Student discipline
Recently, the head of the student guidance department at a high school in Kaohsiung noticed three students in a class with their backs to the teacher playing on their smartphones.
With the teacher’s permission, the department head entered the classroom and asked the students to produce their phones. They hid them in a drawer and placed their jackets on the drawer.
The department head then asked them to remove the jackets, but the students refused, so the department head stepped in, removed the jackets and told the students to hand over the phones, confiscating them until the end of the school day.
This is a daily occurrence in many schools, but because the students reported the incident to the Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy, accusing the school of illegally searching their personal effects, the incident has caused a bit of a stink.
The Kaohsiung Education Bureau said that the school should have recorded the whole process of the safety check, in accordance with regulations, to protect the rights of both parties.
That sounds great, but are teachers expected to go online and refer to the safety check guidelines every time something happens in the classroom?
Ministry of Education guidelines say that safety checks can be conducted when there is reason to believe students are breaking regulations or are in possession of prohibited items, but there must be either two or more parents’ associations representatives, student associations cadres or teachers present for a search of students’ personal effects or personal space to be conducted, and the entire process is to be recorded by the school’s student affairs department.
Are mobile phones prohibited items and how is the teacher supposed to find representatives during class time?
While the bureau appears to be fair in the matter, the process is a blow to teacher morale.
Discussing this matter with colleagues, some just shook their heads and sighed; one said they had no idea that they were “breaking the law” on a daily basis; and another said they had given up, and if that is the way students wanted to behave, they would be in for a shock when they went out into the big, wide world.
When teachers are “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” in situations when students need to be disciplined, it might be better to recruit teachers on a “see no evil, hear no evil, discipline no evil” basis.
Li Yu-chang
Kaohsiung
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