I'm minded of the near-weekly rule overhauls by the various assistant principals at my HS, coming off as desperate attempts to make up for their own lack of authority.
Kids have healthy prostate glands. They'll be fine.
I should admit upfront to two biases:
1) I have an extreme sense of the degree to which we as a society should be trusting children to know their own needs (and, simultaneously, teaching them to assess and respond to their own needs, and where there are boundaries). So I'm already biased toward thinking that policies that c
2) I spent six years supervising a program in a large high school where bathroom passes were an unbelievable issue. As in, people's ability to use the facilities was routinely abused by those who had power to dispense passes.
Even though this was a large school that genuinely had problems with hall-walking and violence,* I still found (find) this unforgivable.
*Among other reasons, because sometimes a student chooses to go to the bathroom during class rather than a break because it's safer for them to do that. Talk about depressing.
What the heck, sentence fragment?
So I'm already biased toward thinking that policies that crudely restrict liberty in ways that often don't even serve their professed purpose are a Bad Idea.
But whether or not a teacher chooses to be borderline-abusive with regard to hall passes is pretty irrelevant to the presence of an incentive policy like this. That depends on the temperament of the teacher entirely, and not behavior-incentive-gimmicks laid out on Day 1.
I suspect that the presence of a policy like this is largely to allow teachers to be borderline-abusive.
I mean, short of teachers intentionally ignoring the rules here and deliberately exempting students from them this kind of monitoring/penalizing/etc. basic stuff in this way seems to me like a pretty explicit petty-tyranny rule. It's hard to imagine any other, legitimate purpose for it serious enough to justify this kind of thing.
It's hard to imagine any other, legitimate purpose for it serious enough to justify this kind of thing.
Preventing 15 kids from asking to use the bathroom in every single class.
It also seems like the sort of policy that's set up perfectly to be abused in order to assert power/bully/otherwise hurt students by other students. I have very little trouble imagining a few students blocking some student they don't like from getting to the bathroom the entire day, and forcing them to eventually use a pass. And repeat this for, say, a week and you get a near perfect kind of bullying! Hard to demonstrate that they're doing it, and effectively endorsed by the authority figures. It's what every bully dreams of!
Actually I have more trouble imagining no one ever doing it, honestly.
I, on the other hand, have a possibly unfair and irrational bias that people should learn to monitor and control their biological functions more than they do. An average human should be able to go an hour or two without hitting the bathroom. In fact, they usually do when it's something they care about missing.
But arbitrary rules will inevitably be wrong some of the time and draconian arbitrary rules will end up being wrong most of the time, so this is not a solution. I just end up stewing to myself when students leave to use the bathroom every single meeting.
Huh. I want to be on the warm and fuzzy hippie side of everything, but I do think that 'kids fooling around and ducking out of class' is going to be a much, much, much more frequent occurrence than kids being bullied or terrorized out of using the bathrooms between classes.
This is a stupid policy -- grades shouldn't be linked to non-academic behavior -- but I wouldn't care if the policy were "no one leaves during class except in an emergency. If it's an emergency, convince the teacher. If you've got a medical need that means you generally can't hold it for an hour, talk to the school about an accommodation."
Preventing 15 kids from asking to use the bathroom in every single class....can be easily achieved with totally normal policies and not demented ones like this one.
When I was a TA, I had to police bathroom use during exams with increasingly strict rules. Student after student was caught with cheat sheets hidden in or disposed of in the nearby bathrooms. The final policy was to insist students turn out all their pockets (what?!) before letting them leave. This was awesome during finals when I had the girl who was up all night studying who drank five cups of coffee before the exam. It was such a petty policy. I felt like such an asshole. I can't imagine having to enforce something like a restroom log. What a bullshit waste of a teacher's time.
This policy may be silly, but basically it offers extra credit for not being overly disruptive. That's hardly demented.
One of my high school English teachers docked grades based on attendance. The teacher's logic was that if a student missed a day of book discussion, their highest possible score would be a B, regardless of either quality or quantity of participation on the other days (so missing one day a week meant you got a B that week rather than an A, with every week averaged somehow). What did high school me do? Insisted a parent take off work to drop me off to this class, the final period of the day, so I wouldn't risk getting a B. I'd figure I could sit up for the one hour the class took no matter how sick I was. I wasn't sick really often, but enough to worry me. My parents were both utterly pissed about the policy. I'm curious about what portion of the final grade a restroom pass costs. I'm hoping it's trivial, like a single homework assignment or something.
How disruptive would it be just to hang the stupid pass at the door and let students come and go as needed without raised hands or permission? Seems less disruptive than keeping a log and charging points.
Offering extra credit for not going to the bathroom is strange but probably mostly harmless. But this bit seems to me to be a really bad idea: "Students will be allowed to use the hall pass a maximum of 3 times per quarter.."
"Have to go to the bathroom? Sorry! You went eight, five, and three weeks ago so you're out of using-the-bathrooms!"
How disruptive would it be just to hang the stupid pass at the door and let students come and go as needed without raised hands or permission?
Seventh graders? If you didn't have a particularly engaged group of students?
Also if the defense of a rule is "I'm sure the authority figures will apply selectively" then that's pretty much a tacit acknowledgement both that the rule is a terrible one and also that it's there to give the relevant authority figures license to harass/penalize the people they don't like while letting the people they like off the hook.
17: What do you imagine happening? Maybe I'm not seeing it. A steady stream of kids coming and going? Or worse? Brawling/arguing over the pass? A line forming next to the door? I mean, if you have a disengaged class, they'll find a bajillion ways to be disruptive, like jiggling the chair in front of them or passing notes/texting/playing games/whispering/whatever. I can't imagine the pass being the make-or-break element in having a class that's a mess.
7th grade seems like a likely age to engage in bathroom related terror, so I could easily imagine a terrorized student preferring to pee during class time to minimize the risk of unpleasant encounters in the loo. I feel sorrier for those kids than a teacher struggling to maintain order through the exercise of petty tyranny.
I have had a college class with disruptive overuse of the facilities. It was a low-level ASL class with a particularly weird mix of students, and there were some other classroom management issues, but the bathroom thing was out of control. I finally banned bathroom breaks (which I had never done before). There were two or three people who were going to the bathroom or getting water every single class, sometimes multiple times. And staying in the hallway for unreasonably long amounts of time. The nearly-constant in-and-out would have been disruptive for any class, but it made doing partner and small-group language activities almost impossible.
Depending on the school bathroom related tyranny would be really, really easy/straightforward for students as well. In small schools this is less true, but when I switched from elementary school to the larger middle school (which like the high school covered the entire township) I had to start keeping track of which between-class-periods I even had the option of using the bathroom. Plenty of times the amount of time it took to get from one class to another would have made it impossible to take a detour to the bathroom, and use it, and still get to class before the bell rang (let alone if I needed to stop off at my locker between classes as well). Someone willing to put in the probably relatively minor effort involved could absolutely have made it impossible for me to use the bathroom without a bathroom pass (though the school was sensible about them and you just had to ask the teacher for it so there wasn't any use for potential bullies).
Recently, I've found that I sometimes don't need to pee but then do fairly quickly. I totally fear that I'd pee in my pants if I had to follow this rule.
That's what happens when you get an older prostate.
It works even if you only have one on community property grounds.
I, on the other hand, have a possibly unfair and irrational bias that people should learn to monitor and control their biological functions more than they do. An average human should be able to go an hour or two without hitting the bathroom.
I actually share this bias, insofar as it's an opinion I privately hold about people and sometimes get inwardly irritated about. The difference is that you're not making hall pass policy for average people in average situations, you're making a baseline humane policy, fully expecting it will be too "generous" for many people.
I think the "sacrifice" of having some extra false positives -- rather than some very painful-to-the-student false negatives -- is worth it. Although I can remember dance classes in my youth that had the exact poisonous dynamic that E. Messily describes, and that was certainly very irritating as a student.
I've never taught at this level, but this seems to me to fall into the category of rules that make things worse by lowering expectations. We can't imagine treating you like young adults who can pee responsibly; so we'll treat you like toddlers, and then act surprised when you live up to that.
"Every kid gets their own gallon jug to keep under the desk. Fill it up before the end of the semester, and you're out of luck."
I've also had a class like 21. 28 is a nice sentiment, but appeal to maturity/better natures is a very hit-or-miss proposition. In my class, it was simply that they realized midway through the class that the nice polite benefit-of-the-doubt-giving US teachers would always say yes to a bathroom break. Since other means of relieving boredom were not available, they started asking to go every class and taking about 15 minutes each time. There was actually no excuse, since they all had the same 4 classes in the same room with 10 minute breaks between them, so there was no conceivable way they needed to go that often or for that long.
And yet I also remember vividly how incompatible the institutional nature of high school and its various bathroom policies was with the exciting and horrible reality of early-adolescence menstruation. Fun times!
(1) Yes, with the menstruation issues. My kid is having dreadful issues with exactly that problem at her penitentiary of a high school.
(2) High schools today -- at least this one! -- have five minutes between classes. How tf do you deal with bodily necessities *and* get to your locker *and* get to class on time, in five minutes, when sixty other girls are also trying to get in the pisser for the same reason?
Her high school issues each student a little booklet. Like in the movies about Nazi Germany, when you have to show your Papers Please? Yeah, like that. When a student wants to go to the bathroom, a teacher has to sign them out in this little booklet, and then sign them back into the classroom.
And they can only been signed in and out so many times a semester. Otherwise, it's STD!
(Student Detention Day -- they get sent to In-School Prison, IOW.)
When a student wants to go to the bathroom *during* class, I meant.
They can pee all they want in those five minutes between class. But if they're late more than twice in a semester, STD!
My phone might be alarmed at how many times I type chlamydia.
How tf do you deal with bodily necessities *and* get to your locker *and* get to class on time, in five minutes, when sixty other girls are also trying to get in the pisser for the same reason?
Ugh, yes, how well I remember it. What a pile of shit it all is.
The menstruation thing is making me more and more livid the more I think about it. Super solidarity to Kid of Delegar. Argh!
On the other hand, my friends invoked menstruation to get out of doing all sorts of high school things, knowing the teachers would not challenge them on it. Kids are simultaneously wonderful and jerks.
Yes, absolutely! It goes both ways, and presumably the answer is that the whole system is what sucks.
We had bathroom passes or whatever in public school.
In private school (girls day school), if you had to go, you raised your hand and asked to go, and invariably they said yes. In high school, in my smallest classes (AP Latin 8 people, a couple of classes with 4 or 5 people), you just got up quietly and went to the bathroom. No big deal. We also didn't have study hall in the day time. It was called a "free period."
I mean, I'm convinced that evolution via natural section fits the observed world, but I don't see any reason to be so fucking happy about it. Stupid poorly designed ankle that natural selection didn't care about because I'm way old enough to have passed on my genes.
How disruptive would it be just to hang the stupid pass at the door and let students come and go as needed without raised hands or permission?
This is how Teach for America candidates end up as cutters. Ms Professor of Social Work shows nothing on her CV involving teaching anyone but college students, which isn't the same world as a low income middle school.
When I was a TA, I had to police bathroom use during exams with increasingly strict rules.
I was a TA at a place with an honor code that basically meant we couldn't police anything. TAs needed to be near the classroom during exams to answer questions but couldn't be in the room except to hand out the exams, announce time left, and collect exams at the end.
For one class final, we (the TAs) sat at a table outside of the classroom that turned out to be on the most convenient route from the room to the restrooms. I was kind of shocked how many times certain students needed to use the restroom during the up to three hours they were given to write, but also happy that we didn't have to monitor anything and could just ignore them while we sat, bored, waiting for the exam to be over.
My kid's Latin teacher just lets them go without signing the little book, and so did her (very cool) English teacher, last year.
This year, though, all of her teachers except the Latin teacher (he's the same guy) are hyper-by-the-rules. Monday she bled through her jeans because she couldn't get to the bathroom in time.
I was more angry about it that she was. She was just like WELP.
I wanted to go to school and fuck someone up.
46 Wow, that's so horrible. I'd be livid. What the fuck is wrong with these people?
It is the kind of thing that happens sometimes even without anyone keeping you from the bathroom -- a tampon failing to do its job or a pad being out of position enough to allow leaking can easily happen without your noticing it until the damage is done. Still annoying of the school, but it's not something that would be terribly unlikely in the absence of hall-pass rules.
(If the circumstances were that she knew something was going wrong, but still couldn't get permission to go to the bathroom, admittedly, I'd be irate too.)
49 is true, especially when you're a teenager and your body is erratic and you're still figuring out how to manage the logistics.
Much, much less true when you're 37 and had a hysterectomy.
When I was working as a substitute teacher, I hated enforcing those "only x times per semester" bathroom rules. I would enforce the "only one kid at a time" rule, which discouraged kids from just hanging out with their friends on a "bathroom break," and I would tell each kid to hurry back with the classroom bathroom pass so their peers could use it. But when it came to passing on the info about which kids had used the bathroom, I always found I had much more important things to write to the regular classroom teacher about.
It is distinctly possible that my attitude is influenced by having been the kid who had a bathroom accident in class back in third grade, on a day when the teacher was distracted and didn't see my frantically waving hand until it was too late. I was too much of a good kid back then to speak up or get out of my seat before the teacher called on me. The other kids kept bringing that incident up for years, all the way into high school. Yes, I do think there can be bigger classroom distractions than discretely excusing one kid to go use the bathroom, even if they are really just trying to see what the sub will let them get away with. Why do you ask?