"These Kids Are High Maintenance"

"Our kids are high maintenance kids, Mr. S. They can push your buttons. We just do not think that you are the right fit for this school." So said the squat administrator, a multicultural type who has shouted me down a while back, proclaiming her colorful heritage as the source of everything good about who she was. I cannot believe that our schools have been taken over by such short-sighted people. What was the civil rights movement really about, if we have school leaders who are cramming students with the empty notion that their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or poor habits should be celebrated and accommodated, as opposed to the skills and will which they can learn and demonstrate with growing efficacy?

The school in question, a local continuation high school in the South Bay, was a disorderly affair from the beginning. I cannot believe that I survived as long as I did at that school. I never thought that these students were high maintenance. In fact, most of them were simply apathetic, refusing to do any work, especially when a sub like me was covering a class for one of the flustered or frustrated teachers. I did not think that the students were high maintenance. In truth, I noticed that I pushed their buttons more than they allegedly pushed mine. I know I frustrated some students, who expected a substitute teacher like me to let them get away with doing nothing, and I refused to do so. Unlike most subs, I expected them to get something done. Usually, I approached students in a casual way, trying to figure out if they thought the work was just too difficult, or if the teacher had not explained something adequately. In most cases, sadly, faculty and administration seemed resigned to student apathy.

"High maintenance" is a term which belongs to the preppy wealthy stereotypes of the Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles crowd. Yet one administrator whom I had confronted recently told me that the students under her supervision were also high maintenance, that they can push a teacher's buttons.

Where have all the serious, thinking adults gone? Where have our leaders gotten the notion that students can say and think whatever they please, and that schools and site staff must accommodate them? This is appalling all around.

The last day I spent substituting at a local high school, I was dumbfounded by the childish and infantile behavior of the high school students. This continuation school was turning into a stagnation school, a site which celebrated, or at least permitted low expectations. I cannot believe that a school of meandering entrances and exits, of security personnel who spend more time holding teachers to an empty standard instead of expecting the students to do what they are told, a school that did everything but school -- was allowed to remain open. This is not education, not in the slightest.

"These kids are high maintenance," the administrator told me. "And we do not think that you are the right fit for this school."

During the last period of the day, I witnessed to high school students fight over a chair like five-year olds. I was so fed up with their petty bickering, I asked both students to leave. "You are Extra!" one of the two students exclaimed. Honestly, I was surprised that this one student would label so callously. He was fighting over a chair, and the class did not have a seating chart prepared for me to rely on. The whole matter was simply ridiculous. I cannot believe that teachers are expected just to put up with such insanity.

"These kids are High Maintenance." That is an empty cop-out, a grandly, blandly bad excuse for putting all the pressure on the teacher to keep the students in the classroom, and the students are aware of the constraints placed on them. Some students have not qualms about intimidating, berating, and harassing teachers who cannot do anything accept suggest that the students behave.

The administrator's empty excuse reminded me of what a dean at another high school had told me. "These are tough kids. They are not easy to get along with." I am tired of administrators, staff, counselors, security personnel blaming the students, as if they are essentially bad. Part of the reason they go to school is to learn how to behave. If students are idiots, knuckleheads, troublemakers coming in, then school staff have an obligation to teach them how to behave - so that they graduate from high school as young men and women who know how to command respect and honor others, whether they like them or share their opinions of others or not. Students are not high maintenance, or we should not permit them to remain that way, at any rate.

Who is running our schools, now? The liberal cabal of rights, irresponsibilities, and regulations has squelched the much needed yet neglected role of teacher as parent. Students have no right or reason to be high maintenance, or to remain that way, at any rate. No discipline is pleasant initially, yet such tender, tough level is necessary, proper, and commendable all around.

At any rate, after a rough day of no-holds-barre, no threshold discipline, I received the expected phone call -- "You are no longer required for the assignment at " ---- High School". I was shaken briefly, but I understood why. I was "Extra with a Capital E," and they decided that I need to leave, with a Capital L.

If anyone is "high maintenance," it would be the jittery district officials who are more worried about a lawsuit than doing well by the students, who need to be held to a higher standard than passing a standardized test. "High Maintenance" describes the state's rules and regulations, all of which war against the innovation and improvement of our schools to assist a generation of students which can find more accurate information on their I-phones than what they read in a background, clunky, heavy textbook.

At any rate, after a rough day of no-holds-barre, no threshold discipline, I received the expected phone call -- "You are no longer required for the assignment at " ---- High School". I was shaken briefly, but I understood why. I was "Extra with a Capital E," and they decided that I need to leave, with a Capital L.

If anyone is "high maintenance," it would be the jittery disriicials who aree more worried about a lawsuit than doing well by the students who need to be held to a higher standard than passing a standardized test.