«Curmudgucation» has the low-down on behavior issues nationwide, writing, “Classroom chaos is an issue. How bad is it? Why is it bad? What do we do?”
“Daniel Buck raised a bit of an internet stir with a complaint about school discipline issues, “Don’t Spare the Rod,” that ends with this rather dark paragraph: ‘Schools fail when they lose sight of human nature. Children are capable of wickedness and cruelty. There is something rotten in the core of man. When schools deny this, when they fail to punish cruelty, the apple is left putrefying on the teacher’s desk’. … Is it worse than ever? Hard to know–we haven’t been quantifying this on any kind of national scale for a long time, but as someone who’s been in the classroom for ages, I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t a concern. Not only a concern, but often characterized as “worse than ever.” And that “worse than ever” has always been a localized thing. I remember coming back to my small town after teaching my first year in Lorain, Ohio, where fighting and disorder were common, I’d faced physical threats twice in my own room, and students came from environments where guns and knives were not unusual. When I came back home, I tried not to laugh at colleagues who were really, really upset about how out of control gum chewing had become.”
Curmudgucation
Worth a read. And ditto for our own experience.