I never got to experience that again at school after I left the second grade.

So be it! That's life.

It only takes a few to ruin it for everybody.

Not quite sure what you're getting at here but insofar as progressive education was an explicit philosophy reflected in policies and actions, it was centered.

>But most schools are not organized that way, and there’s only so much one teacher can do to buck the system. As it was, I got fired from that particular job after two years, and it wasn’t because I was too strict, certainly.

No disagreement there, and I'm sorry to hear you got fired. I'm sure your students appreciated you doing your part to make things less shitty.

It's perfectly normal for bowel movements to be on a schedule. If a student it leaving your class multiple time per week then have a discussion to see what's going on, you might learn something about their life that paints them in a new light. Or, maybe discuss the possibility of going before class starts if possible.

I think people are downvoting your original comment because referring a student directly to the nurse is a strange thing to threaten upfront.

Again speaking from experience, there’s nothing more humiliating than leaving a bloody mark in your desk because your teacher limits bathroom passes. And even if you think that you would make an exception, many well-behaved students won’t speak up, hoping they can make it to the next class. If you’re ‘enlightened’ enough to let your students go to the bathroom three times a week, you’re enlightened enough to call the truants on their BS without penalizing the rest of the class.

I of course chose disobeying, but I'm pretty sure that the teacher would be far less strict in the future if I went the other route.

Just turn on your voice recorder and go.

I can't imagine any good reason for that policy other than covering for terrible people.

Is there an expectation of privacy in a public school classroom?

Have you done that? Sue the powerful (a school board) from a position of powerlessness (black working class in the ghetto)? Probably not, unfair question. Do you really think it is a realistic prospect? Really?

Obstructing a child from using the bathroom who needs to is a form of abuse. If that teacher then physically restrains or otherwise contacts/touches the child to prevent them, especially if it culminates in their wetting/soiling themselves, this starts resembling something along the lines of sexual abuse.

If there's one thing the USA can be relied on it's both society and the law leaning heavily in the direction of protecting the children, to a fault.

This situation is literally just a phone call away from completely ruining the teacher's career if not life.

I hear people with theories, but child services the world over are famous for nice theories and systematic abuse. Especially for minority and poor children

And being the teen that I was, it's not like I had an otherwise perfect attendance in any of my high school years.

4 hours without food seems very short, it only would be a problem if the main food source would be fast carbs which let the blood sugar drop very quickly afterwards.

Freudian slip?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hangry

..and I just learned the word is over a century old, it's definitely not new slang.

Obesity comes from ultimately consuming more calories than calories exerted. Your body learns (maybe this is the wrong word) to store fats when there are long periods of time without eating

I strongly agree with the avoiding carbs and sticking to healthy fats and that it reduces the obesity problem to none.

I definitely agree that obesity comes from consuming more calories that exerting.

I strongly disagree that fat gets stored when you don't eat for a longer time. The exact opposite is the case, nothing can be stored when you don't eat. When you rise blood sugar the body releases insulin which is the fat storage hormone. So the less often you do it the less fat gets stored.

In the US, most prisons have an open, bare toilet in the cell shared by a few cell mates. Even if one can technically use it whenever, according to what @throwaway998662 says, in practice this means you can only crap during the 1-2 hours a day when your cell mate(s) are gone.

Yeah, you could get a capricious teacher that says "no" when you ask, but that doesn't seem like much in comparison to the degradation and potential for violence of using the toilet in prison...

I was a good kid!

If I had of robbed or killed someone and been to Juvenile Hall, my pants would probably have been dry.

The world chews up and spits out good kids. I vowed early on that I wouldn't let anyone shit on me again and it really shaped my early life, not necessarily for the better. I overshot assertive by a decent margin.

Fortunately, I eventually settled into a healthy middle ground. I do wonder if there is a method of preparing "good kids" for the world of shit they are about to encounter in a manner that is a net benefit to them (ie. Not scarred or jaded by it). Not that I'm ever having kids.

The teacher on the other hand might decide it was time for a trip to the principal's office & call home to parents because the student caused a disruption to the class by leaving without permission.

It is indeed exactly as you said. The world chewed me up for being innocent. I was routinely physically assaulted at school. These things were passed off as roughhousing or joking and the adults never intervened, and some even seemed to appreciate the "humor."

The adults rolled their eyes at me essentially for being weak, it was sort of like "sigh, what are we gonna do with that kid?" It occurs to me now that these were bitter, jaded people who hated a child for his naiveté.

If I defended myself, I was the bad guy. At some point I thought: "it doesn't make sense that I am the one who is right and that everyone else is wrong, so maybe I should be more like those guys." But then I got punished too. For example, it was considered funny for people to kick me in the balls at times. It had happened to me 10+ times and nobody got punished. Regrettably, I did it once to another kid and it was a scandal and I got punished.

I am in a healthy place now but I thank God I got through the teen and young adult years without becoming a criminal. I think I easily could have, because I came out of school a deeply damaged individual.

There was one time a kid got denied wrongfully because the teacher thought he was part of a group that was causing trouble right before that. He had a half-empty Gatorade bottle in his backpack from lunch... he was sitting in the back of class and chugged it while the teacher wasn't looking. He then refilled it with a different yellow liquid, if you know what I mean. I'm a bit surprised the teacher didn't catch him and that nobody freaked out and snitched.

I substitute taught for a few years after college, and you can't leave the classroom at all except during your prep period. It was really bad some days.

As a contrast, at my school the policy was far more reasonable: you still needed permission to leave, but if you didn't abuse the privilege—using it every day, or disappearing for half the lesson—the teacher wouldn't give you any grief.

A codified system is bound to introduce problems: 'You get one bathroom break during class per week, and you've used yours, but this is an emergency? Sorry, I trust you, but the system says I have to give you detention if you go.'

My point was that the problem was with GP's specific (though perhaps commonplace) school culture/teachers, not the general idea of requiring permission.

Uhm. Where in the world do you live?! :O

Prison food probably means you have to break the taboo some days no matter what.

Business school classes were very much like high school, at least the ones I took (I was not a business major). Assigned seats, attendance taken, etc. Don't recall if bathroom trips needed permission as I always handled that before class started.

Math and science classes were generally much more informal. Class met at a specified time and place, and nobody paid much attention to who was there or not. I would occasionally sit in on other classes I was considering taking, to see if I liked the instructor.

At my university, attendance at lectures and tutorials was optional and no attendance was taken (for most subjects). Most people went to the lectures but attendance at tutorials was much more mixed. I tended to skip tutorials a lot.

I remember one year I promised myself "This year I'm going to turn up to everything". So I went to the first tutorial for one of my CS subjects. The tutor asked us "Is there anything you didn't understand from the lecture?" We all said "No". He said, "Then why did you bother coming to the tutorial?"

Then he told us he was trying to teach himself quantum physics as an excuse to not work on his PhD thesis. He asked us if anyone knew quantum physics. One guy in the class was a physics major and offered to give the tutor a quantum physics lesson. The rest of us just left. And the tutor would have put that down on his timesheet and got paid for it.

I didn't bother going to any more tutorials for that subject.

In hindsight, maybe I should have complained, I probably could have got that tutor in a lot of trouble. But I didn't.

Might be good you didn't. I obviously don't know the particulars here, but I've learned that the attitude of the university teaching staff can be confusing because of non-obvious job reasons.

At my university, there was this PhD having labs with us who I liked - she seemed one of the smarter and wiser of the people I've dealt with up to that point. A year or two after those classes, we ended up having a discussion about upcoming changes in the curriculum. I asked if she'll still be running the same labs she did with us, at which point she almost burst into tears and said something like, "oh god I hope not". I was perplexed by it, until she explained to me that she never wanted these labs, she was forced by her superiors to run them, and they are completely unrelated to the domain of her research. That insight made me understand several other cases of PhDs and professors that seemed incompetent and/or disinterested - it's not that they were bad or stupid; it's because the university mismanaged them into teaching things entirely outside their domain.

This story aired in TV and probably it's no longer the case. Also it likely bends the truth a bit, but nevertheless this is so unsettling and absurd that I wanted to share it.

1) Adult bladders are larger, we're more experienced in judging the severity of our needs so we're unlikely to hold it to the point of physical injury. In kids, especially when they've been trained to artificially "hold it in" by schools, they become less sensitized to their needs and can develop problems ranging from UTI's to incontinence.

2) Teachers went to the bathroom all of the time when I was in school, they'd pull the school nurse, or a secretary, or teacher's assistant from somewhere to watch the class for a few minutes.

3) Taxi drivers can stop in between trips.

4a) Bus drivers on long-hauls can stop at rest stops, and do so regularly both for themselves & their passengers.

4b) Apart from city buses, many buses (like Greyhounds) have a bathroom on board so a rest stop isn't even required, just a pull off to the side of the road & take their keys with them to the back of the bus

4c) Buses that run frequent stop local routes, There's generally a place to go at each end of the route, but there is actually employer abuse in this area with schedules so tight and penalties for running behind schedule meaning the have a place to go is only one of the concerns. Wearing adult diapers isn't uncommon, and transit unions routinely fight for bathroom rights. But this awful situation for a certain group of workers is not at all a justification for inflicting similar constraints on other people, much less children with developing bodies.

Well it’s not like you have to be there at all, so no ones going to care why you get up and leave.

In grade school, every time someone asks permission to use the bathroom they stop the flow of the lesson and valuable time is lost. In college the idea is that most of the students are responsible enough to handle the bathroom and food.

And how much valuable time is lost here, weighed against the extreme distraction a student has if they can't go? Besides, once the student has raised their hand and been called on, the flow is already disrupted. Answering "yes" or "no" is irrelevant at that point.

Do you have a proposal that both meets biological needs and doesn't run the minor risk of disruption? Disruptions occur constantly anyway every time a student asks a questions when they don't understand, even when most others do.

I simply fail to see how "stop the flow of the lesson" is either very relevant to unpreventable biological needs, or an unsolvable problem in its own right.

It was actually harder in high school because other than lunch, you had minimal passing time between classes (just a few minutes) so if you stopped to go to the bathroom there was a good chance you'd be late to your next class. And of course no recess. Lunch and P.E. were the two chances you had per day to use the bathroom without having to ask.

It's fine to ask kids to go when there's specific opportunities, but that doesn't justify restrictive policies during other times: Tiny bladders of small children don't work that way. Especially in grade school, it doesn't need to take more than 15-20 minutes to go from "I'm fine" to "I a really need to go". Especially when bathroom privileges are rationed out & tightly controlled and you become hyper aware of your bladder state. I have my two young kids "do a try" in the bathroom before we leave the house for any car ride. That doesn't stop the occasional "I have to go!" 20 minutes into the trip. And sure enough, at the rest stop it's like my kid turned from a 6 year old into an elephant from the amount that comes out of their body.

When & how quickly you develop the need to urinate depends on a lot of factors: Your specific metabolism, recent activity, what you drank and ate, body position, and probably more. And at some point mentally, you simply pass a threshold where one minute you feel no need to go to the bathroom, and the next minute you do. If that "next minute" occurs 10 minutes after lunch break, so what? What is gained by denying that need?

This is a fairly reductive statement. Dealing with children is incredibly taxing and difficult. Teachers are [in my country] underpaid and under-appreciated and I believe this kind of rhetoric doesn’t do them justice. People began to appreciate teachers during the pandemic’s home schooling period, but that seems [anecdotally] to have dropped off since children have returned to regular schooling.

> when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?."

Because you were [likely] an adult now who needs to be able to regulate their own behaviours. No surprise here.

My comment was also not a reductive statement when I've been told "no" when I ask to go to the bathroom, or told "3 people have already gone to the bathroom, you'll have to wait until next period."

Both of these specific situations, and variations, happened to me. I watched a classmate pee their pants once when they were denied access to the bathroom.

Want to talk about job stress? Think about the stress an 8 year old goes through when every time they feel their bladder getting full they start worrying about whether they'll be allowed to pee, or have to wait until the next class or recess/lunch, learning nothing in the meantime and hoping they're not the next kid that has to have their parents bring a change of clothes.

I don't know what country you're in. I'm in the US, and quality of pay varies greatly from state to state. Workload (class size) often varies with the socioeconomic status of the people in that school district. What doesn't vary in any conversation I've had with people on this topic is that my experiences are very much not unique.

I sympathise with your situation that a child peeing in their pants is not ok under any circumstances. My point was that’s it’s difficult, nigh impossible, to discern between a child copying another’s behaviour and a child in need. This is simply a fact of having 30+ 8 year olds acting as non-rational actors in a classroom setting. This is the point of difference to your original college statement that you could now be considered to act rationally and therefore don’t need to ask permission.

Finally regarding pay, some quick searches show the median income in America to be $60k. My point was that this is indeed undervalued in my opinion when compared to other Industries. You may disagree on that regard, but it’s my opinion understanding what I do about their expected output.

I wish that had resulted in a lawsuit.

People began to appreciate them for the daycare aspect and not really teaching. The statement might be reductive, but it's also the experience that many kids have with teachers and school.

No surprise it's difficult if you already sour the relationship by treating them poorly and give the kids a reason to hate you from day one. Maybe things will be better if you don't start by making up petty rules that don't help anyone?

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In middle school I remember we had a maths teacher who was very good, in the sense that she let us do pretty much whatever we wanted as long as we weren't disrupting anyone else. This ended up working out well for both sides; those who wanted to learn and engage with the coursework could do so, and those who gave up on it and weren't interested could relax and entertain themselves to make time fly instead of being bored and dreading the class.

In comparison, we had a very severe history teacher, who'd give you spiteful extra assignments (which would escalate further if you didn't do them) if you were lacking in one way or another. Did it help? I don't think so; I remember more about dreading the class and making up excuses/strategies to get away from the class or the assignments than the content of the coursework itself, and I can say for sure that the class was universally hated and dreaded.