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Dangerous minds
By Doron Koren
Tags: Doron Koren, Education 

The bell rings, and you head down the hallway toward your classroom. Amid the cacophony of shouting, slammed doors, backslaps and frenzied running, it always seems like someone is about to crash into you, and sometimes he does. You enter the classroom.

Here in class, in a middle school in Bat Yam, the disruptions are multilayered. It starts with automatic, nonstop chatter. Chattering is the class's regular state of attention. If you have momentarily managed, with much effort, to get everyone's attention, before you know it your words will be swallowed back up by renewed chatter. If you hesitate just a little when speaking, or if you ask a student to answer a question or ask someone to read something aloud, or when one of the latecomers arrives and, as usual, takes his sweet time noisily sitting down, or if someone knocks on the door to make an announcement or take a few students out to work on some special project (there are loads of special projects in the school system), the chatter will immediately resume in the background and build up once again.

But this endless muttering is just the beginning. In most classrooms, and most of all in middle school classrooms, there is also shouting and yelling and singing in the middle of the lesson, slamming of the classroom door (one of the most common sounds), students getting up and wandering around while you're talking, wads of paper being tossed at students or at the trash can, students busying themselves with their cell phones, with eating or drinking, deliberately ignoring the teacher's calls for quiet, and responding aggressively. And almost always, automatic lying.
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"I swear I didn't throw anything," says an annoyed student who just now, right in front of your eyes, threw a balled-up wad of paper, and the student he threw it at backs him up.

"I'm shell-shocked," a young, idealistic student teacher told me after trying to give a few history lessons to half a class as part of his student teaching. A more experienced and assertive teacher talked about constant "Ninja battles" until quiet was achieved. A third teacher called it "chaos." During my time in the school, I witnessed, among other things, a student having his head slammed against the bars of a window and requiring medical attention for his nose, and a female student almost getting her face bashed by a door that had been forcefully kicked from the other side by a violent student. I went out and shouted at him; he didn't seem to care.

An ongoing problem

I went into teaching out of great love for the Bible and an inner conviction that without knowledge of this book of books, and a genuine love for it, there could be no spiritual remedy for the children of Israel. I wanted to work on a few things, such as teaching the students to read aloud, without mistakes, verses from the Bible. (Many of you may be unaware of this, but hardly any student in the school system today is capable of doing so).

In the end, I did manage some success in this area, not only in improving the students' reading level but also in opening them up to the Bible in a way they had never before experienced ("This is the first time the Bible has ever seemed interesting to us," an intelligent student, who was also one of the most disruptive, told me). I formed a very significant bond with more than a few students (and saved their letters). I'm not saying this to boast, but just to show that it is possible.

Since the last time I had taught, a decade ago, the discipline problem had increased greatly and become the most burning issue in the school system - to the point where it was practically preventing the entry of any information into the students' minds. The last time the subject made the headlines was in 1999, when a committee headed by MK Matan Vilnai submitted its recommendations for dealing with violence in schools. These recommendations were watered-down and cliche-ridden ("Every school must implement violence-prevention programs," "The Education Ministry must set procedures" and so on). Two years later, the "Students' Rights Law" was passed, exacerbating the situation: Instead of bolstering the disciplinary authority of the school staff, the law weakened it, and bolstered the authority of students and their parents to appeal and to sue.

And, contrary to the popular notion, the "level of the teachers" is not the main problem. Not by a long shot. At the school, I met very smart and dedicated teachers who were forced to contend daily with the Sisyphean burden resulting from the Education Ministry's failures. The Education Ministry is responsible for the bland and over-academicized curricula, for the hapless efforts to enforce discipline, for the misguided decisions regarding organization of the schools (such as shutting down the vocational, non-matriculation tracks; the Teachers' Organization did well to devote its recent education conference to this topic).

The ministry's responsibility stretches over many years and several education ministers (including Amnon Rubinstein, Limor Livnat and Yossi Sarid) as well as ministry director generals and a good number of district superintendents. Some of the director generals involved in the ongoing fiasco have returned for a second term (Shlomit Amihai) or even a third (Dr. Shimshon Shoshani, Minister Gideon Sa'ar's latest appointment). The Education Ministry is chiefly responsible for the negligent management of the system. For how else can one describe the steady degeneration in learning coupled with daily threats to the safety and well-being of both students and teachers? The ministry alone can repair the system, and this needn't be all that complicated.

Foolish rules

Some of the disruptions in some of the classes I taught mostly faded over time, but in almost every class a certain amount of chronic disruption remained, and there were several especially disruptive students who never seemed to calm down. It takes just three or four like that to continually affect the entire class: to bring down the mediocre and weaker students who could have learned something, but end up joining in the chaos; to make it next to impossible for the group of immigrants from Russia (some of whom knew no Hebrew at all) and for the quiet and intelligent Ethiopians, who came from a very different educational culture only to get caught up in the general chaos. All become captives of the disruptive student. As does the student himself.

And here we come to one of the most foolish rules that have made this situation possible: You are not allowed to remove a disruptive student from the class. By order of the Education Ministry. "Would you like me to show you the notice from the ministry director-general?" the principal asked when I went to her to inquire about this directive. The Education Ministry, which provides a budget for all kinds of artificial problems (such as the extensive system of special dispensations and assistance for "learning disabilities," when the real problem is teaching disabilities, which we shall come to shortly), does not provide a classroom or a teacher to whom disruptive students may be sent so that the rest of the class can learn, or a discipline coordinator who would take in the disruptive students and deal with whatever is going on with them, or at least ensure that whoever is removed from the classroom remains quietly by the door.

Not only can a student not be removed from the classroom, he cannot be removed from the school. In the name of a misguided principle that the Education Ministry calls "persistence," our schools keep on even the most severely disruptive or even disturbed students, the kind that any teacher in an overloaded classroom of 35-40 students can only relate to as a unbearable nuisance, thus locking them in to that condition and perpetuating it. Wild and violent students who harass others, who became more or less the nightmare of all the teachers, cannot be moved to a more suitable alternative framework in which they might actually succeed. Instead, they wander the classroom and the hallways, terrorizing others and accumulating grievances and developing criminal behavior. It's very bad for the teacher, it's very, very bad for the class, and it's especially bad for the student himself. But it's good for the Education Ministry's "persistence" statistics.

We're all academics

In essence, the prohibition against removing a student from the classroom is not only connected to the principle of "persistence," but also to a much more practical problem: There is nowhere to take them to. There are hardly any alternative frameworks available today. The vocational schools that once existed were drastically reduced in number following yet another reform instituted by the Education Ministry, which began with the recommendations of the Harari committee in the early 1990s and ended with the Dovrat committee in 2003, which also recommended doing away with vocational education in the old format.

"All students must receive an academic education," asserted committee member Prof. Victor Lavi. By "academic," he was referring to the ridiculously narrow range of material upon which students are tested in the matriculation exams.

Everyone got right on board with this: the professors who clearly hoped to increase the supply of students to their institutions; the parents, who got the message that nowadays you need an academic matriculation certificate; the Education Ministry, which enjoyed major savings in its budget (vocational education was about 65 percent more costly) and concurrently took up the banner of equality (in the form of a matriculation certificate) for all. The vocational educational networks themselves - Amal, ORT and others - also supported it, wanting to be seen as academic as everyone else, and they even petitioned the High Court on the matter.

So what if many students are not at all suited to this academic track, and the attempt to force it upon them is twisted and unjust? So what if industrialists like Stef Wertheimer have repeatedly decried the growing shortage of technicians in various fields as a result of this reform? The important thing is that now we're all academics.

And thus everyone has been trapped in this dubious academic track. And many have thereby lost a vocation, a craft that would convey importance and dignity. This calls to mind a saying of the Jewish Sages, which has been alternately attributed to Rabbi Yossi and to Maimonides, to the effect that any occupation in which expertise is attained in itself constitutes great wisdom. Meanwhile, most graduates of our academic matriculation track have no idea where their real strengths and interests lie or what they want to do with themselves after high school. They haven't obtained an education either. But they did take those matriculation exams.

What's left

The other disciplinary tool that has effectively been taken away from teachers is the authority to keep a student from being promoted to the next grade in the next school year, though it was never formally abrogated and can still be found in one of the old directives from the ministry director-general. Not that it's advisable to keep a student back; in most cases, a transfer to another school is preferable, more appropriate, and from this standpoint it's possible to see the justification of the Education Ministry in preventing the use of this tool, which can be very frustrating to the student and his parents. Still, it can be very effective in certain cases.

In tandem with the steady erosion of the recourses available to the educational staff, we have the Students' Rights Law. This arose from a child-centered ideology that was taken to such an extreme degree that it further weakened the teachers and the support provided to them by the system. Hence, for example, the Education Ministry forums before which the student and his parents can appeal a school-imposed penalty are closed to the school representative involved in the incident. In many cases, punishment decisions made by the school have been reversed. In one example, a student who slammed a door on a teacher's finger, cutting it off, was suspended from school; he returned very quickly following an appeal filed by his parents. Having witnessed up close how patient and maternal teachers can be, and how wary of taking harsh measures, I can easily understand how teachers feel like they've been abandoned in the field.

Oh yes, you can also require the students to wear a school uniform and to rise when the teacher enters the classroom (an idiotic and useless gesture). The effectiveness of these remaining disciplinary tactics may be gauged by the intensity of the students' disruptive behavior these days, which is tremendous.

Incidentally, most of the factors responsible for the deterioration of discipline are already well known within the education system: If you read the article by Rami Amitai, principle of a Kfar Sava high school and vice-president of the Principals' Association, in the latest edition of the Teachers' Association journal (Kesher Ayin, May 2009), you'll find that he lists many of the things mentioned here, plus more. On this issue, the new Education Minister would do very well to play close attention to what teachers have to say.

Lost in middle school

When this is the discipline situation, the built-in problems of the middle schools are also heightened. The 1968 reform that created middle schools aimed to increase social-ethnic integration and thereby prepare students for the more academic learning style of high school. In the years since, it has become apparent that this has not worked out as intended in terms of either education or discipline. The Dovrat Committee concluded (correctly, in this instance) that middle schools as a separate entity should be eliminated.

In Bat Yam, which was quite late in switching to the middle school system, having done so only in 2000, they now regret this move, as the coordinator of one of the grades at the school admitted to me. He said that there were significantly fewer discipline problems when the city's elementary schools continued through grade eight and the students went directly on to high school.

Because what really happened here? They took the seventh and eighth graders who were the oldest group in the elementary schools and made them newbies in middle school. They overturned the previous order and brought them to a chaotic place at a tumultuous and confusing time of adolescence, a place where discipline can hardly be enforced and where there is no set academic goal (such as the matriculation certificate, even with all of its aforementioned drawbacks). The study material students encountered here was much drier than what they were familiar with before: academic-style Bible studies instead of the brilliant Bible stories, a more academic approach to literature, difficult mathematics instead of straightforward arithmetic, hours of Arabic studies and more.

It was no surprise when one desperate mother, whom I had called because of her daughter's out-of-control behavior, told me she had no idea what had happened to the girl, that in elementary school she had been an excellent student and not at all a troublemaker. I believed her. And it's also no wonder that things generally calm down a little in ninth grade, when students face the threat of not being accepted into the high school's upper grades.

Teaching disabilities, not learning disabilities

Having said all this, it must also be said that dull study material is also a cause for classroom disruption. A bored student can also become a disruptive student. The tendency today is to locate the problem in the student and to call it an "attention disorder," the presumption being that there is something to pay attention to, and anyone who can't do so must have some kind of disorder. But often it's just no fun to pay attention, and the less patient, often quite intelligent students disconnect faster. Because they get bored faster. With good reason.

The increase in attention disorders and learning disabilities is seen across the spectrum of students. The root of these problems lies in the negligent teaching of language in elementary school. Let us recall: For decades now, we have been teaching reading and writing with the "whole language" method, another terrible American import, a method that ignored vowelization (nikud) and which taught the letters in a disorganized way. Behind this method was another foolish ideology that touted "natural learning" and "conjecture" and so on.

This method, which was essentially imposed upon the Education Ministry, has produced generations of students with reading and writing problems, who do not know how to properly pronounce a vowelized text and therefore cannot get at the root of the Hebrew or contend with Biblical verses or Hebrew poetry written with nikud. So, what we really have here is flawed teaching, rather than learning-disabled students. Only in recent years has the "whole language" method been officially dropped, though the teaching of the aleph-bet in first grade is still very problematic.

Not only that: In our schools, there are hardly any dictation drills to get the students to write with fewer mistakes (though it is still the practice in English classes); nor are students given writing assignments to improve their powers of written expression, or the opportunity to practice reciting aloud or learning passages by heart. In fact, in our schools, errors in writing, speech and reading are not corrected - thanks to another old directive from the Education Ministry, something to do with trying not to harm the students' self-esteem. An effort that has led to a steady reduction in the intellectual demands placed on them.

The whole culture of copying - students copying from one another, from the Internet, on tests - is an outgrowth of this nurturing of intellectual laziness. As is the whole culture of special dispensations that the education system has developed - a whole range of levels of dispensations and special considerations for students when they take exams, dispensations that are often bought with the money the parents have to pay the psychologist making the diagnosis, dispensations often given to students who in fact are thoroughly capable but will at some point start to think of themselves as limited.

One of my most talented eighth graders vehemently protested to me, after I asked the class to learn two verses by heart, that she could not do it because she had a learning disability when it came to memorization. This happened at the end of my time as her teacher, and unfortunately I didn't have the chance to show her that she was mistaken.

And we haven't even mentioned the whole Ritalin culture yet, which tries to obtain by means of medication what was not obtained by means of study material and rules of discipline - namely, the students' attention.

No mind for math

Nonetheless, the overemphasis on mathematics in middle school and high school, and the way it is imposed on the entire student body, is a serious mistake, too. A majority of students are not that interested in it and no scientist is about to blossom from among those who find math torturous. Contrary to popular belief, this kind of learning does not do much to sharpen a student's thinking, because only that which interests us sharpens and enriches our thinking. In short, math ought to be made an elective subject.

In fact, when you think about the standard high school curriculum, and what has already gone bad in it and what hasn't, it seems that only the relatively new theater, music and art tracks are still creative and foster intellectual development; it is in these tracks that you find many students who are genuinely passionate about their studies.

But these are all matters that require a broader discussion, and at this stage I would like to illustrate the overall principle via the subject I taught: Bible.

How I taught Bible

Here are a few of the concepts and topics I was supposed to teach in the ninth grade, according to the given curriculum (Try to imagine the students paying attention): exposition; scene; motif; filling in the gaps; brevity and length in the Bible; the "king's law" as illustrative of a Mesopotamian kingdom; key words; problems in the editing of the Book of Samuel; the literary-artistic design of Saul; casuistic and apodictic law. And the list goes on.

With these cold, dry and threatening terms, I was supposed to capture the interest of our attention-deficient, Hebrew-impaired and Bible-disaffected students. With this, I was supposed to induce them to become enamored of the greatest of all books.

I promise you, I did not tamper with a single word of this list of concepts, taken in its entirety from the bloated, strenuously academic and ridiculous jargon for teaching Bible studies, a pretentious approach that has the effect of erecting a barrier between the students and the divine book (Who knows? Perhaps that is really the hidden purpose of this approach - born of a fashionable atheistic fear that "they might end up believing what they're told there").

It's no wonder the Bible departments at our universities lack students. University students get to choose what to study. But the hundreds of thousands of middle-schoolers and high-schoolers who don't have that choice are still being force-fed this boredom, under the authority of our Ministry of Education.

What's happening? I'm reading!

Drowning in paperwork

But that's only the beginning: Grades need to be recorded, and not just that. You also need to write comments for each student in various categories: disruptiveness, tardiness, missing class, not bringing books to school, not wearing the school uniform, etc. The more discipline deteriorates, the more the paperwork increases.

All of these grades and comments are supposed to be recorded first of all in my notebook, and then I'm supposed to enter this information on the computer, in the Mashov program which teachers and many parents and students are connected to. It's Sisyphean clerical work.

And all kinds of other tasks arise in the process: writing letters to parents (one type of disciplinary action), in duplicate; keeping parents apprised over the phone about extreme cases of disruptiveness or a troublesome number of absences; making copies of exams; filling out interim report cards with all the additional comments; taking care of the "personal education" certificates (denoting personal and communal commitment, and completely ceremonial in nature). And the list goes on.

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