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Me_irl
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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me_irl
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What's that saying about having all the accountability but none of the agency?
Side note: triaging doesn't really imply a mandate for action. A teacher can make a note to follow up or mark a tardy slip without verbally repremanding the child on the spot.
You're confusing a perfect world with one we can actually live in.
To elaborate, I've consistently noticed a blind spot in lemmy when it comes to teachers and education. There is always a consistent failure to recognize the hard limits of available resources. The common wisdom here seems to be that a local tax base can support an unlimited amount of education spending, and that any problem in education can be solved by throwing more money at the problem. "Just hire more teachers" is the lazy zero-thought solution trotted out to any issue in education. I think it comes from lemmy's left-leaning politics. Which is fine. But even socialists need to understand the concept of opportunity cost. Even if the economy was entirely state run, there are still hard limits on available resources.
There seems to be a great inability to recognize that teachers are actual human beings working very real jobs. And every time you tell a teacher, "the solution is to hire more teachers," you are betraying the actual teachers. Because the teachers know they have to actually work around real-world limits in resources. And every time you tell a teacher, "just hire more teachers," you're indicating you are not seriously attempting to address the real challenges and limits of education. (I realize you didn't explicitly say it, but your comment implies that resources are infinite.)
One thing teachers have to do is to design their classroom instruction and policies around the real limits of available resources, and that includes time. Often times you will deliberately write policies to require little investigation, simply because there aren't enough hours in the day. For example, your suggestion was to follow-up after class, but that's still time the teacher will have to spend litigating every excuse. If there's five students late in each class, and you teach six classes, and it's five minutes each? That's two and a half hours of phone calls, just for one day's tardies!
My dude, the assertion here is "there's no need to be condescending to a small child for actions outside of their sphere of control".
That obviously wasn't the part I was responding to. There's more than one point floating around this discussion. No need to take the bad faith approach and assume I'm responding to the blame issue. No need to be rude.
There's no need to shame students. But I'm talking specifically about why schools have policies like this. Often you need to design policies so that blame isn't assigned. Instead of litigating every late homework assignment, you except X number of late homeworks. Or you simply accept none and give opportunities for extra credit.
Teachers often have to design policies so that they don't need to do a bunch of litigation. Instead you have blameless policies and simply have enough buffer that a few negative occurrences that aren't the kid's fault won't affect their grade.
No, you definitely responded to them saying "Which kind of idiot says that to an elementary student? That incredibly dumb." by describing them as "A teacher that actually needs to run a classroom".
I don't know what kind of classroom you're running but I certainly didn't feel any need to blame a child for their parent dropping them off late.
You're too focused on blame and responsibility. When a teacher says, "it's your responsibility," they're saying, "ultimately, in life, you are the one who will have to deal with the outcome. You need to plan for the unexpected." It's not a statement of moral responsibility. It's saying, "one way or another, it's your responsibility to be here."
If a parent is consistently dropping a kid off late, the student needs to reach out to the teacher about that. The teacher can then have a discussion with the parents.
You solve conundrums like this by getting away from the blame mentality. We're talking about K12 students being late for class, not people being indicted for felonies. We don't need to obsess so much over guilt and innocence or whether once absence is the parent's fault or the student's fault.
Do you not see the disconnect between saying others need to move away from the blame mentality while actively defending blaming the kid? Why would the teacher not be able to independently recognise the pattern of lateness and need a literal 7 year old to point it out? What help could a teacher even offer beyond a report to social services?
How, as specifically as possible, is 7 year old meant to ensure their own timeliness when they have almost no legal control over their actions?
I'm not blaming the kid at all. You're confusing blame with responsibility.
Can't answer this as you're too focused on individual blame.
When I say blame, I'm referring to a moral judgment. If I'm blaming someone, I feel they clearly did something wrong and they should feel bad about it.
I'm not blaming a kid. I'm saying they're ultimately responsible. Kids and parents have to take responsibility for their tardies, even if they're not the ones at fault. As an adult, paying your bills is your responsibility. Even if some month you miss your rent payment for circumstances beyond your control, you're still responsible for making rent.
That's why zero-blame systems are a good way to design classroom instruction. You give the kid and parents a certain number of free absences and don't try to assign blame for every single incident.
That's exactly the kind of classroom I'm describing. You give a student a certain number of free tardies. For 90% of kids, they'll stay under the limit and not have a problem. No need to waste time litigating every tardy. But a few will consistently have more than the limit, and that's when you as a teacher can notice the pattern and start investigating.
And also, don't be too focused on the individual here. A 7 year old doesn't really have individual responsibility for anything. The parents are ultimately always responsible for the student arriving on time. Tardies are just recorded on the student's file, because they're the ones enrolled there. When a 7 year old gets poor marks or a disciplinary action, it's always a situation of shared responsibility between parents and children.
Fuck you, the kids ARE individuals and classroom planning that doesn't account for that is guaranteed to fail. When you "assign responsibility" by telling a child to fix it themselves you aren't talking to a hypothetical, you are talking to a real, single individual who needs real help and is being told to just somehow transport themselves. The reason so many children are being failed by school systems worldwide is because of people like you who expect them to fit themselves to your expectations regardless of thier personal circumstances.
There we go, the problem with society: we trap people in unjust traps, leaving them bitter, because someone up the chain could not be arsed.
Imagine the kind of lesson this teaches the poor kid.
Hell, the type of lesson I learned from this, is that there must be a better species than human somewhere in the future, to replace us.
I honestly do not see a problem with this system. Kids need to be in school. Some won't. You have to have some way of forcing them to attend and be there on time.
You can lament and wax poetically about the unjustness of it all, but in the meantime we have kids to teach. And really, this isn't an unjust trap at all. You provide a mechanism to hold people accountable, and you give them enough grace to handle accidental twists of fate beyond their control.
I see nothing wrong with this system. You're dreaming of a utopia where every kid will willingly go to school and arrive perfectly on time, all of their own free will. You're lamenting that we don't live in a fairlyland fantasy world.
Then what were you responding to. The comment you responded to literally only said one thing, about talking to a child. So yeah, that is what you were responding to.
No there wasn’t. You were the one that brought up everything else. The only thing being discussed was talking shit to a child.
Policies like what!?!? Blaming children?
I think you must be a robot.
They asked who would say that to a kid. And I said any teacher that needs to run an actual classroom. Then I explained why so many teachers have policies like this.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with telling a kid, "sorry, I can't dig into every excuse for every tardy and late homework. You get three free tardies and three free late homeworks. It's ultimately your responsibility, and for unpredictable accidents, you're covered."
There's absolutely nothing wrong with instructing students that they are ultimately responsible for their actions. There will be times in life where they simply have to be at a certain place and certain time.
The thing being asked, School Administrator-in-the-making, is to pull your head out of your...woes and troubles, and remember the child in front of you.
Keeping a condescendingly presumptuous mouth shut, costs no resources and impedes no tardy marking nor the consequences thereof.
You need to remember ALL the children in front of you. Spending ten minutes arguing with one student about an absence is 10 minutes stolen from every student in that classroom.
And please do not be rude.
You should have the education required to both define the word 'rude', and use it with nuance. It's a bad look for an educator to use semantics to weasel out of their responsibilities.
Keeping your mouth shut regarding your opinion about the rationale for a specific tardy instance, costs you zero minutes, and allows you to go back to your resource management game, earlier.
Without a single repercussion to your process, because as you already previously mentioned, it is simple too much to expect of you to address any of them until the consequences of serial tardiness/truancy come into effect.
Your children must be respectful to you. They have not yet signed the social contract.
I owe you no such thing and am already being exceedingly more cordial than I believe your blasé approach towards your effect upon the psyche of your wards merits.
Have you ever actually worked in education in any form whatsoever?
I do not need to make an appeal to authority, to back my statements up. But yes.
And in the areas that have to later mitigate the damages done by those who earlier in the chain decided burn out and struggle justified their neglect and abuse.
Details thereof which shall remain undisclosed, because, again, I do not need to make an appeal to authority here. It's simple humanity.
So your life is tough. It's not an excuse, or their fault.
I get that teachers are under so much pressure that it may sometimes not be possible to do their jobs while also treating students in a way that is fair and honest, but to me that's one sign among many that there is something deeply wrong with the whole institution, and not something that should be just accepted.
Again. This is the type of blind spot I see on Lemmy. There's always a failure to recognize real world limits. The fact that education needs to work within limited resources is not some horrible flaw in its design. It's simply how every institution mankind has ever or will ever create has to operate within limits. You have to design any institution around its material limits. That doesn't mean there's something deeply wrong with education. It means that those that expect schools to have infinite resources are simply delusional.
So is your position that stuff like what is described by OOP is a necessary and worthwhile tradeoff for the smooth operation of a school? Or maybe that it isn't a bad thing at all?
I think it can be phrased better. But the core policy is perfectly fine. Often you can't spend class time arguing with every student about every absence. Instead, you tell them, "sorry, it's your responsibility to be here on time. I realize accidents happen, that's why you get a certain number of free tardies, so the accidents don't hurt you."
It's a perfectly fine way to run a classroom. You don't try and figure out whether the student is truly responsible for a small number of absences. Give them three free tardies. When shit happens, they're covered. But it saves your from having to argue with 16 year olds about every single absence and tardy. If a student goals over the limit, then you can actually put in the time to see if their excuses are valid.
Smooth operation of a school is not some minor thing to be dismissed. Every minute in class spent arguing about absence excuses is a minute taken from the instruction of every other student in the class.
That's fair, but the benefits of bureaucracy do not negate the ways that it is dehumanizing, even if they happen to outweigh them. The inability of individual bureaucrats to do anything about it also doesn't negate that.