Have many teachers in my family. My only complaint with your statement is that 9.5 out of 10 is way too generous. The level of absolute bare basics decency and behavior is so bad that it's hard to believe.
I spend plenty of time around “normal” well-adjusted middle- and upper-middle-class kids, and I’d say kids are inherently little balls of emotion with their own ideas and personalities who haven’t yet developed socially appropriate ways of dealing with frustration. They get into plenty of mischief despite their parents’ best efforts and wide variety of parenting styles.
Most families are doing their best, but being human is just hard sometimes.
To be clear, I'm not talking about mischief. I'm talking about assault, battery, serious destruction of property, direct threats to the teachers during class, with less than zero support given to the staff by the administration. To give a specific example, one of my friends used to teach 5th grade. A student got angry with him, and when he turned to address another student, jumped him and literally pulled his arm out of his socket. Not only was the student not expelled, but my friend had to spend months while recovering from surgery refusing to sign papers the administration was pushing on him to make him accept all responsibility. This is not hyperbole in the least, it really happened, and it is way more common than anyone would think.
Okay, that’s pretty messed up. Seems plausible the kid may come from some context of severe neglect/abuse. (I am guessing this kid is quite a bit older than the 1st graders the top-level comment was discussing?)
I’m thinking more of 4–7-year-olds hitting each-other with sticks they pick up at the park, having temper meltdowns at trivial frustrations, refusing to follow instructions to stop doing obviously unsafe things, etc.
What do you think should be done in this sort of case? How does it get to this point, and what could be done to help kids like this before they reach the point of literally assaulting their teachers or other criminal-level violence? Most kinds of school punishments (detention, extra homework, suspension, ...) seem unlikely to really solve whatever issues this kid has, but teachers don’t have the extra bandwidth to be full-time social-worker caretakers of each specific kid.
He was a 5th grader. Average size, just clear... issues across the board.
With the foreword that I know this is a huge thorny mess of a problem with no easy solutions, there are three things that would make an immediate improvement.
#1, by far: Administrations as they currently are live in existential fear of a lawsuit that will destroy the entire district. Teachers are thrown under the bus with almost rabid fervor, as they are seen as fungible. This must stop, and real consequences need to be consistently enforced across the board. The genuinely unstable and violent need to be removed from the general school population. I do not know what to best do with them, and I will not even hazard a guess in this post. But I do know that they are holding the entirety of the education of the remaining 90% of the student body hostage to their whims, and that has to stop.
#2: The student teacher ratio needs to drop from 30+:1 to below 15:1, ideally even lower with the addition of aides along with regular teaching staff. The money is there- if you look at the per capita spend, the US is very high, even compared to other Western nations. We just blow it on literally anything other than paying teachers.
#3: Free, school-supplied breakfasts and lunches for the entire student body, no questions asked. Hunger is a huge deal, and hungry kids can't learn. Food instability affects somewhere between 20-50% of the students in the US, and it is a phenomenal return on outcome vs. $ spent.
Being a teacher is like being a nurse: it really takes the right kind of person to do the job well. Having more bodies in classrooms isn't a solution by itself.
Why not cut out massive govt. corruption and waste first? The money is already there. Pouring more water into a bucket with a thousand holes is not helpful.
Most families are doing their best, but being human is just hard sometimes.