Kids’ Lack of Respect to Teachers

By Musab Kazmi

When entering room 7 of the ISSD building on November 9th at the peak of noon, a dissonance could be heard from a table that is a couple of feet away from the door while Ms. Wahdy is lecturing the students of 8th grade about writing columns. Upon further inspection on the troubling sound, an unknown 8th grader boy is found fiddling around with his pencil pouch only to be taken away by Ms. Wahdy. The primary reasons why the pouch was taken away from this 8th grader was to avoid distracting himself and the people around him, but it was also because it was showing disrespect to the teacher, even if the student’s intention was not to be disrespectful.

This story reveals that showing disrespect towards a teacher could be done with ease even if that is not the intention. According to CNN’s Schools blog, 44 percent of teachers are victims of disrespect or bad behavior from students, but only 57 percent of those have reported it.

According to four student interviewees, the main source of disrespectful behavior towards teachers comes from careless parents who either don’t care about their child’s behavior or they defend the child’s action if he or she gets in trouble. One student said,” It’s mainly parents who are too lenient with their child, making them think whatever they do is okay.” Another student said,”Parents play a big role in this since they were responsible to raise the child in the best way possible with the best behavior, as they are the ones who control their child’s life for the first few years”. These two statements are also backed up by Dr. Lorin Bradbury, who has a PhD in psychology, who said,”when a parent defends a child from consequences for bad behavior in school, or anywhere else, that parent is conveying to the child that bad behavior is acceptable.

A couple of weeks before the incident mentioned above, another act of disrespect towards a teacher occurred in the same school. There was a presentation being presented by a policeman and a teacher specifically told the students not to raise their hands while the policeman was talking. Unfortunately for the teacher, there were many students raising their hands, disregarding whatever the teacher said.

People need to start educating parents on how to properly raise a child that will be not only respectful towards teachers but to everyone. Schools could possibly hold seminars that could teach and guide parents on how to raise on respectful child. One 8th grade student said,“Teachers have the ability to get rid of bad behavior”. This claim is also supported by Dr. Bradbury who said,”It’s well known that some teachers are able to relate to and manage children, whereas others can create a chaotic classroom. There are several things a teacher can do: 1. Treat every child with respect. 2. Be interested in the child. Someone said he found someone interesting because the person was interested. If you are interested only in dispensing information, you are less likely to have the respect of a child and less likely to have an orderly classroom”. If the ways mentioned above by Dr. Bradbury and this reporter could be put in full use, the amount of well-behaved students will burst forth while bad behavior will diminish.