By Don Hall

Back in 1989 I started my decade-long career as a seventh and eighth grade music teacher on the West side of Chicago. Coming from a series of grade schools around the country, a high school in the middle of Where the Fuck Are We Again?, Kansas and a college in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the rules of the teaching road had adapted some from my upbringing.

I was told as a new teacher that Chicago students were not expelled. They were not suspended. There was no corporal punishment of any kind. If students were disruptive or violent, it was our job to deal with it with fewer and fewer tools at our disposal while still attempting to teach the rest of the thirty kids in each period.

Being a young and creative teacher-type, I came up with alternative methods to punish students for monkey-wrenching my lesson plans. I would tell a student to count down thirteen lines on a piece of paper and mark a dot on the thirteenth line. They were told to stare at that dot silently or be kept after school. I’d have them stand on two tiles in the room silently or be kept after school. I’d put them to work cleaning graffiti off the walls in my hallway (until it was deemed to be corporal punishment by the school district once a parent complained).

Eventually, I landed upon one of the band practice rooms across the hall. I dubbed it the Hot Room and made up a story that this specific room had a broken radiator and was horribly hot (there were no radiators and the windows opened easily but kids are gullible so the ruse worked). The Hot Room was a temporary time-out for students hellbent on either fucking around in order to prevent anything from being done or in such a violent mood that beating the shit out of another kid just seemed like the only road to travel.

In my book, Strippers, Guns, and The Holocaust Museum: OR: How I Survived My Time as a Chicago Public School Music Teacher, I have a story about the Hot Room I think is worth checking out.

As my time as a teacher began to wane, I was informed that forcing children to stand on tiles or stare at dots on a page were considered corporal punishment and that I could no longer keep children after school. The result was that there was simply no tool available to deal with asshole kids, which resulted in every teacher spending approximately thirty-three of their meager forty minutes of instruction time trying to gain a modicum of control over the classroom environment. No consequences to misbehavior meant that the inmates were running the asylum.

If you believe for one second that kids can’t be assholes or should be given a pass for acting out their sociopathic fantasies, you’ve never encountered a human child. Greta Thunberg aside, most pre-teens and teenagers are consumptive little beasts with little else but the demise of any adult within their sense of smell.

And now this:

There’s an Emergency Ban on Isolated Timeouts in Illinois Schools. What’s Next?

“Two days after Gov. J.B. Pritzker ordered Illinois schools to immediately stop secluding children alone in timeout rooms, educators and parents tried to grasp the implications of the new prohibition on a practice that had been embedded in schools for decades.

School districts sent letters to parents saying they would no longer put children in locked rooms, while the head of the Illinois State Board of Education apologized to families and said the law that had been in effect ‘did not sufficiently regulate’ isolated timeout, causing “lasting trauma.”

I’m a bonafide Leftie with all my liberal merit badges but even I am aghast for teachers today. Without even the possibility of removing students from a room full of kids to calm them down or punish them with a bit of isolation from the very attention they so desperately crave, educators are fucked. “Lasting trauma?” How about the lasting trauma of an inability to connect consequence with behavior? How about the lasting trauma of kids with no regard for accountability running rampant in vehicles on the roads?

How traumatic for a child taught he can pretty much get away with anything in school with no possible consequence to be put in jail? What about the trauma of a young woman realizing that the consequence of not paying her bills equals eviction from her home? What shock and awe when these protected students are confronted with other, perhaps more violent protected students in a clash of wills and a bat in the Pizza Hut parking lot at 10:30 p.m. on a school night?

Is it any wonder that Gen Z voluntarily take out loans for college, get degrees, and then decide they shouldn’t have to pay the loans back because they’re for more money than they have, which they knew when they signed up for it in the first place? And how bizarre that a student can viciously beat another in class and receive no consequence but a teacher can be fired for refusing to use preferred pronouns.

A few years ago, I toe-dipped back into substitute teaching in Chicago only to realize that I couldn’t even take a student’s smartphone away if she was texting random people in class. I knew then that I was long finished with teaching because teachers without appropriate tools to manage the hordes of hormonal monkeys is like a zookeeper who is only allowed to enter the lion cage naked, covered in meat.