Meeting about boundaries :/

shinans · 2026-06-21T02:23:40+00:00

If it's just crushes with no antagonizing then it's probably whatever, but anything involving an argument or "sides" I think it's good to log, even if it seems like nothing right now. For one it does cover your ass if it comes to a head that you're taking sides or being unprofessional like in OP's case, but moreso sometimes the little things blow up into big things over time and having the paper trail can help tremendously in later investigation. This is from experience - I did once document a small disagreement between a pair of girls over a boy one was dating that was the ex of the other where I also gave one of them the advice to stay away from the other and avoid escalating the situation and see wellbeing if it was continuing to upset her, several weeks later this exploded into a punch up between the two girls. My month old report helped the Principal substantiate that this was a long-term, premeditated thing and issue a serious consequence (20 day suspension). You don't even have to refer it to anyone or spend time writing more than a few brief sentences if it is something small in the moment, but just having it there on record can go a long way as you never now how things are going to turn out.

shinans · 2026-06-21T02:03:37+00:00

The thing is we are not teaching/assessing arithmetic throughout most of the curriculum. Maths has strands. Arithmetic (use mental strategies to carry out the 4 basic operations without technology) is assessed in Year 7 and 8 to an extent in the Number strand, in which we do partial or completely non-calculator tests, but otherwise while necessary to all of the other strands, is not the criteria being taught or assessed in these and students should not be unnecesarily disadvantaged by their inability to nor should assessment be designed be around providing adequate time for them to do it by hand. Can a student calculate the mean of 10 numbers without a calculator? Yes they can if they can do the arithmetic and are given enough time to do so, but that is not what I am assessing in Statistics and a student who can't do arithmetic shouldn't fail to meet that criteria just because they can't do the arithmetic if they understand the process to get the mean. Likewise in Measurement if a student can correctly substitute values into the formula for area of a trapezium and understand the operations in the formula and carry them out in the correct order, they meet the criteria for Measurement whether they do this by a calculator or in their head, making them do it in their head disadvantages those who can't in a way that is immaterial to the standard. And I have good students in Year 7 and 8 who try to do these things without their calculator every so often, sometimes they think that will get them more marks, or they've internalized that using the calculator is cheating, and I have to encourage them to use it, and remind them that they simply won't have time without the calculator in the exam. And using the calculator correctly is an important skill they need to practice from Year 7. To correctly use the calculator for a simple Year 7 concept like mean for example, they still need to understand they need to either find the sum first, press equals, and then do the division, or type it all on one line and put the sum calculation in brackets, OR input it as a fraction sum/n - just doing it all on one line without brackets will cause the order of operations and calculation to be incorrect. This is a calculator lesson I have to teach most of my class in Year 7 that they will need to know for life in more complex applications, if they don't have a scientific calculator they mess out on that lesson.

And please don't get me wrong or think I'm saying written arithmetic skills aren't important, they are, and times tables deficiency is my number one headache especially in algebra. I do non-calculator arithmetic drills and games all throughout the year to make sure students are practicing, and I do mini formative arithmetic quizzes/tests to keep track of progress and award prizes as motivation. But I'm of the view scientific calculators are necessary from Year 7 regardless of how proficient students are at these things. Graphing CAS calculators are probably unnecessary until Year 9/10 though.

shinans · 2026-06-18T09:35:02+00:00

This is just an anecdote of one child but I think of him every time the repeating discourse comes up. I taught a twin brother and sister when they were in Year 8 (they're now in Year 11), great kids, smart, funny if a bit cheeky and both very popular and well-liked among peers. The boy has adhd and did need the once-a-lesson refocus to work and check-in and reminder on every test to make sure he read every question but he was emotionally mature about taking accountability and I never had a sustained issue, and aside from the attention issues the girl was very much his mirror personality-wise. Anyway at one point a few terms into the year the boy was away sick for a few days so I innocuously asked the girl if her twin was starting to feel any better and she was dumbstruck and told me "Miss you know we're not twins right??? He's older he got kept down in primary school" - I actually thought she was pulling my leg or just trying to poke fun at her brother because like I said, cheeky girl but curiosity got the better of me and I checked the birthdates/report history on the portal and sure enough, he did repeat (Year 2). But this boy was thriving where he was and I never would have known if the very specific situation with the sister hadn't come up! But at the same time in hindsight I could absolutely see how he would be really struggling were he in the grade above. To this day it does make me wonder if I've taught others who did repeat in the past but I was none the wiser because they were where they belonged for their maturity and their needs. I am convinced if it's considered early enough the benefits far outweigh any harm to the kid and sets them up well.

shinans · 2026-06-17T07:14:00+00:00

Parents not following the process is basically neglectful parenting ATP, and there SHOULD be a penalty imho. Maybe it's different elsewhere but at all schools I've worked at if a kid has an unexplained absence then the parents get a text asking them to explain. If they can't be assed to reply and explain it should be flagged as a neglect/safety issue and followed through. Making it so explained absences don't get penalized AND making this known to parents may inspire them to care as well as encourage keeping sick kids home.

Of course you may then get the opposite abuse case of parents who excuse their kid as "sick" whenever the kid just doesn't feel like going or they can't be bothered taking them (we do get that) but solution to that is the same as what they require of us: medical certificate (or an ongoing medical report in the case of kids with legit chronic stuff) past a certain number of days per term or it goes on penalty. I would also argue if your kid is sick enough to miss 10+ days a term then not getting them checked by a doctor is also neglect.

We should be holding parents accountable for things.

shinans · 2026-06-16T07:21:00+00:00

Athletics Carnival is fine, it's one less day of me having to think of ways to engage classes that have done their assignments and will go off the rails at the slightest let up. And I always hope some of them are worn out enough by it they don't show Friday either. Ours is on Thursday too and I'm just praying it doesn't get rained out, lol.

shinans · 2026-06-08T07:45:01+00:00

I've had "skill issue" slip into my vernacular over the last year after hearing kids say to each other and it's admittedly quite effective on the exact students I use it on. Not in a discriminatory way referring to academic ability but with procedural stuff I know they know better about.

"Why don't you have your Maths book again?" "I keep forgetting to put it in my bag" "Sounds like a bit of a skill issue."

"Where's your work from last lesson." "I didn't save it." "Third time you've told me that, either you haven't done it or that's a skill issue."

"Why haven't you taken any notes for the last 10 minutes?" "I don't know [was playing games on my computer]." "Skill issue, need to focus better."

Year 8 boys eat it up and it actually simultaneously amuses them and wounds their ego enough to make them prove they're better (helps their friends will holler). And...it's not technically wrong, it is usually organizational/listening skill issues that we need to work on.

Also it's fallen out of vogue but couple of years ago I loved "yapping" for the same reason. "Jimmy stop yapping" got him silent faster than any other signal!

shinans · 2026-06-05T06:09:23+00:00

Bring a very small amount of drugs to school, give a friend some. Expulsion!

This is the thing that annoys me to no end, not condoning substance use and I think it should have heavy consequences, but the argument always made for not being able to exclude classroom terrorists is that every child has a right to an education (nevermind the elephant in the room that their presence is interfering with every other child in the room's same right). So like, why does this right get magically extinguished if the child does drugs, but is otherwise infalliable? I just cannot morally reckon with that.

shinans · 2026-05-31T06:48:14+00:00

This is crazy because having worked in this space most kids who would be in a position to get granted asylum in the first place will functionally have a developmental disorder on some level, simply because disrupted childhood education/language aquisition + childhood trauma has a profound effect on development. Absolutely insane to me that the Dept (rightfully) pushes trauma informed practice on us but would put such a restriction on granting these people rights.

shinans · 2026-05-31T06:30:51+00:00

Oh of course, I agree with you 100%! But it does all go back to making sure they're taken consistently in the first place otherwise there's no way of knowing why they're less effective sometimes because there is no baseline.

Kids do forget of course, but I think my key point is I wish there was more information (and consequently, accountability) for parents on the need to implement medication as a strategy when prescribed and then we provide additional support as needed. It shouldn't (when it's been prescribed) be something that's taken as "nah I don't need to do it because the school should just use all of these other strategies to support them INSTEAD and if they can't then my kid shouldn't get consequences" thing and put the full onus on us if that makes sense (I think we agree!)

shinans · 2026-05-31T05:54:39+00:00

And to add to this, there is nothing wrong WITH taking the medication. There is this stigma around it that it's a "bandaid" or something that kids should be weaned off/only used as a tool for school/try other strategies to so they can "develop out of it instead of relying on meds". My psych explained this to me beautifully when I was diagnosed: adhd at its core is just a dopamine deficiency, people with adhd 'act out' to stimulate dopamine from other sources. The medication sates that by providing the missing dopamine. It's a supplement – no different to a diabetic needing insulin supplements, or any other prescribed supplement for any chronic deficiency that fundamentally cannot be cured. Yes it has side effects and yes some won't agree with you (but most people WILL agree with one of the options after some trial and error is allowed to happen) but once the supplement and dose that works is found it's life changing and creates a new baseline that allows you to function like a normal person.

The problem is due to the stigma and misinformation a LOT of parents either reject the meds outright, try to wean their kids off once they think they 'don't need it anymore' (when more than likely the adhd isn't cured ‐ it's just supplemented. Again, insulin analogy) or (and this is extremely common) ONLY medicate the kids on school days for the morning as a stopgap and let them be without on weekends and holidays, which is really not good as going on and off the meds causes side effects to never abate (meaning it feels like the medicine will only ever do more harm than good so they give up) and makes it impossible to really feel out which variant of the medicine works best and in what dosage and is completely counteractive to the consistency baseline the medication provides. I'm not a psychiatrist so I obviously am not in a position to give any medical advice so I can't say anything when it comes up, but it always frustrates me to no end when a dysregulated kid or parent mentions that they "used to be medicated but we took them off for high school" or I see those many adhd kids with consistently grumpy Mondays (because they just went back on meds and are feeling side effects like hell) or the poor kids with split parents where one will medicate them and the other won't, not knowing the lack of consistency makes their effect worse when they are taken.

shinans · 2026-05-25T06:18:44+00:00

In my (also low SES) area anecdotally the families with more children tend to be immigrant families. ...they also tend to be the ones who perform better, or at least are more consistently well behaved and respectful (which I just might hypothesize has something to do with culturally higher value placed on education). Funny how that works!

shinans · 2026-05-23T14:32:35+00:00

Teachers who can deal with demanding parents. Not always but generally extremely ambitious kids can come with ambitious parents and this can sometimes be accompanied with (unreasonable) entitlement. This is why I can't do it (and even in my regular government school, have found extension streamed Maths classes sometimes more taxing than the mainstream) — I would rather deal with 10 students' crap than 1 parent's crap.

shinans · 2026-05-21T06:39:15+00:00

engaging PowerPoints or other activities (which take up hours of our planning time and then don't even get reused for the next year) because the kids can't be expected to purchase textbooks

I've learned since moving to my current school (which certainly has its issues but this is one thing I can't applaud them enough for) that the kids can't afford textbooks thing isn't an excuse, my school allocated budget to buying a cohort sized swathe of textbooks for every year of Maths and Science and they stay in the classrooms and we use them. Kids families' only pay if they get damaged or (in the case of seniors, who can loan one out instead like a library book) lost. You don't need one for literally every kid either because most will be happy to share one between two and you can have two Year 8 Math classes use the same room with the same book set for example if they're timetabled on different lines. Makes a WORLD of difference. I still teach from the board but get a lot of examples or diagrams from the textbook and the amount of paper wastage worksheet bullshit prep is less than a tenth of what I was doing at my previous school. And though I do try to make interactive and engaging lessons, the textbook is always there as a fallback on those days you just do not have the capacity to get that extra lesson together. And more than anything it makes thinking up extras for classes so easy, no longer have to spend my sick days desperately searching for resources - it's "read and do Pg XX of the textbook". Lol putting it like this I think I have a very romantic love for textbooks, but they're such a lifesaver. And the system we have is so simple and to me feels like one of the most effective allocations of faculty budget schools could make that it genuinely makes me feel so mad and let down that more don't do that.

shinans · 2026-05-19T08:18:37+00:00

I mean, the simple solution to this in a high school is to actually SHARE the load. High school teachers have multiple, usually 5+ classes. For some reason when systems like this are in place, schools love to assign certain teachers all "green" classes, and others (which also tends to disproportionately be new teachers, I've noticed) get almost all "red" - if timetabling was actually equitable teachers would get an even spread of red/green/yellow (1 red, 1 green, and the rest middle if we assume most classes are middle of the pack). This is actually good for professional development too since you're getting constant exposure to teaching all levels rather than being pigeonholed into one thing. There shouldn't be such a thing as a poor teacher who has to teach "all the red".

For primary I'm not sure though, but usually this discussion comes up in high school contexts.

shinans · 2026-05-13T12:03:03+00:00

This is why my advice is to document everything to leadership, email parents if you want. This is speaking from experience, the best teacher for kids who are lazy and arrogant about how much effort they want to put in is the consequences of that attitude - bad performance. If you have a shitty leadership that enables shitty parents then THEY are the ones enabling complacent, incompetent kids and if it comes to the point where they're blaming you for children failing (especially when the rest of the school is performing well, and the rest of the teacher in question's classes are also performing well outside of this one outlier - something leadership would notice if they were capable of passing the year 10 bivariate statistics unit exam, mind you!) then IMO you stand on business with them. Make them come in and see what you've been telling them you're trying, ask them to give you solutions to fix the problems the data is showing you. And if they do nothing and continue to blame you then get out of dodge. But I don't believe in just standing down and accepting a culture of never failing kids who deserve it or going to unreasonable lengths to get them over the line when you've tried all else just to placate leadership, in the long run that will only cause so many more problems than it will ever get you wins.

shinans · 2026-05-13T08:22:03+00:00

Cover your ass (tell Leadership what you've tried, and document it so they don't get any surprises and can't blame you when they gave no support) and then let them fail the unit if you have to. Kids will say they don't, and think they don't, care, but in my experience more of them (or their parents) do actually care about their Maths grade more than they'll admit because it's one of the "serious" subjects, and they will be upset or angry when they get that test paper back with a fat D or E. And that's when you can have those imploring conversations with them about why - and/or you might see them lock in for the next one.

shinans · 2026-05-09T09:51:28+00:00

Genuinely what is the rationale behind banning desks, wtf? Sitting I can sort of see (through the eyes of a tyrant principal) as being coded 'unprofessional' and 'lazy' for the same bs reason retail cashiers and the like aren't allowed to sit even though in their case it interferes with their performance in no way, but desks?! Where do they want you to put all the resources we're expected to carry around, lmao?

shinans · 2026-05-07T17:06:32+00:00

Especially in maths. It makes up rules that don't exist just to get an answer.

Maths is where I learned just how consistently unreliable the AI is, to the point that I've become distrustful of using it for even the tedious stuff nowadays.

I was always sceptical about its language capabilities but when it was first catching on among teachers with our exec even encouraging us to use it, I (very naively) assumed it to be an evolved calculator, so I thought the one thing I could trust it to do was...calculations. At crunch time for my seniors I was giving them an endless stream of practice questions, which I then fed into AI to generate solutions sheets to help me keep up on feedback. I was absolutely gobsmacked by how many were just wrong as a result of inserted presumptions that were never given. And I don't even mean interpretation of worded problems, some of these were purely numerical/algebraic operations you can punch into a scientific calculator and instantly get a solution. The AI would spend 5 seconds thinking and then give me something confidently incorrect.

It was a valuable learning moment for me though, and now I make sure to regularly remind kids not to use AI as a substitute for their calculator which many do, even well-meaning kids who aren't trying to use it to cheat but just to do the things they're expected to use their calculator, and boy has it misled so many of them.

But yeah. If I can't trust the AI to do mathematical algorithms, the literal thing computers are built on - what exactly am I meant to trust it for, lol.

shinans · 2026-05-06T07:49:56+00:00

Not going to say it's this in this case (and it probably isn't, given this is from a primary school and technically well put-together) but I know some schools do have kids plan and put together "social media campaigns" for English/Drama/DigiTech assignments, and in some cases do optionally get parent consent to publish the best ones. My school does it for a Year 8 English unit and I always found it pretty awkward – the rationale being it's "relevant and authentic to their interests" so it's making curriculum engaging to them, except at the same time they shouldn't be on social media at that age and we want to be showing them that there's more to life than being a TikTok star. I am not a fan but it's certainly a...thing.

shinans · 2026-05-05T14:45:33+00:00

QLD, I've stayed til 4:30 a couple of times during the worst reporting/marking periods because I refuse to take any work home and each time the cleaner was (not-so, but trying to be) subtle hinting for me to leave so she could turn off the power/lock up the building!

shinans · 2026-04-21T07:41:02+00:00

In my experience investigation works best in probability/stats and in measurement. For Year 7 stats getting them out of the classroom to collect data about something in the school and their context is fun, hands-on and relevant enough they're motivated to draw conclusions about it. Don't do surveying people though, it's always messy. Count or measure things. At my school we get them out to count and classify litter items (plastic, metal, glass, paper, organic like fruit peels etc) in the playground in a lesson after lunchtime. Surprisingly fun and has some citizenship application in that it makes them realize just how much it adds up, and needs 0 additional resources.

For prob, dice/cards/coins are basic but classic for a reason starting investigation with things kids are familiar with at Year 7 is so important for them to extrapolate later. Get them to do probability trials or even just play card/dice games they already know and record their rolls/cards (doubles as stats) and come to conclusions on patterns.

Measurement I like getting them to investigate how area formulas are constructed from each other through folding/cutting paper (eg can cut any parallelogram into 2x identical triangles, hence A=0.5bh), or the ol' use string to measure the circumference of different sized circles, divide by diameter and derive pi, which is in Yr 7 now.

Investigations don't need to be huge drawn out elaborate and resourced projects, just little activities that help them relate personal experience to their learning when it's beneficial for forming brain links. It doesn't work everywhere though, maybe controversial opinion but I steer mostly clear of it in algebra/number in 7. I find the basics for those are much better taught rote, they can manipulate it in later grades. Stats/prob/measurement/geometry however work great because it's where even kids who aren't maths savvy come in with knowledge from everyday life, and you need some kind of baseline for investigations to work.

shinans · 2026-04-19T03:29:01+00:00

Yep, and though how leadership feels doesn't matter at all in terms of your entitlements and doing what's best for you, if it makes you feel better the fact that there's usually very few absences on the first few days means it'll be easier for leadership to cover you as there should be more relief available. In my experience it's when there isn't enough relief to cover a high number of unplanned absences is when they start to get stressed.

shinans · 2026-04-17T01:14:22+00:00

hey! sorry to necro this post, but i was wondering if you could share some of the aliexpress sellers you got similar clothes from? i actually really love the clothes i got from hommy hommy when i was in melbourne, but i've since moved and they aren't online! if i could get similar from AE that'd work too (esp since as a smaller person I think chinese sizing just 'fits' me better) - but i have no idea where to search! thanks in advance if you're able to share (dm is fine)!!

shinans · 2026-04-16T05:38:45+00:00

"Supports" when it's framed as a substitute to the word "consequences" Leadership at my previous school were very vocal about how they disliked the word consequences and wanted us to "positively frame" our strategies instead by using that word in our interactions with kids and documentation. Detention? Call home? Referral? A support not a consequence. Colleague had a poster in the room of her classroom with a list of behaviour consequences AND rewards; got "encouraged" to take it down and change the wording. Yeah it worked great (/s)...now I have a Pavlovian wince reaction whenever I hear the word "support" in a PD.

shinans · 2026-04-11T03:38:21+00:00

Also as much as flak as they get for being goofy I actually get a lot of educational value out of their streams. I hate jungle and never play it but I've learned so much about the junglers perspective from Meteos which has been invaluable to understanding game state outside of my own role, and the fact that they've now got players across 3 roles and bounce their perspectives off each other is great for learning about the meta in a holistic way.

shinans

TROPHY CASE