Hapuku had been left alone with his partner’s child in a Flaxmere sleepout in January last year. Prosecution lawyers argued Hapuku was intent on beating his high score in a PlayStation game called Scarface.
When the toddler interrupted the game, Hapuku struck him so hard he died from his injuries. But rather than rushing the child to hospital, Hapuku continued playing. When Mikara’s mother returned she found her partner playing PlayStation and holding Mikara over his left shoulder.
But just wait a minute! This is an isolated case, right? I’m afraid not:
Dr Eleanor Carmichael, from Waikato Hospital, said she frequently sees cases where a young man has abused a child because a game was disturbed. “You sit down, take a bit of P, start your PlayStation game, the baby starts to cry, you’re in a hurry to pick it up and settle it down before you lose your place.”
Shame! Shame! Shame!
Click here to find out if you are addicted to the internet or here to read about kids and technology addiction.
Are parents derelict in their duties if they refuse to buy their children the latest gadgets such as smartphones, tablets, game consoles and i-pods?
Absolutely not!
On the contrary, it can be argued that any parent that buys those items when they can’t afford to, is derelict in their duties:
IT was dubbed the “digital divide” – the gap between the haves and the have nots in the computer age.
But far from missing out on the electronic essentials of modern life, new research shows children from poorer families are keeping up with wealthier counterparts.
High-tech ownership is consistent across all income levels, research by insurer GIO reveals, with the average teen owning $1882.06 worth of equipment.
And tech-savvy teens are much more likely to own computer equipment than sports gear or a musical instrument.
About 42 per cent of kids own a laptop, while half own mobile phones and more than three in five own an MP3 music player such as an iPod. But less than a third of kids own sporting equipment or a musical instrument.
Sociology expert Dr Michael Bittman said most of the devices were essential for teens to function socially.
I disagree vehemently with Dr. Bittman. Teens do not need the latest devices, they need to understand that money doesn’t grow on trees. They need to respect the volatile nature of the economy and the hardships their parents face in ensuring that they have the necessities.
Teens would be best advised to worry less about their social standing and more about how they could contribute to their family, rather than run their family budget dry.
When it comes to disciplining students who are continually getting into trouble, Principals suffer from an extreme case of memory loss. The standard punishment of granting suspensions hasn’t worked and is unlikely to work in the future.
So what is the standard reaction to students that continue to offend? Suspend them again!
THE state’s worst students are being suspended at least once every three weeks.
Data reveals 90 misbehaving students were sent home from school 16 or more times in 2011 and another 16 were suspended between 11 and 15 times throughout the year.
The Education Department said the primary and secondary school children were sent home for between one and 10 days.
State School Teachers Union president Anne Gisborne said mainstream schools did not have the resources to cope with recidivist students.
“We do have a number of children within our system who are obviously stretching the capacity of the school to respond to their needs,” she said.
The number of suspensions issued for “negative behaviour”, such as disrupting lessons or back-chatting a teacher, have surged almost 50 per cent in five years. Just more than 1600 suspensions were handed out for such behaviour last year, compared to 1082 in 2007.
Suspensions for breaking school rules, such as not wearing a uniform or using a mobile phone in class rose 30 per cent. More than 7100 were issued last year, compared to 5453 in 2007.
The school probably thinks the saga has ended. It hasn’t. This story was not just about 4 students bullying a bus monitor. This story highlighted the school’s own challenges in addressing a culture that resulted in a person being bullied in public with not one objection from any of the bystanders.
The Greece Central School district said that the four unnamed students will transfer to an alternative education program within the district to keep up their academic progress, and will be allowed to reapply to middle school after their complete the discipline. They released a long statement about the situation, but here’s the important part:
Rarely are school districts able to announce the exact discipline students receive for violations of the Code of Conduct. It was possible in this case because each of the students involved admitted to wrongdoing, accepted the recommended consequences and agreed to permit the district to publicly release the terms of their disciplinary action.
Facebook are using their own lack 0f vigilance as an excuse to relax very important age restrictions. Instead of giving up on protecting minors, Facebook should try harder to stop under ages kids from accessing their own Facebook page:
Facebook is still mulling over whether to open its doors to those aged under 13, but in Malaysia, nearly 250,000 children, some as young as seven, have already signed up on the world’s biggest social network.
The young Internet users, like millions worldwide, have managed to avoid the age-restriction ruling by lying about their age, sometimes with the help of their parents.
I believe that it is very hard for male teachers to get a job in the public system. Often public schools are female dominated, to the point where a token male would have some effect on the staff-room dynamic. I feel that it was a major factor in my inability to secure a job in the public school system. As I recounted in an earlier post:
I applied for 30 Public School positions over the summer and none of these possibilities turned into a job offer. Nobody in the State system was prepared to take me on. Sitting in the job interview, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I was leapfrogged because of my gender. I know it seems rich for a male to cry sexism, but the selection panel was nearly always all female and on walking around schools, I noticed that nearly all the teachers were female. In the name of a close-knit staff dynamic, it wouldn’t have been such an easy proposition to disturb the status quo and invite a male into the staff room inner sanctum.
But while males might be discriminated in the public system, I have it on good authority from people high up in other private schools, that males are preferred over females in the private system because they don’t go on maternity leave. So it goes both ways.
Still, after all women went through (and to some extent still do) when it comes to being overlooked for jobs, you can understand why it doesn’t feel right to have a male shouting sexual discrimination:
A MALE primary school teacher has alleged he was the victim of sex discrimination after losing out on a job to a young woman.
Glenn Telfer claims he was the top candidate for a permanent post at an Edinburgh primary after doing the job for several months and earning plaudits from parents and his boss.
But the 55-year-old ended up out of work after the job went to Louise Hunter, 25.
Mr Telfer is taking Edinburgh City Council to an employment tribunal claiming sex and age discrimination.
Just in case you thought that only teachers who give zeroes lose their job:
A Manhattan judge has denied a petition by a New York City teacher to win her job back after she was fired for engaging in inappropriate behavior in 2009.
Cindy Mauro, a 34-year-old French teacher at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, was caught half naked in a classroom, ‘kneeling between the legs’ of a topless fellow teacher, an arbitrator found.
Mauro and her alleged lover, 32-year-old Alini Brito, had vehemently denied allegations of a ‘lesbian lovefest.’ The 34-year-old claimed that she was only helping Brito deal with her diabetes by bringing her some candy to raise her blood glucose levels.
Both teachers also denied they were ever naked, alleging that the custodian who walked in on them during a school talent show had a vivid imagination, the New York Daily News reported.
He’s been pushed down a ski hill, jumped, beaten and pounded so hard that he’s suffered three concussions.
He’s been bullied so badly over the years that he’s twice threatened suicide.
Yet the expelled teen who’s made Fraser Sutherland’s life a living hell is being allowed back into his high school next year. And administrators have told the 15-year-old victim to suck it up and forgive his “reformed” tormentor – or find somewhere else to go in September.
“I shouldn’t have to leave the school when I didn’t do anything wrong. I believe the person that is doing the harm should leave,” said Fraser, who’s just finished Grade 10 at St. Brother Andre Catholic School in Markham, Ont.
“What we’re fearing is this individual is going to come back to finish the job,” his angry dad, Kirk, said. “What’s it going to take? Does he have to be left lying in a puddle of blood in the school bathroom?”
“Suck it up … or find somewhere else to go?” I hope that line isn’t accurate.
You are talking to a child that had to endure terrible hardships at your school due to one of your students – show some respect!
As much as I have reservations about the “phonics approach” to teaching reading, I firmly believe that any skill worth teaching can be taught well. Just because phonics, spelling and grammar can be taught in a very dry and mundane way, doesn’t mean that it isn’t valuable and it doesn’t mean that it can’t be delivered in a style in which students enjoy.
Plans for new primary school grammar tests in England will hold a “gun to the head” of teachers, experts say.
The National Association for the Teaching of English says a revised focus on spelling, grammar and punctuation will “impoverish” teaching.
Its chairman, Dr Simon Gibbon, says the reforms are based on ministers’ “diminishing memories of their own grammar- and public-school educations”.
It’s not the content of the tests that I am concerned about, it’s the tests themselves that bother me.
Topical Teaching 