When Does Inclusion Become Detrimental?

riotgrl said:

HughFreakingDillon said:

riotgrl said:

I agree with much of what you said but as a teacher, I can tell you that many of our students have suffered an immense amount of trauma.  Many of them go home to unsafe neighborhoods with little or no support at home and probably suffer some level of abuse on many nights.  A lot of those kids are the ones causing the problems and they need more attention than what I can give.  We need to build additional schools and create smaller classrooms that incorporate job skill training and intensive mental health counseling and anything else that will help break the cycle of poverty, drug/alcohol abuse, and poor/broken families.  But this requires government funding which will never happen because we (in the US) cannot have one policy and one funding mechanism for the nation as a whole.  The US is lagging behind in so many ways, in part, because there is no cohesiveness amongst the nation, meaning the states have to much say over policy which means we see widely divergent outcomes regarding education, sex ed., income levels, etc.

Second, I have a lot of 'good' kids from 'good' families that are also significant problems.  They are enabled by their parents to continue their disruptive behavior because "their kid would never act like that".  The reality is many parents refuse to see their child the way they really are and many have checked out and pretend to not know what their kids are doing. The number of kids doing drugs is mind-blowing.  These are good kids, smart kids, who have loving, caring families.  They are high every day while at school.  We can't catch them anymore because they use DAB pens to smoke weed and it produces no smell.  Unless we can get drug-sniffing dogs into the building it's next to impossible to prove.  Hell, I've got a kid who is high most of the time and we have been honest with his mom and she doesn't care because SHE GETS HIGH WITH HIM.  

Not sure the answer to some of this but I would say having REALISTIC policies that help kids would be a start.  Abstinence-only education doesn't work.  Free access to birth control would help.  Being honest with kids about drugs, social media, sex is necessary BUT we can't do that because many parents believe that teachers are indoctrinating their kids or encouraging behavior when the reality is they have no clue what their kids are doing.  I would love to be that honest with a parent but, as you stated, it is not permissible because parents that have access to a lawyer will make sure to sue anyone who believes their child could do any wrong.  The only ones that do wrong are other peoples kids, apparently.  

In the US, the parents that could, and should, be helping simply leave for private and charter schools so they can protect their own kids with little thought to anyone else.  Don't get me wrong, I get it.  I want the best for my kids and, absolutely, they come first but when do we start caring for our neighbors? Our country is so focused on the individual with little thought for the common good and the general welfare that we seem to forget, or ignore, that we, society, will suffer the consequences of our apathy, our neglect, our selfishness at some point.

and it's not a teacher's job, in my opinion, to deal with that trauma. those kids should be in counselling. Maybe a teaching/counselling class hybrid or something. I don't know the answer. But I know 100% inclusion isn't it. 

Maybe not but MOSTLY inclusion IS a good thing.  It teaches kids and teachers empathy and understanding which is sorely lacking in the world today.  My son has an auditory processing disorder, a kind of auditory dyslexia, if you will.  He learns just fine, slower than everyone else because he has to 'interpret' everything which takes him twice as long to do, but he eventually gets it.  Thirty years ago he would have been labeled as slow and put in an isolated classroom.  The world can't revolve around the 'winners'.  School is created for easily teachable kids and we are struggling now to create an environment that will meet the needs of all kids but schools get NO support to do that.  ALL kids deserve a GOOD education that meets their needs.  That won't happen until we lower class sizes for all kids.  Your kids are smart and don't need much guidance but wouldn't it be great if they could excel at a much faster pace?  That's meeting the needs of all not just some of them.