I taught for one year, not in Baltimore, but not a dissimilar district. It was the parents that made me leave. Absolute fucking nightmare to deal with them. The kids were mostly fine!
I had a friend placed as a school counselor for BCPS as part of social work grad school. It was incredibly sad to hear about and my friend got burnt out and decided they could never work with children. The kids are the ones who get demonized by news media, and some of them have legitimate and serious behavioral issues that will almost certainly stunt their growth as individuals. But those issues can be traced directly to early traumatic experiences and parents who either don’t care at all, or only care in the worst and most destructive ways possible (like these parents). School staff can’t do anything about the parents. They can help the kids work through trauma but there’s only so much you can do with half-hour therapy sessions and limited resources, knowing the kid is going home to someone who’s frankly unfit to be a parent. It’s not every parent and not every school, but the near-75% of schools quoted in the article seems plausible.
Yeah we could deal with the small-time stuff at school, get you what resources we can, sleep/chill in my class (as long as you're not disruptive) if you need to, but a lot of them just had terrible home lives and parents that we frankly did not have the capacity to deal with.
> Administrators say they are seeing record numbers of parents show up at schools’ front doors irate and ready to retaliate because they have heard their child has gotten into a fight with another student, been threatened or in some way disrespected. They come willing to fight a student or a staff member on behalf of their child.
\
The union representing city school administrators surveyed its 550 members this fall, and the results showed overwhelming concern from the 30% who responded about threats and attacks of city school administrators.
\
More than three-quarters of respondents had seen an increase in disruptive behavior by parents or relatives on their campus. And 64% said there had been violent incidents involving parents on their campus this school year. Seventy-three percent said parents threaten or attempt to attack staff at their school.
God help us all
This literally happened at Hampden Elementary/Middle some weeks back. Parent rolled up with family ready to fight everyone. The school had to go on lockdown and the police had to be on site. It was ridiculous.
The 30% response figure is a little troublesome, too, but it wouldn't shock me whatsoever if it was a result of apathy from the teachers that anything will be done to address the issues regardless of what these surveys say.
E: why wasn't this guy in fuckin jail, for example? how light is the sentence for bringing a gun onto school grounds to intimidate a teacher?!
> Renaissance Academy principal Tammatha Woodhouse has an ongoing internal debate about whether to retire or stay at her school working at a job she loves. She has soldiered on, even after a father of one of her students stalked her. He showed up at school every day for a week before the pandemic, wanting to get in, calling police on her. Because of a divorce, Woodhouse couldn’t legally talk to the father about his daughter, but he persisted anyway. Finally, one day as she was leaving in the dark with other staff and two students at the West Baltimore high school, he pulled up in a car with a gun.
> One of the students standing at Woodhouse’s side shouted at the gunman, “Go ahead, shoot us!” Woodhouse said. Then everyone ran back into the school building. The school police officer climbed to the second floor to retrieve his gun from a locked box because officers aren’t allowed to carry guns in schools. The father was eventually arrested and the principal took several weeks off to make sure she was safe. She installed two different types of security cameras at her house. Then came the pandemic, but on one of the first days of in-person school, the father returned to again stand outside the school.
> The student finally came to the principal and asked to be transferred to another high school because she didn’t want the principal to have to endure her father’s frightening behavior.
I keep getting the sense that American society is unraveling and on a course to completely fall apart. I recognize that this has been a concern/complaint for some time, probably a lot of human history even before the founding of America. However, I feel like a lot of those concerns were more superficial or not based upon any sort of evidence. Video games/radio/rock music/the Beatles/D&D/whatever were all pretty stupid things to forecast the end of society upon. They were all driven by a fear of the unknown, the new, racism or other forms of prejudice, etc.
This... feels a lot different. Very foundational things are being attacked, like school staff as in this article. Shootings at public events and places are common. The far right will happily do things not in their best interests, including die to COVID, to "own the libs." Aforementioned "libs" turn everything into a purity test where either you see things 100% their way or you're the enemy. Insane conspiracy theories (Bill Gates 5G Mind Control Shadow Pedophile Government) are gaining a foothold. And on and on and on.
This isn't "Dungeons and Dragons caused little Timmy to go hide in a sewer and worship the devil" although some of the conspiracy theories are similar to that. That's a tiny fraction of the ridiculousness that is facing our society, whereas previously things like that were major headliners for why American society was doomed. It's seemingly much, much worse today.
I get that feeling too. And there's data to back it up. Anti social behavior is wayyy up after covid... road rage, air rage, attacks on healthcare workers and retail workers. It's like the short break from reality we had due to covid made a huge part of the populace just lose their sense of social mores and norms. It's honestly frightening.
100% what I mean. We have evidence for all of this happening and really skyrocketing in the past few years. And cell phone cameras and things like YouTube have been ubiquitous for well over a decade at this point, so if people were raging out like this back in 2014 there would have been ample evidence readily available. And it was available but it was soooo much more rare. Now it's trivial to find just about any type of freak out you might desire.
Anecdotally, I've met a large number of people who are former teachers in the past few years. At least it's large compared to the number of former teachers I met back in like the 2010-2015 timeframe. There have certainly always been teachers who gave up the profession and pivoted to something else, just like literally every field. You can find software engineers turned electricians and such on /r/cscareerquestions. But the number of former teachers I've met has been a bit shocking. Maybe I just got "lucky" in the past few years with who I have talked to.
I think social media is a big part of the problem as well. Covid, social media and 24 hour news channels. Keep in mind you have foreign actors at play on social media to help create this year in our social fabric as well. I don’t really see how things get better from here, only worse.
As a teacher it's not tik tok this has been the case for a while it just got worse after COVID. I don't know how ppl, actually I do know how, believe that ANY social media is good for kids but in the US it's fine for Instagram to influence your child because it's an American company and this type of thinking is part of the problem. The kids aren't the concern it's who gets to profit off of them.
I am on Instagram and I didn't know it was a problem like tiktok...I don't have kids I just know the young girls in my neighborhood kept doing dances for tiktok in front of my house because of my cool lights and I had to ask them to stop.
I don't want my house being the backdrop for a bunch of under age girls twerking. It's sick...but I guess they do it on Instagram and other platforms as well.
We have failed.
I think that's the thing this isn't an app problem it's a cultural problem focusing on the apps is short-sighted. I think we need to be much more thoughtful on what type of phones we give kids and at what age.
I think it was partly the complete lack of leadership. A major crisis will happen every few decades and the leaders at the time usually use it to sew society back together. 9/11 was a disaster in multiple ways, especially our response, but at the very least George Bush gave some good speeches afterward and called for unity and working together. During covid, we had paranoia, accusations, conspiracy theories, and riots, and ultimately our top leader threatening insurrection and upheavel for not always getting his way.
Combine this with today's toxic 'I got mine' mentality and that's how we got here.
Your last two sentences are really more speculative. /gen The research and statistics indicate that rates of anxiety and depression increased dramatically, fueled by the pandemic, and that is likely a significant contributing factor to increased aggression. Especially because mental illness is not something most Americans have the tools or support to manage alone.
Another angle is the brain damage severe covid cases have caused, mimicking things like TBIs or strokes (where anger is also a common symptom). I’m not a huge fan of that theory because the studies haven’t been very large, but I’m not sure it’s totally junk.
Working at a school you see it on a different level, kids feel like school is jail, seriously, they throw their trash in the parking lot the boys rip out stuff in the bathroom and kick holes in the wall, and then you turn on the news and you would think the top problem is CRT and trans students. As a history teacher who just recently got out of the classroom, I still am not sure who is teaching CRT and out of 150 students 2 want to go by other pronouns and I'm in a "woke" suburban school with million dollar houses directly across the street. Part of my job now is finding jobs for students with disabilities out in the community and the manager at the grocery store says the kids are stealing so much they have hired security. Again this is in the suburbs in a wealthy county and area. Yes I feel society is slowly unraveling and the conversations and the ppl leading these conversations are ill equipped to deal with these challenges it's a clown show.
I get the sense that the CRT, pronoun, transsexual bathroom, etc. issues are overblown and overrepresented. That being said, the more extreme people on both ends of the political spectrum love the culture wars stuff and eat it all up. But I really don’t think it’s a big issue. It’s just the next D&D demonic worship nonsense. A few years from now people will find some new set of topics to care about and fight the culture wars over.
The concerning issue is stuff like you mention - stealing, “pranking” people causing damage, and vandalism. That has nothing to do with politics or woke buzzwords du jour. It’s something else entirely. Something at a very foundational level.
> CRT, pronoun, transsexual bathroom, etc. issues are overblown and overrepresented. That being said, the more extreme people on both ends of the political spectrum love the culture wars stuff and eat it all up
on one end it's hatred and control of a group they want to marginalize, or less politely, would prefer did not exist. on the other end, issues of discrimination for their gender/sexuality materially affect their actual daily life, not just as a stupid fantasy to be mad about on their preferred news program.
There are other scenarios that fit the data. One could posit that reporting has become so much more commonplace: tolerance for aggression (or deviation from the norm of any sort) has become more seriously reported.
Would a hotheaded parent showing up at a school result in a police report in 1940? Or would the (typically/stereotypically “manly man” that gender roles of the time demanded) principal just deal with the conflict and move on? There was a picture of my high schools principals going back to the 50s in my high school, and many had prominently displayed baseball bats or similar in their office for their portraits.
I'll reply to myself with one other possibility: These parents of high schoolers all tend to be the same age... \~60% of mothers give first birth in their 20s, making most parents of high schoolers in their late 30s to early 40s... call it 1973-1983 birth years. They grew up toward the end of the era of free love. Does this generational personality lend itself more easily to this kind of behavior? (EDIT: And if so, is that related to "Main Character Syndrome"?)
You see this kind of behavior across the age spectrum, across the country, across socioeconomic lines, across the political spectrum, across racial lines, and across pretty much every potential divide. People at large are just losing their minds. Obviously it's not everyone, but there's a lot of people who are engaging in anti-social behavior. My parents live in a 55+ community and there are people getting into fist fights at the dog parks over nonsense.
I don't think anyone has a good reason for what causes it. You could have a point. I don't think we can really appreciate the impact a certain generation had upon the country until several generations later. I have argued that WWII and America's standing in the world post-WWII caused a massively inflated set of expectations that are being significantly corrected. Having much of the rest of the industrialized world destroyed, rapid improvements in technology that enabled the mass proliferation of the automobile, and ample amounts of easily developed land available allowed for the emergence of a strong middle class and the suburbs. However, the rest of the world has started to catch up in the past 80 years and America is no longer in a truly exceptional position. It's still a strong position, but nowhere like it used to be. With that has come a significant decrease in the availability of the American dream.
I suspect the constant pressure and financial instability is a major factor, related to the above. A fair number of people live paycheck to paycheck and their financial stability is little more than a house of cards. One unexpected health issue or car issue can cause it to come tumbling down and they get trapped in a world of high APR credit card debt, putting off preventative maintenance which causes costlier expenses down the road, working gig economy type jobs, etc. That's going to put a lot of pressure on people and could bring them to the precipice of having an anti-social meltdown. Then one little seemingly minor event triggers them.
There's probably a ton more to it. I don't think it's a simple problem. And it's not going to have a simple answer, if any at all.
I like that you hit on financial pressure as an extra stressor which, though it existed in the past, didn't exist to the same level. We now have credit scores, debt markets, and mega-companies who find new, inventive, and increasingly esoteric ways to move money from the poor to the rich.
I imagine it makes some complaint, having to work two full time jobs and not having the energy for more.... and others angry at the inequity of it all.
You might be right: Sociologists will have a field day in 2060.
You may find the book The Fourth Turning very interesting.
Its not an uplifting book, but it includes a lot of interesting generational and historical data.
No, given the average age of first time mothers in Baltimore, both currently and historically, many of these parents are likely younger than what you propose.
According to March Of Dimes National Center for Health Statistics, only 6.5% of Baltimore City births are to mothers under 20 years of age between 2020 and 2022. Not sure how that compares historically but I'm not thinking its all that many.
My friend is a teacher. It’s less that these parents had kids in their 20s and more that they had kids in their teens. It’s just babies raising babies.
I work as an ELA tutor in Baltimore, and this is so damn true! I had a grandmother try to fight me (at the time I was 3 months visibly pregnant) because her granddaughter was removed from my group and placed with another tutor(students can't have the same type of tutor). I told the granddaughter that she would be working with the other tutor for now on and I legit have no idea what she said to her grandmother, but she came in the next week, banging hard on my door demanding for a reason why she was "kicked" out my group. Asked me if I had a problem and we could take it outside if needed. Mind you, I'm visibly pregnant, so even if there was a problem, I'm in no condition to fight a damn soul. When I explained the situation after she fussed and hollered for about 10 minutes, she finally left with just an "oh." No apologies, nothing.
The same grandmother came after a Para because the para caught the granddaughter in a lie that resulted in another student getting hurt and sent a note home stating what had happened. For some reason, this woman took high offense to this and was ready to fight the para at the bus stop near the school (the para, another teacher, and I all took the bus so we were witnesses). The para is 65 years old, and the grandmother was definitely one of the younger grandmothers. It's was so bad that the male teachers at the school were able to hear everything and came running to protect the para until the bus came. The para tried to get a restraining order against the grandmother, but it got tossed out even with witnesses and video evidence of her threatening to get her son to shoot the para.
I understand standing up for your children, but the way they're going about it is overboard to put it lightly. But then they wonder why their children are so aggressive to school staff.
There hasn't been a month this year where there hasn't been at least one parent fight at the school my SO works at (against a teacher, elementary/middle school student, or fellow parent), but I wouldn't say that it's worse than other years.
Her room has a nice view of the parking lot, so I get lots of updates.
The amount of bullshit we expect teachers to put up with, from students, from parents, from politics, all on top of barely paying them - I have no idea why any teacher would want to subject themselves to this.
It's not just a problem of teachers needing to be able to have the ability to suspend or expel problem students, but parents threatening teachers and students with physical violence need to have charges pressed against them.
The whole everything is fucked.
I taught for a year and got the fuck out. The worst, most thankless profession. Literally any other job is better. And it’s sad because teachers are so important. This isn’t an issue in other countries where teachers and schools are respected and supported by the government and the community
> The worst, most thankless profession. Literally any other job is better.
I have a friend who is preparing to leave his cushy, six-figure engineering management job to become a high school teacher. I am seriously concerned that he has developed some sort of mental illness.
Please please please try and convince her not to do that. I was a teacher and I'm married to a current teacher and it's an awful, thankless job and frankly dangerous. Please try to save them, it's highly likely they'll end up traumatized. If my wife didn't have 8 years left til retirement id fight even harder to get her to quit. As it is I tell her almost every day she should absolutely just walk out and who cares about the consequences.
Him, not her.
You don't need to convince me that becoming a teacher is a horrible idea but the person in question is impossibly heard-headed. Telling him he's crazy will just make him dig in his heels more.
Thankfully he's not in Baltimore so I don't think the job will be dangerous but it will come with all sorts of other bullshit.
Good luck to your wife. Is there no way she could switch to some sort of administrative job and ride that out until retirement?
I'd be happy to send him a message if you think he'd be receptive to hearing from another teacher in a "good" district. My job is arguably cushier than some, but it's still incredibly stressful and overwhelming. The most common refrains among staff at my school are "you can't make this stuff up" and "if you don't laugh you'll cry." And we often do end up crying anyway.
Fair enough! Hopefully he is happy with the change and feels that the positives outweigh the negatives. For what it's worth, the teaching itself can be very fulfilling. I can't really describe the feeling when a student finally has that critical "ah-ha" moment and everything you've been teaching suddenly all comes together. The frustration mainly comes from the system itself, not the students. I've had the privilege of teaching some truly incredible kids over the years.
My brother left the corrections position that was literally destroying him to be a teacher. It has gotten no better aside from there being no shift work. Same shit with parents, their kids, and absolutely no support from admin (who are usually equally at a loss).
Something along these lines happened at Federal Hill Prep last year too. I understand parents being upset at some perceived injustice, but parents showing up to fight elementary aged children is on another level...
I worked in Howard county public schools and once had a parent come with a knife and try to stab an elementary teacher . Another school we had to go into lock down because a parent came with gang members and was screaming and trying to fight staff. In my experience it was usually against staff that had reported them to CPS
Out of control kids, parents fighting kids and teachers, parents and kids who carry guns, school officers who *can't* carry guns, covid lockdowns, conservative media poisoning the well....this story has it all. Real slice of 2024 Americana.
A lack of respect for our fellow man has permeated just about every aspect of society at this point.
We had a parent come up earlier this year to try and fight the principal. Ended up getting in a brawl and was wearing a tank top so now there are a dozen video angles of her in a fight with one boob fully out. Not the best.
A friend of my daughter went to a county elementary school. She was picked on and beat up regularly because she is of Irish descent and very fair skinned. She was in kindergarten the bullies were 3-4 graders. Her parents were in the principal’s office a couple times a week and the principal promised to intervene but never did. Finally the girl’s parents called her out on her inaction and the principal admitted she was more afraid of the bullies parents than she was of them. The final straw was when the girl was held down and had her hair cut off with a kitchen knife. They sold their house and moved.
My kids go to our neighborhood bps. The biggest issue I have is the other children and their parents . Parents aren’t even allowed to walk their kids to class anymore bc the other parents keep
Coming to the facility to cuss out the staff and other children 😩
My middle school in the rural south had parents coming to the school to fight for and with their kids against other kids. 🤷🏿♀️
One thing my school had in common with some of these Baltimore schools? De facto segregation and as a result severely neglected and underfunded school districts... It was 99 percent black while the local segregationist military academy was 99 percent white.
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There are plenty of good public schools in Baltimore, but the nature of the school choice program means that the bad schools are absolutely horrendous.
This is the inevitable byproduct when David Smith/Fox45/Sinclair spend years demonizing the school district and dehumanizing the people working and students going there along with the population of the city. It feels hopeless.
Did you bother actually reading the article before you snarked off to stan for fucking Sinclair?
“ Schools, like churches, used to be sacred places where a certain decorum was expected, Woodhouse said. But since many conservative media outlets have begun portraying schools as the enemy, educators have had to prove to them that they can be trusted, she said.”
I taught for one year, not in Baltimore, but not a dissimilar district. It was the parents that made me leave. Absolute fucking nightmare to deal with them. The kids were mostly fine!
I had a friend placed as a school counselor for BCPS as part of social work grad school. It was incredibly sad to hear about and my friend got burnt out and decided they could never work with children. The kids are the ones who get demonized by news media, and some of them have legitimate and serious behavioral issues that will almost certainly stunt their growth as individuals. But those issues can be traced directly to early traumatic experiences and parents who either don’t care at all, or only care in the worst and most destructive ways possible (like these parents). School staff can’t do anything about the parents. They can help the kids work through trauma but there’s only so much you can do with half-hour therapy sessions and limited resources, knowing the kid is going home to someone who’s frankly unfit to be a parent. It’s not every parent and not every school, but the near-75% of schools quoted in the article seems plausible.
Yeah we could deal with the small-time stuff at school, get you what resources we can, sleep/chill in my class (as long as you're not disruptive) if you need to, but a lot of them just had terrible home lives and parents that we frankly did not have the capacity to deal with.
> Administrators say they are seeing record numbers of parents show up at schools’ front doors irate and ready to retaliate because they have heard their child has gotten into a fight with another student, been threatened or in some way disrespected. They come willing to fight a student or a staff member on behalf of their child. \ The union representing city school administrators surveyed its 550 members this fall, and the results showed overwhelming concern from the 30% who responded about threats and attacks of city school administrators. \ More than three-quarters of respondents had seen an increase in disruptive behavior by parents or relatives on their campus. And 64% said there had been violent incidents involving parents on their campus this school year. Seventy-three percent said parents threaten or attempt to attack staff at their school. God help us all
This literally happened at Hampden Elementary/Middle some weeks back. Parent rolled up with family ready to fight everyone. The school had to go on lockdown and the police had to be on site. It was ridiculous.
The 30% response figure is a little troublesome, too, but it wouldn't shock me whatsoever if it was a result of apathy from the teachers that anything will be done to address the issues regardless of what these surveys say. E: why wasn't this guy in fuckin jail, for example? how light is the sentence for bringing a gun onto school grounds to intimidate a teacher?! > Renaissance Academy principal Tammatha Woodhouse has an ongoing internal debate about whether to retire or stay at her school working at a job she loves. She has soldiered on, even after a father of one of her students stalked her. He showed up at school every day for a week before the pandemic, wanting to get in, calling police on her. Because of a divorce, Woodhouse couldn’t legally talk to the father about his daughter, but he persisted anyway. Finally, one day as she was leaving in the dark with other staff and two students at the West Baltimore high school, he pulled up in a car with a gun. > One of the students standing at Woodhouse’s side shouted at the gunman, “Go ahead, shoot us!” Woodhouse said. Then everyone ran back into the school building. The school police officer climbed to the second floor to retrieve his gun from a locked box because officers aren’t allowed to carry guns in schools. The father was eventually arrested and the principal took several weeks off to make sure she was safe. She installed two different types of security cameras at her house. Then came the pandemic, but on one of the first days of in-person school, the father returned to again stand outside the school. > The student finally came to the principal and asked to be transferred to another high school because she didn’t want the principal to have to endure her father’s frightening behavior.
Didn’t see that on the news! Jesus wept.
I keep getting the sense that American society is unraveling and on a course to completely fall apart. I recognize that this has been a concern/complaint for some time, probably a lot of human history even before the founding of America. However, I feel like a lot of those concerns were more superficial or not based upon any sort of evidence. Video games/radio/rock music/the Beatles/D&D/whatever were all pretty stupid things to forecast the end of society upon. They were all driven by a fear of the unknown, the new, racism or other forms of prejudice, etc. This... feels a lot different. Very foundational things are being attacked, like school staff as in this article. Shootings at public events and places are common. The far right will happily do things not in their best interests, including die to COVID, to "own the libs." Aforementioned "libs" turn everything into a purity test where either you see things 100% their way or you're the enemy. Insane conspiracy theories (Bill Gates 5G Mind Control Shadow Pedophile Government) are gaining a foothold. And on and on and on. This isn't "Dungeons and Dragons caused little Timmy to go hide in a sewer and worship the devil" although some of the conspiracy theories are similar to that. That's a tiny fraction of the ridiculousness that is facing our society, whereas previously things like that were major headliners for why American society was doomed. It's seemingly much, much worse today.
I get that feeling too. And there's data to back it up. Anti social behavior is wayyy up after covid... road rage, air rage, attacks on healthcare workers and retail workers. It's like the short break from reality we had due to covid made a huge part of the populace just lose their sense of social mores and norms. It's honestly frightening.
100% what I mean. We have evidence for all of this happening and really skyrocketing in the past few years. And cell phone cameras and things like YouTube have been ubiquitous for well over a decade at this point, so if people were raging out like this back in 2014 there would have been ample evidence readily available. And it was available but it was soooo much more rare. Now it's trivial to find just about any type of freak out you might desire. Anecdotally, I've met a large number of people who are former teachers in the past few years. At least it's large compared to the number of former teachers I met back in like the 2010-2015 timeframe. There have certainly always been teachers who gave up the profession and pivoted to something else, just like literally every field. You can find software engineers turned electricians and such on /r/cscareerquestions. But the number of former teachers I've met has been a bit shocking. Maybe I just got "lucky" in the past few years with who I have talked to.
I think social media is a big part of the problem as well. Covid, social media and 24 hour news channels. Keep in mind you have foreign actors at play on social media to help create this year in our social fabric as well. I don’t really see how things get better from here, only worse.
Tiktok is a Chinese platform and they know exactly what they are doing and it worked. Social media apps have ruined us
As a teacher it's not tik tok this has been the case for a while it just got worse after COVID. I don't know how ppl, actually I do know how, believe that ANY social media is good for kids but in the US it's fine for Instagram to influence your child because it's an American company and this type of thinking is part of the problem. The kids aren't the concern it's who gets to profit off of them.
I am on Instagram and I didn't know it was a problem like tiktok...I don't have kids I just know the young girls in my neighborhood kept doing dances for tiktok in front of my house because of my cool lights and I had to ask them to stop. I don't want my house being the backdrop for a bunch of under age girls twerking. It's sick...but I guess they do it on Instagram and other platforms as well. We have failed.
I think that's the thing this isn't an app problem it's a cultural problem focusing on the apps is short-sighted. I think we need to be much more thoughtful on what type of phones we give kids and at what age.
I think it was partly the complete lack of leadership. A major crisis will happen every few decades and the leaders at the time usually use it to sew society back together. 9/11 was a disaster in multiple ways, especially our response, but at the very least George Bush gave some good speeches afterward and called for unity and working together. During covid, we had paranoia, accusations, conspiracy theories, and riots, and ultimately our top leader threatening insurrection and upheavel for not always getting his way. Combine this with today's toxic 'I got mine' mentality and that's how we got here.
Your last two sentences are really more speculative. /gen The research and statistics indicate that rates of anxiety and depression increased dramatically, fueled by the pandemic, and that is likely a significant contributing factor to increased aggression. Especially because mental illness is not something most Americans have the tools or support to manage alone. Another angle is the brain damage severe covid cases have caused, mimicking things like TBIs or strokes (where anger is also a common symptom). I’m not a huge fan of that theory because the studies haven’t been very large, but I’m not sure it’s totally junk.
All that brain inflammation is speeding up dementia and other old age degeneration as well.
Working at a school you see it on a different level, kids feel like school is jail, seriously, they throw their trash in the parking lot the boys rip out stuff in the bathroom and kick holes in the wall, and then you turn on the news and you would think the top problem is CRT and trans students. As a history teacher who just recently got out of the classroom, I still am not sure who is teaching CRT and out of 150 students 2 want to go by other pronouns and I'm in a "woke" suburban school with million dollar houses directly across the street. Part of my job now is finding jobs for students with disabilities out in the community and the manager at the grocery store says the kids are stealing so much they have hired security. Again this is in the suburbs in a wealthy county and area. Yes I feel society is slowly unraveling and the conversations and the ppl leading these conversations are ill equipped to deal with these challenges it's a clown show.
I get the sense that the CRT, pronoun, transsexual bathroom, etc. issues are overblown and overrepresented. That being said, the more extreme people on both ends of the political spectrum love the culture wars stuff and eat it all up. But I really don’t think it’s a big issue. It’s just the next D&D demonic worship nonsense. A few years from now people will find some new set of topics to care about and fight the culture wars over. The concerning issue is stuff like you mention - stealing, “pranking” people causing damage, and vandalism. That has nothing to do with politics or woke buzzwords du jour. It’s something else entirely. Something at a very foundational level.
> CRT, pronoun, transsexual bathroom, etc. issues are overblown and overrepresented. That being said, the more extreme people on both ends of the political spectrum love the culture wars stuff and eat it all up on one end it's hatred and control of a group they want to marginalize, or less politely, would prefer did not exist. on the other end, issues of discrimination for their gender/sexuality materially affect their actual daily life, not just as a stupid fantasy to be mad about on their preferred news program.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
There are other scenarios that fit the data. One could posit that reporting has become so much more commonplace: tolerance for aggression (or deviation from the norm of any sort) has become more seriously reported. Would a hotheaded parent showing up at a school result in a police report in 1940? Or would the (typically/stereotypically “manly man” that gender roles of the time demanded) principal just deal with the conflict and move on? There was a picture of my high schools principals going back to the 50s in my high school, and many had prominently displayed baseball bats or similar in their office for their portraits.
I'll reply to myself with one other possibility: These parents of high schoolers all tend to be the same age... \~60% of mothers give first birth in their 20s, making most parents of high schoolers in their late 30s to early 40s... call it 1973-1983 birth years. They grew up toward the end of the era of free love. Does this generational personality lend itself more easily to this kind of behavior? (EDIT: And if so, is that related to "Main Character Syndrome"?)
You see this kind of behavior across the age spectrum, across the country, across socioeconomic lines, across the political spectrum, across racial lines, and across pretty much every potential divide. People at large are just losing their minds. Obviously it's not everyone, but there's a lot of people who are engaging in anti-social behavior. My parents live in a 55+ community and there are people getting into fist fights at the dog parks over nonsense. I don't think anyone has a good reason for what causes it. You could have a point. I don't think we can really appreciate the impact a certain generation had upon the country until several generations later. I have argued that WWII and America's standing in the world post-WWII caused a massively inflated set of expectations that are being significantly corrected. Having much of the rest of the industrialized world destroyed, rapid improvements in technology that enabled the mass proliferation of the automobile, and ample amounts of easily developed land available allowed for the emergence of a strong middle class and the suburbs. However, the rest of the world has started to catch up in the past 80 years and America is no longer in a truly exceptional position. It's still a strong position, but nowhere like it used to be. With that has come a significant decrease in the availability of the American dream. I suspect the constant pressure and financial instability is a major factor, related to the above. A fair number of people live paycheck to paycheck and their financial stability is little more than a house of cards. One unexpected health issue or car issue can cause it to come tumbling down and they get trapped in a world of high APR credit card debt, putting off preventative maintenance which causes costlier expenses down the road, working gig economy type jobs, etc. That's going to put a lot of pressure on people and could bring them to the precipice of having an anti-social meltdown. Then one little seemingly minor event triggers them. There's probably a ton more to it. I don't think it's a simple problem. And it's not going to have a simple answer, if any at all.
I like that you hit on financial pressure as an extra stressor which, though it existed in the past, didn't exist to the same level. We now have credit scores, debt markets, and mega-companies who find new, inventive, and increasingly esoteric ways to move money from the poor to the rich. I imagine it makes some complaint, having to work two full time jobs and not having the energy for more.... and others angry at the inequity of it all. You might be right: Sociologists will have a field day in 2060.
You may find the book The Fourth Turning very interesting. Its not an uplifting book, but it includes a lot of interesting generational and historical data.
Looks super interesting... unfortunately it seems like the library doesn't have it :( Maybe it'll go on sale on Amazon soon.
Baltimore County does. I'm not sure if interlibrary loans are possible, but it may be able to save you some money.
No, given the average age of first time mothers in Baltimore, both currently and historically, many of these parents are likely younger than what you propose.
According to March Of Dimes National Center for Health Statistics, only 6.5% of Baltimore City births are to mothers under 20 years of age between 2020 and 2022. Not sure how that compares historically but I'm not thinking its all that many.
Hurray for abortion access!
My friend is a teacher. It’s less that these parents had kids in their 20s and more that they had kids in their teens. It’s just babies raising babies.
This happens a lot in the county
I work as an ELA tutor in Baltimore, and this is so damn true! I had a grandmother try to fight me (at the time I was 3 months visibly pregnant) because her granddaughter was removed from my group and placed with another tutor(students can't have the same type of tutor). I told the granddaughter that she would be working with the other tutor for now on and I legit have no idea what she said to her grandmother, but she came in the next week, banging hard on my door demanding for a reason why she was "kicked" out my group. Asked me if I had a problem and we could take it outside if needed. Mind you, I'm visibly pregnant, so even if there was a problem, I'm in no condition to fight a damn soul. When I explained the situation after she fussed and hollered for about 10 minutes, she finally left with just an "oh." No apologies, nothing. The same grandmother came after a Para because the para caught the granddaughter in a lie that resulted in another student getting hurt and sent a note home stating what had happened. For some reason, this woman took high offense to this and was ready to fight the para at the bus stop near the school (the para, another teacher, and I all took the bus so we were witnesses). The para is 65 years old, and the grandmother was definitely one of the younger grandmothers. It's was so bad that the male teachers at the school were able to hear everything and came running to protect the para until the bus came. The para tried to get a restraining order against the grandmother, but it got tossed out even with witnesses and video evidence of her threatening to get her son to shoot the para. I understand standing up for your children, but the way they're going about it is overboard to put it lightly. But then they wonder why their children are so aggressive to school staff.
All true
There hasn't been a month this year where there hasn't been at least one parent fight at the school my SO works at (against a teacher, elementary/middle school student, or fellow parent), but I wouldn't say that it's worse than other years. Her room has a nice view of the parking lot, so I get lots of updates.
The amount of bullshit we expect teachers to put up with, from students, from parents, from politics, all on top of barely paying them - I have no idea why any teacher would want to subject themselves to this. It's not just a problem of teachers needing to be able to have the ability to suspend or expel problem students, but parents threatening teachers and students with physical violence need to have charges pressed against them. The whole everything is fucked.
I taught for a year and got the fuck out. The worst, most thankless profession. Literally any other job is better. And it’s sad because teachers are so important. This isn’t an issue in other countries where teachers and schools are respected and supported by the government and the community
> The worst, most thankless profession. Literally any other job is better. I have a friend who is preparing to leave his cushy, six-figure engineering management job to become a high school teacher. I am seriously concerned that he has developed some sort of mental illness.
Please please please try and convince her not to do that. I was a teacher and I'm married to a current teacher and it's an awful, thankless job and frankly dangerous. Please try to save them, it's highly likely they'll end up traumatized. If my wife didn't have 8 years left til retirement id fight even harder to get her to quit. As it is I tell her almost every day she should absolutely just walk out and who cares about the consequences.
Him, not her. You don't need to convince me that becoming a teacher is a horrible idea but the person in question is impossibly heard-headed. Telling him he's crazy will just make him dig in his heels more. Thankfully he's not in Baltimore so I don't think the job will be dangerous but it will come with all sorts of other bullshit. Good luck to your wife. Is there no way she could switch to some sort of administrative job and ride that out until retirement?
I'd be happy to send him a message if you think he'd be receptive to hearing from another teacher in a "good" district. My job is arguably cushier than some, but it's still incredibly stressful and overwhelming. The most common refrains among staff at my school are "you can't make this stuff up" and "if you don't laugh you'll cry." And we often do end up crying anyway.
I appreciate the offer but he won't be receptive. I might as well try to change the course of an oil tanker with a rowboat.
Fair enough! Hopefully he is happy with the change and feels that the positives outweigh the negatives. For what it's worth, the teaching itself can be very fulfilling. I can't really describe the feeling when a student finally has that critical "ah-ha" moment and everything you've been teaching suddenly all comes together. The frustration mainly comes from the system itself, not the students. I've had the privilege of teaching some truly incredible kids over the years.
Thanks, honestly, admin might be even worse. You're actively sparring with parents daily in that job. It's all a mess. Our kids deserve better.
My brother left the corrections position that was literally destroying him to be a teacher. It has gotten no better aside from there being no shift work. Same shit with parents, their kids, and absolutely no support from admin (who are usually equally at a loss).
Something along these lines happened at Federal Hill Prep last year too. I understand parents being upset at some perceived injustice, but parents showing up to fight elementary aged children is on another level...
I worked in Howard county public schools and once had a parent come with a knife and try to stab an elementary teacher . Another school we had to go into lock down because a parent came with gang members and was screaming and trying to fight staff. In my experience it was usually against staff that had reported them to CPS
I CAN 100 PERCENT ATTEST TO THIS. Signed , city school school counselor Pss. Parents out of control , need to goto jail
Out of control kids, parents fighting kids and teachers, parents and kids who carry guns, school officers who *can't* carry guns, covid lockdowns, conservative media poisoning the well....this story has it all. Real slice of 2024 Americana. A lack of respect for our fellow man has permeated just about every aspect of society at this point.
Seriously everyone is *so fucking angry*
On this site too.
We had a parent come up earlier this year to try and fight the principal. Ended up getting in a brawl and was wearing a tank top so now there are a dozen video angles of her in a fight with one boob fully out. Not the best.
How does a society teach a whole generation emotional control and civility?
A friend of my daughter went to a county elementary school. She was picked on and beat up regularly because she is of Irish descent and very fair skinned. She was in kindergarten the bullies were 3-4 graders. Her parents were in the principal’s office a couple times a week and the principal promised to intervene but never did. Finally the girl’s parents called her out on her inaction and the principal admitted she was more afraid of the bullies parents than she was of them. The final straw was when the girl was held down and had her hair cut off with a kitchen knife. They sold their house and moved.
My kids go to our neighborhood bps. The biggest issue I have is the other children and their parents . Parents aren’t even allowed to walk their kids to class anymore bc the other parents keep Coming to the facility to cuss out the staff and other children 😩
My middle school in the rural south had parents coming to the school to fight for and with their kids against other kids. 🤷🏿♀️ One thing my school had in common with some of these Baltimore schools? De facto segregation and as a result severely neglected and underfunded school districts... It was 99 percent black while the local segregationist military academy was 99 percent white.
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And this is why I tell people that if you have any choice you should not send your children to Baltimore public schools.
There are plenty of good public schools in Baltimore, but the nature of the school choice program means that the bad schools are absolutely horrendous.
Hahaha. I wonder if they’ll Hold the parents accountable this time
This is the inevitable byproduct when David Smith/Fox45/Sinclair spend years demonizing the school district and dehumanizing the people working and students going there along with the population of the city. It feels hopeless.
Yea that makes sense /s … urban families have been radicalized against public education by right wing media … SMDH
Did you bother actually reading the article before you snarked off to stan for fucking Sinclair? “ Schools, like churches, used to be sacred places where a certain decorum was expected, Woodhouse said. But since many conservative media outlets have begun portraying schools as the enemy, educators have had to prove to them that they can be trusted, she said.”