some grounds to make a case for self defence in the murder charge. Not sure if you can use self defence in a charge of violating weapons regulation even if it turned out to be true.

[Esquire]

My bad, didn't know there was a law against knives at school.

[blahface]

3. On the other side its said that the bully victim had stolen the bully's iphone. According to the bully victim's mother, they used to be friend until Crump (the bully) brought a stolen iphone to the bully victim's house. At that point appalled she had confiscated the iphone and smashed it by throwing it to the floor (presumably to teach him stealing is bad) and that's when the iphone trouble started.

If you are so appalled at someone stealing a phone then shouldn't you return it to the rightful owner instead of destroy it?

[General Zod]

What's the penalty for bringing a knife to the school grounds? Can't be as bad as the second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter they're planning to charge him with. Unless weapon regulations are severe, I would have thought his future is more dependent on the outcome of the murder charges. And as noted, he has some grounds to make a case for self defence in the murder charge. Not sure if you can use self defence in a charge of violating weapons regulation even if it turned out to be true.

I think it's just a misdemeanor, but since he used it to kill someone it's almost a slam-dunk to show intent. If he's lucky he'll get a plea-bargain out of it due to the circumstances, assuming the prosecutor's not a total asshole.

Edit: Of course, if the kid is black he might be completely fucked.

[mr friendly guy]

3. On the other side its said that the bully victim had stolen the bully's iphone. According to the bully victim's mother, they used to be friend until Crump (the bully) brought a stolen iphone to the bully victim's house. At that point appalled she had confiscated the iphone and smashed it by throwing it to the floor (presumably to teach him stealing is bad) and that's when the iphone trouble started.

If you are so appalled at someone stealing a phone then shouldn't you return it to the rightful owner instead of destroy it?

Or she may have thought she was helping the thief by destroying the evidence at the same time teaching him stealing doesn't pay (since he no longer has the iphone). Or she could have not been thinking straight. Or <insert whatever reason here>. We will have to wait for the court case before this becomes clearer. However it doesn't seem so far fetch to me on face value.

[Simon_Jester]

I went through a similar situation in middle school...
For months I was picked on by two particular assholes in school, they would mock me, steal stuff from me, and mostly pick on me in public areas to get other kids laughing. I reported it several times, but the response was usually " They aren't PHYSICALLY hurting you"

The one day, after it had rained, one of the kids grabbed an art sketch book I had, yanked it away and tossed it in a muddy puddle. I flipped out, and beat the kid with the Umbrella I had that day (a very BIG Umbrella).

I got three weeks detention, and was forced to do a public apology to the bully in front of my class.

When people talk about the "problem" with bullying in American schools, this is usually what it boils down to. The School institution simply don't care most of the time unless an actual fight takes place. And even then, things are usually dismissed with a "Kids will be kids!" type of dismissive attitude...

I would like to point out part of the difficulty the school has trying to do what you'd like them to do.

Picture me, the schoolteacher. I have all sorts of kids harassing each other in my classrooms, with everything from harsh language up to "Joey randomly lashes out at Timmy whenever Timmy passes his desk, and then Timmy punches back because 'you have to hit back,' which may result in no further chaos or may result in a brawl in the classroom."

And then, over and above that, there are all sorts of scenes in the halls, kids wandering around late for class, demanding the right to enter other people's classrooms "looking for their phone" which this or that child allegedly took, or wanting to speak to a student in my class and refusing to tell me why. Which of these incidents might result in a fight? I don't know. Which of them present distractions that undermine my efforts to deliver education to children? ALL OF THEM.

From my point of view, high school social life is a morass of pointless, senseless exercises in children getting angry at each other over nothing. Literally, children, and this is important because children get angry, aggrieved, upset, all the damn time. Especially when interacting with each other in vast numbers.

And when they outnumber the adults twenty to one, there literally are not enough of us in the building to be present for the beginning of every dispute. Not when we all, literally ALL, have other jobs to do that require our full intellect and attention to accomplish those other jobs, in addition to somehow policing all the short-tempered self-righteous petulant children.

It reminds me of a quote from Terry Pratchett's Night Watch.

Keep the peace. That was the thing. People often failed to understand what that meant. You'd go to some life-threatening disturbance like a couple of neighbours scrapping in the street over who owned the hedge between their properties, and they'd both be bursting with aggrieved self-righteousness, both yelling, their wives would either be having a private scrap on the side or would have adjourned to a kitchen for a shared pot of tea and a chat, and they all expected you to sort it out.

And they could never understand that it wasn't your job. Sorting it out was a job for a good surveyor and a couple of lawyers, maybe. Your job was to quell the impulse to bang their stupid fat heads together, to ignore the affronted speeches of dodgy self-justification, to get them to stop shouting and to get them off the street. Once that had been achieved, your job was over. You weren't some walking god, dispensing finely tuned natural justice. Your job was simply to bring back peace.

That's part of my reality. I mean seriously, what am I, as a classroom teacher, supposed to do if I see bullying in the halls? Nine times out of ten I didn't see the incident begin so I don't actually know what, if anything, started it. I have neither the training nor the protection from legal liability it takes to wade into a fight between angry sixteen year olds and break it up.

If there isn't a fight on, both sides are busy inventing self-serving lies-to-authority figures and acting insanely offended if I question their stories in any detail, forcing me to spend long minutes trying to get anything like a straight answer out of them, and odds are the more a given child had to do with starting the trouble, the shiftier and more defensive they'll be about letting me know the truth.

So am I supposed to somehow step in, figure out what happened, with kids that 80-90% of the time I don't even know, identify the troublemaker/bully, arrange for him to be punished, despite the fact that the odds are good I didn't even personally witness some very important parts of the whole affair?

Give me a break. While I'm doing all this, who's supposed to teach?

And that, unfortunately, is why schools cannot (even though most adults in the building would secretly like to) enforce real justice on all the kids who pick on other kids, and kids who push each other and harass each other, and who tend to single out certain individuals for extra pushing and harassing. We don't have the manpower to play Sherlock Holmes to every case that comes up, not and teach at the same time.

Zero tolerance sucks and is insane, but it's downright farcical to put one adult per twenty children in a building, then expect all those adults to do responsible full time jobs, and simultaneously expect them to dispense finely metered justice so that bullies can be reliably, effectively punished.

There's a trick that we're missing if we want it to happen; I wish I knew what it was.

[mr friendly guy]

I am not too sure I find Simon Jester's example the norm. There are times when its blatantly obvious who was at fault.

Case in point

1. There was a case when I was in high school of a gay kid suing NSW education for failing to protect him from bullies. Australian 60 minutes filmed an incident where a homophobic fuckwits were calling him fa**ot right in front of the teacher who did jack and shit. Maybe American kids are just more sneaky than Australian kids, but in that case its pretty obvious who started what.

2. When I was a kid I hit some racist kid. I didn't know the word for racism then, but he was clearly teasing me. The teacher who finally came in had this to say about the situation.

Me : These guys are teasing me

Him : He hit me.

Teacher : I don't blame him.

Him. But he hit me.

Teacher : I don't blame him. Repeat these lines a few times

Seriously. If a kid is too god damn stupid to not even bother and try to pretend he wasn't the instigator, you don't deserve to be taken sympathetically, and its not a question of who to believe.

[Simon_Jester]

I am not too sure I find Simon Jester's example the norm. There are times when its blatantly obvious who was at fault.

I'm not saying it's the norm, it is sometimes blatantly obvious who did what.

If the teacher realizes there's a serious incident going on they should always, always act to break it up. The problem is punishing people effectively. I'm being quite frank here, the majority of the time (not all the time) I have no goddamn clue who started a given incident. Unless I do literally nothing but monitor student behavior, I have to guess on the basis of which of the kids is the biggest troublemaker... and there are profoundly obvious problems with that approach when you're trying to act justly.

Case in point

1. There was a case when I was in high school of a gay kid suing NSW education for failing to protect him from bullies. Australian 60 minutes filmed an incident where a homophobic fuckwits were calling him fa**ot right in front of the teacher who did jack and shit. Maybe American kids are just more sneaky than Australian kids, but in that case its pretty obvious who started what.

Teacher hears it, teacher should be breaking it up. A teacher might outright miss a kid calling another kid a homophobic slur once, but not repeatedly.

In that case, there's no question about who provoked it because the rules are really clear on that, and because it's the 'aggressor' (for lack of a better word) who is clearly choosing to use the slur.

The problem is that it's relatively easy to find the guilty party in that case. Much harder to do it when it's one voice in a crowd.

2. When I was a kid I hit some racist kid. I didn't know the word for racism then, but he was clearly teasing me. The teacher who finally came in had this to say about the situation.
Me : These guys are teasing me
Him : He hit me.
Teacher : I don't blame him.
Him. But he hit me.
Teacher : I don't blame him. Repeat these lines a few times
Seriously. If a kid is too god damn stupid to not even bother and try to pretend he wasn't the instigator, you don't deserve to be taken sympathetically, and its not a question of who to believe.

I get that. My point is that your memories of specific instances from childhood or high-profile national scandals notwithstanding, this is why there's an issue. With a handful of exceptions for asinine teachers who are themselves homophobes or racists or whatever, no educator wants their students bullied... this does not mean they can reliably dispense finely metered and appropriate punishment on the bullies, reliably enough to make the bullies stop.

If it were easy, we'd already be doing it.

[Highlord Laan]

Heaven forfbid the faculty actually listen to repeated complaints about the same handful of students, or take some interest as to why there's only a few students that are miserable, hiding, introverted and avoid contact with the rest of the student body and wonder whats wrong.

You seem to be a decent teacher Simon. Most of those I remember were more interested in not making waves for the varsity team and their hangers on than actually doing their jobs.

[Simon_Jester]

Heaven forfbid the faculty actually listen to repeated complaints about the same handful of students,

Mine does. Expelling students is actually hard, though, because, well. Leave No Child Behind while Racing to the Top and all that...

If it's any consolation we have trouble getting rid of the kids who do things like punch the principal, too.

or take some interest as to why there's only a few students that are miserable, hiding, introverted and avoid contact with the rest of the student body and wonder whats wrong.

It's sometimes trickier than you might think to even spot that, because you're observing student interactions from an altitude of thirty thousand feet, so to speak. You really do have to spend most of your time on the job doing things other than monitoring their social development.

While there are people at the school responsible for monitoring students' social and mental well-being (guidance counselors, school psychologist(s)...), those people have very large caseloads and the nature of their routine duties mean they spend most of their time sitting in an office waiting for kids to come to them.

It was obvious to me that I was psychologically withdrawn from my classmates in high school. I'm not sure anyone else at the school even knew that I was, let alone inquired as to why (in my case, not bullying).

In many cases, students who need help are actively evasive,* too, which doesn't help. They either feel bad about 'snitching,' or they fear it themselves. Or (my biggest teeth-gritter) they're so used to being withdrawn and hiding their problems from adults that they don't even bother to consider that anyone might be willing to help them. Instead they wait for help to fall into their laps, and when nobody knows to give it to them they decide adults are useless.

We'd need a whole separate, parallel staff devoted to social development and 'babysitting' duties to monitor the kids this way, and while I think that's a pretty good idea, it's certainly not the norm.

*As in: "How are you?" "Fine." as opposed to "How are you?" "Dodging angry teenagers with knuckledusters, thank you for asking!"

You seem to be a decent teacher Simon. Most of those I remember were more interested in not making waves for the varsity team and their hangers on than actually doing their jobs.

I think your opinion on this subject may be distorted, because of your assumption that the reality perceived by those teachers matches up with the reality you knew was taking place.

Can you find teachers who are knowingly complicit in a culture of bullying? Yes. But I think it reasonable from my own experiences to claim that the majority of teachers would make bullying stop if they could... and yet bullying persists. If the problem were easy to solve it would already be solved, even if a substantial minority of adults in schools didn't care.

[Siege]

If schools are set up in such a fashion that teachers cannot reasonably expect to stop bullying that to me means those schools are failing flagrantly in their in loco parentis duties, which means the problem goes beyond bullying (itself a damned serious problem) into total organizational dysfunctionality territory.

Offering students a safe environment to learn in is the absolute minimum any school should offer. If they can't even consistently do that then frankly it's better to shut the whole thing down and start over again. Bullying is a problem that's been well known for decades if not longer; if the system still hasn't managed to fix it then clearly the system isn't working the way it should.

Let's face it, why are we delivering kids to organizations that apparently can't even stop them from being regularly harassed again? We wouldn't accept a fire department that regularly fails to show up to put out a major fire for no apparent reason, would we? That would be crazy. We can't just let houses burn down for no good reason. Well, the educational equivalent should be just as unacceptable.

Now I'm not saying teachers bear the brunt of the blame for the failure to stop bullying but one way or the other they're still part of a dysfunctional system. And if I were a parent and you were to give me this thirty thousand feet spiel then my response would be along the lines of, why the fuck am I trusting you with my kid again, when you're apparently this far removed from their situation?

[Simon_Jester]

If schools are set up in such a fashion that teachers cannot reasonably expect to stop bullying that to me means those schools are failing flagrantly in their in loco parentis duties, which means the problem goes beyond bullying (itself a damned serious problem) into total organizational dysfunctionality territory.

I am honestly inclined to agree.

The heart of the problem, in my opinion, is that the school's duty splits into two very different missions: one is education, the other is... I honestly don't know what to call it, it's mostly dealing with children with behavioral problems, and it's somewhere between babysitting and animal control.

As long as you expect the school to take whoever is sent there, give them minimal latitude to say "no, this child is harming the education of the other children, get them the hell out," and do not provide a large dedicated staff responsible specifically for student behavior, the situation is going to be a mess. This is not an American problem either, in my opinion; it's not like bullying is unique to US public schools.

Certain specific schools for kids with behavior problems do maintain a strong infrastructure for controlling behavior. The trouble is, that's money not being spent on academics, and if there's any budget pressure on a typical school, non-academic subjects get cut faster.

Now I'm not saying teachers bear the brunt of the blame for the failure to stop bullying but one way or the other they're still part of a dysfunctional system. And if I were a parent and you were to give me this thirty thousand feet spiel then my response would be along the lines of, why the fuck am I trusting you with my kid again, when you're apparently this far removed from their situation?

I quite agree.

On the other hand, I could equally well ask the parents: do you make a serious attempt to know what your child's life is like at school? Does your child cooperate with your efforts to understand their life? Are they hiding things from you? Are you sure, because a lot of kids hide stuff from their parents. And if they can hide things from you, you who literally own the roof over their head, the bed they sleep in, the clothes they wear and the food they eat... how the hell am I supposed to figure this out?

And then I'd want to ask, do the parents of the bullies have this kind of relationship with their child? Because in a lot of cases they are the ones who screwed up by raising their kids to act like a bunch of jackals. Thing is, somehow the state still expects me to educate them, even if the education I give them is purchased at the price of a huge opportunity cost in terms of the education (and sometimes the safety) of other children.

There's only so much I can do with kids who outnumber me twenty to one, when the parents can barely handle kids at a ratio of one to one.

I don't have easy answers, but the problem is a reality and calling me (or anyone else who does my job) incompetent or unmotivated for admitting it isn't going to help.

And yet that's the easy solution: to say "the teachers don't give a fuck." We've seen multiple people doing it in this thread alone. My response is: do you really believe that? Most people do give a fuck, but that doesn't make it automatically possible to police a population of notoriously ungoverned adolescents while simultaneously teaching complex topics.

Maybe what we really need to do is think about the role of 'teacher' and recognize that maybe trying to combine the roles of educator, role model, disciplinarian, frontline social worker, and volunteer after-school activity organizer into one human isn't working very well and never has. And that some of those roles quite simply must be split up among multiple people if they are going to get done properly.

[NeoGoomba]

Maybe what we really need to do is think about the role of 'teacher' and recognize that maybe trying to combine the roles of educator, role model, disciplinarian, frontline social worker, and volunteer after-school activity organizer into one human isn't working very well and never has. And that some of those roles quite simply must be split up among multiple people if they are going to get done properly.

This. One thousand times this. I see my students an hour per day. More if they are in one of my clubs, extras, or free blocks. And I know that what I provide for some of these students is hard pressed to compete with the other twenty-three hours of their day. It's their culture at home and within their peer groups that makes some of these students so toxic or otherwise detrimental to themselves and to others that they need more than just what I teach them in English, even though I try so damn hard to impart some sense of social and civic duty (for lack of a better term) while I teach. But I admit it's a little difficult sometimes to do that while teaching roots and prefixes.

These students are like Batman in the sense that they can't make it on their own within the school population. They require an army behind the scenes to function properly. And it seems that a lot of schools just aren't equipped to provide the support structures these kids need, such as psychologists, counselors, and social workers, for them to thrive in a school setting.

[Serafina]

Class teachers.
That is, teachers who stick with a single class for most of that classes time. Who are responsible for the social cohesion, issues and general well-being of that class.
In Germany we do that in a half-decent way for the first four years of school, where a single teacher can handle most classes. Once we need specialized teachers for more difficult subjects, the position still technically exists but is just a single teacher with extra responsibilities and no real extra time with the class except on school excursions and such.

A proposition i have heard a few times and could get really behind would be to simply have "class teachers" as a separate specialty and have them accompany the class to their periods. They could act as an assistant teacher to the teacher of whatever subject you have during that period, but also take over the social duties - prevent the classroom from erupting into chaos, keep an eye out for struggling students etc.
This would help compensate for growing class sizes, but also have the added benefit of having a teacher who is more in touch with their students than just seeing them for an hour a day and can thus actually tell whether an incident is part of a repeating pattern of bullying or an isolated case.

[General Zod]

Class teachers.
That is, teachers who stick with a single class for most of that classes time. Who are responsible for the social cohesion, issues and general well-being of that class.
In Germany we do that in a half-decent way for the first four years of school, where a single teacher can handle most classes. Once we need specialized teachers for more difficult subjects, the position still technically exists but is just a single teacher with extra responsibilities and no real extra time with the class except on school excursions and such.

A proposition i have heard a few times and could get really behind would be to simply have "class teachers" as a separate specialty and have them accompany the class to their periods. They could act as an assistant teacher to the teacher of whatever subject you have during that period, but also take over the social duties - prevent the classroom from erupting into chaos, keep an eye out for struggling students etc.
This would help compensate for growing class sizes, but also have the added benefit of having a teacher who is more in touch with their students than just seeing them for an hour a day and can thus actually tell whether an incident is part of a repeating pattern of bullying or an isolated case.

I bet they don't make active efforts to defund public schools in Germany and give teachers more students than they can reasonably deal with.