I just can't believe why people in the US let this happen. It's not inevitable - hell, I should know, I've gone to school in both Poland and France. There was a bit of bullying, namecalling etc, but I was lucky with homeroom teachers who always caught on and defused such situations pretty quickly. If anything, it was more boys vs girls in primary school...
I'm not trying to generalize, but having done informal follow-up on a few local incidents near me that hit the newspapers...a lot of school districts don't have the funding to hire enough teachers. Average class-teacher ratio in U. S. public schools is something like 30-35 kids to one teacher, I think; you get a school with 25 kids to a teacher and that's considered great. I don't remember exactly, but I believe class-teacher ratios in other countries are much lower.
Over here it was something like 30+ kids in one class (who had all their classes together), and I think in primary school (year 7 to year 14) all teachers but the gym coaches were assigned their own class - they'd get an additional period with them to make sure there were no problems etc. We had the perfect teacher in the first four years, she'd notice everything in minutes and solve it terribly smoothly. It worked the same way in secondary school (ok, more teachers didn't have their own classes since there were so many subjects), and there it helped that everyone in my school was a geek. We went with the entire class to see the first Matrix, for one...
I think the stable classes themselves might contribute to having less problems - even if there were quarrels and cliques in our class A (and there were, I even had a nemesis yay!), the moment someone from class B (or gods forbid C through E, since prestige was apparently assigned alphabetically) tried to join in on the picking, everyone would close ranks and attack them. Ostracizing didn't work that way either, since bad/ugly/stinky or not, that person was on our side.
Over here, middle school is when they start the college-like class structure: you have a different set of people for a different class.
Sometimes I wonder if sex-ed class had much to do with things. It is scientifically shown that adolescent mood swings stem from changes in hormone levels, but I remember that info being presented in my school as if the kids couldn't help it in any way, as if you can't learn to control it to some extent. We're just supposed to be nasty and weepy and work it all out of our systems by the end of high school, when we magically turn into mature adults. *shrugs* I may just have an unusual school system.
And then they wonder where the entitlement bitches come from, and why Americans in general are considered so rude. Or why America's therapist heaven ~_~
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I think the stable classes themselves might contribute to having less problems - even if there were quarrels and cliques in our class A (and there were, I even had a nemesis yay!), the moment someone from class B (or gods forbid C through E, since prestige was apparently assigned alphabetically) tried to join in on the picking, everyone would close ranks and attack them. Ostracizing didn't work that way either, since bad/ugly/stinky or not, that person was on our side.
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Over here, middle school is when they start the college-like class structure: you have a different set of people for a different class.
Sometimes I wonder if sex-ed class had much to do with things. It is scientifically shown that adolescent mood swings stem from changes in hormone levels, but I remember that info being presented in my school as if the kids couldn't help it in any way, as if you can't learn to control it to some extent. We're just supposed to be nasty and weepy and work it all out of our systems by the end of high school, when we magically turn into mature adults. *shrugs* I may just have an unusual school system.
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