Fear in Today's Schools

The role of our schools is to give an education to children and get them ready for lives as adults. As with many other aspects of our society today, our school systems have issues that make this goal hard to accomplish. These issues range from the small, such as the cafeteria food being disgusting, to big problems, like no respect between teachers and students. One problem not completely looked at in depth is fear. Fear is in our lives everyday; from being scared of a little spider, to being scared of having no one to sit with at the lunch table. Everyone has fears as children and adults. The fear a teacher feels about his or her students can change how the school is run, just as much as the fear a student feels about a teacher. Fear has a hold on today's school system and changes the way teachers teach their students, as well as students' capabilities to learn the subject properly.

When I was in school, the students ran the school by spreading fear into the teachers' hearts. They would torture the teachers they didn't like by putting laxatives in their coffee or water in their gas tank. There was one student who didn't turn in an assignment all year but had good grades on tests, so he was passing. At the end of the year he turned in all of his assignments to the principal to show the teacher's failure to grade homework and, in this way, get her fired. Actions like these escalated to the point that we went through eight English teachers in a semester. Students can not properly learn the subjects when a class goes through that many teachers. But this sort of incident was typical. Teachers feared that they would be fired or that today a student would make them cry.

These types of events happen in more than just the school I att...

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...ied, having a good teacher or bad teacher, and if their friends are really friends. I know from experience school can be a extremely threatening thing. High school for me was not easy. I remember walking down the halls and getting tripped and stepped on, sitting in class having paper thrown in my hair, and walking in the lunch room to someone standing up and screaming “Here comes Kansas” since I was flat chested. There were many days I feared coming to school because the bulling was so bad. That wasn't the only thing I was scared of though, I was also scared that my friends weren't necessarily my friends and were talking behind my back which had happened many times before. There is also that one teacher that every school has that only focuses on certain students and so it makes it impossible to learn the subject. Students fear school just as much as the teachers do.