Respect

Thursdays are my long days. I get a 30 minute break and start the day with meetings. Unlike my other life where I could always leave to decompress a little, Thursday's are filled to the top with things to do. Today's topic was enforcement of school policies. We sat around and had the AP's explain to us why we needed to enforce the dress code and the rules. This meeting was only 30 minutes before we went to yet another meeting that was another 40 minutes about TAKS review (a topic for another time). One thing that I do not miss about the corporate world is the meetings. Every Thursday reminds me of the insane amount of time that I used to spend in meetings that happened at least 3 times a week.

 The problem with the meeting today was consistency. In the school world, consistency is important. If you are enforcing a rule that someone else does not you come out looking like the bad guy. Being fair and just every time grants you respect, but can lose you a lot if you are slack off just once. This happens quite a lot in schools. The kids do not like to wear their ID's and I make them wear them. After they leave my class they often take them off because their next teacher never checks. There are some rules that I disagree with, but that is not up to me nor is it up to a kid to bend or break that rule because it is outdated or is just unnecessary. I have told them before and will tell them in the future "if this rule inconveniences you so much then do something about it." Unfortunately apathy usually wins, and they just grumble under their breath.

 Authority is a tricky thing. I get authority by being respectful to the kids and by the position that I hold. Sometimes other teachers undermine my authority by not following the same rules as I do, but sometimes it is the assistant principals themselves that undermine the authority of the teacher. The AP's are suppose to safeguard that authority. If they are not willing to hand out the consequences for a rule that is broken then the rule becomes powerless. Follow through becomes important. Other teachers have turned in cell phones only to have the phone returned with little or no consequence.

We are sending a bad example if we are not consistent in our dealings with students. My profession is one of the few that really requires you to be at your best every single day, and consistent 100% of the time. We are all human and we may slack here and there, but a school and a society are made by the enforcement of the rules. Education parallels society in this case as in many others. As a society we have placed different levels of severity on the crime depending on the person. Stars get in trouble for drug possession all of the time, but the average person ends up going to jail for it. How many times has Lyndsey Lohan gotten in trouble with the law, and what would the average person have been put through by now? We send a message that the rules of society are negotiable. We lose sight of the fact that most of the time there was a good reason for that rule in the first place. If we do not like something we have the power to change it. Education parallels society, so it is paramount that we create an environment that is as consistent as possible and has avenues for change.

Until tomorrow,

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
-- Henry Brooks Adams