Troublemakers disrupt learning process for serious students. Students are telling teachers that they won't listen to them, or that Mom or Dad will sue them. They worried that, with so many discipline problems, teachers didn't have enough time to teach. I don't understand why anyone wants to be a teacher.
Parents come down on the side of kids.
As part of our Democracy '98 election coverage, the Savannah Morning News will conduct a mail survey to probe attitudes toward the school discipline and family values issues raised at the Backyard Barbecues. Instead, they drive classmates and teachers to distraction by calling out to one another from opposite sides of the room, cracking jokes and making loud asides, and sometimes cussing out the teacher. That, say Richard Olt and Racine Riley, a pair of Windsor Forest High School juniors chosen by their teacher and principal to talk frankly about the state of discipline in their classrooms, is what they and other students have to put up with these days in the pursuit of education. And that may be exactly what students, teachers and parents may be talking about when they despair about eroding order in the classroom. Every day, it's two or three people in a class who have this sort of running joke.