Stockholm Syndrome

I got a text message the other day from my friend Peter. He asked if I could remember the name of the syndrome where a hostage of kidnap victim begins to sympathize with his or her captors and sort of help them out (Stockholm Syndrome). Peter and I worked on crosswords a lot in training, so I asked if he was tackling another (he's got a book of NY Times Sunday crosswords... they're tough). "No," he said, "I'm just writing a letter to a friend and trying to describe my place in the educational system here."

I know exactly what he means. I showed up today and was about to call the form 5's in for math when I realized that only about 5 of them were there (out of 60). It turns out there was some problem with water, so they were working on that. They showed up for the last bit, I taught for about half an hour, which turned out to be okay. We reviewed the last lesson and did some practice problems. Then I taught my F6 physics and went to the daily staff meeting/announcements. They went on longer than usual, and the teachers decided that after the meeting they'd call all the students to the parade ground and punish those that hadn't shown up to the morning parade on Friday (nearly 200 of them!). We had talked about it Friday and decided that each student would get 3 hits (with a stick about 2 1/2' long). So each of about 15 teachers had a stick so that they could punish all the students in a somewhat timely manner. But they started about 15 minutes after my period was supposed to start and it still took them a while, so my class didn't return in time for me to teach much of anything.

Some thoughts on corporal punishment: it's reasonably fast and easy. As a teacher, you can mete out fairly standardized punishments quickly and forget about it. It definitely has its advantages. I'm only beginning to think of other punishments that we could have used on nearly 1/4 of the student body that wouldn't have taken lots of teacher-hours. (This method did take almost all of the staff about 30 minutes, between hitting and lecturing.) The problem I have with it is that I don't think it's effective. One of the teachers today confirmed my suspicions and said that this morning attendance was no higher than normal at the morning parade, and that many students who did show up still were skipping their classes later. So while I can understand the desire to just hit a kid sometimes, I don't find corporal punishment good for much more than venting that desire. It gives both the teacher and student a feeling that punishment has been given, but does little to correct the behavior.

Personally, I'm extremely lucky that I don't have big behavior problems in my classes. It comes not from any magical classroom charisma that I have, but from the fact that my kids are older and more mature--mostly in their early 20's. In O-Level schools I've heard plenty of stories of Peace Corps Volunteers using more creative forms of punishment and having the students ask to be beaten--they'd just as soon get it over with as well.

So the long story short is that the half of my classes didn't get near as much time as I thought they would. And the only thing I can think is "Kama kawa:" as usual.

There's a ton of things about the educational system that I don't like, but all I can do is try to teach the kids as best I can. The Stockholm Syndrome analogy works well. I'm trapped in the system, but working as hard as I can for it.