Tony Mac gave a good explanation as to why quoting stats is pointless
Stats are useful except when they prove what
you want them to prove, apparently.
You can abuse them, but there are well known methods for stopping people doing exactly that. Anyone who turns around and dismisses all statistics because of what you've said almost certainly just doesn't like the fact that real-world evidence is against them.
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Fear of punishment is how life works, most adults don't break the law for fear of arrest prosecution and maybe imprisonment.
Engaging with kids is fine up to point.
Your final sentence is just ridiculous!
Or maybe you just can't accept that your way of dealing with things is simplistic, rubbish and just doesn't work in the long term. Violence breeds violence, and not all of us want to live in the stone age thank you very much.
I do what works, not what my base impulse tells me to do.
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This. I taught in China where corporal punishment was (and is) used quite a lot. Taking their phones off them was by far the easiest solution. They might have hated you for it, but frankly the solution was to engage them with more interesting activity. Chinese kids are even more prone to spend their whole time on their phones, so this was a major issue.
If they told me to "**** off" I'd just give them more work. If they didn't do that, I'd just repeatedly embarrass them in front of the class and keep doing it. The easiest way to engage with a kid is on their level, and once you do that you actually have a lot more power over them as they realise that they don't have anything on you that they can do better than you. If I'd hit them it wouldn't have changed a thing, as I saw with some other teachers.
And if you're going to say that "Chinese kids are obviously all better behaved", then I'll have you know that a) some brought alcohol to school as though it was normal, b)
did fight, c)
did answer back etc. They were exactly the same once they'd got over the fact you were a weird foreigner, and this was supposedly an extremely good school.
So you'll excuse me if I think
my personal experience trumps yours, Antman. The statistics and experience as a teacher are both on my side here.
. But you are confusing the treatments of two different groups. Adults are presumed to know what they are meant to be doing, and are not learning this day by day, so do not require anything other than a punishment when they contravene the rules. Children are still learning, and do require the positive reinforcement that you seem to dismiss. Of course it has to be applied such that it does promote good behaviour and not, as you imply, simply stimulate bad behaviour.
