Thread

1. ValueTheory · 1790606717 · focus · HN ↗

   "The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."

   This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.

   1. danesparza · 1790607033 · focus · HN ↗

      Nurses have the same shit they have to go through (they get questioned by their own hospital legal team when the nurse is the one that got assaulted).

      It's wrong. We need to stand up for educators and healthcare providers.

      1. jan_m_savage · 1790607263 · focus · HN ↗

         The problem is particularly serious in some countries, like South Korea.

         A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.

         highly recommend you watch it.

         1. PorciiVorbesc · 1790608032 · focus · HN ↗

            Wild how much of the successful entertainment coming out of South Korea (like Squid Game), is basically them dramatizing facets of their dystopian society, that a lot of it is actually based on real issues they face, and it's not all just made up fantasy.

            1. phatfish · 1790610060 · focus · HN ↗

               Hellbound was on Netflix around the time of Squid Game. Less popular obviously, but an entertaining take on the cults they are famous for.

               1. PorciiVorbesc · 1790610164 · focus · HN ↗

                  True, but that show had a too many fantasy/horror elements to it for people in the west to read into the cult aspects of Korean society.
            2. jan_m_savage · 1790644123 · focus · HN ↗

               Indeed. I haven't been to Korea but when I was in China, I met many Koreans and when I was taking Chinese lessons, some Koreans were in my class.

               They are generally less friendlier than all the other foreigners I met, closed to outsiders, and somewhat racist (I asked a group of Koreans if I could join their game of Basketball, but they said they preferred to play by themselves. No Chinese ever said anything like that, nor any other foreigners I had joined to play with).

               Also, they are quite a violent people. My classmates and I nearly came to blows over the window in the class; I wanted to open it because the indoor air was stale and probably toxic, but he didn't want the window open (for whatever reason, though the weather wasn't cold). Another non-Asian foreigner got into a fight with a Korean puncturing his eardrum which resulted in deafness. Outside the university, too, when they get drunk they become aggressive and seek fights. I guess it must be all the stress they're to put up with in their Dystopian country?

         2. boogieknite · 1790608091 · focus · HN ↗

            piggyback to recommend a classic: Battle Royale
      2. forshaper · 1790608137 · focus · HN ↗

         A lot of hospital have armed tactical teams. Though I would guess that in major metro areas they would be more hidden, and so less used.

         1. hunterpayne · 1790612571 · focus · HN ↗

            I seriously doubt any hospital in the US outside of a major metro area has an "armed tactical team". I've never even heard of such a thing despite working in a major metro area for most of my adult life.

            1. forshaper · 1790635820 · focus · HN ↗

               We have one here, in a town of 60,000.
            2. ethbr1 · 1790686576 · focus · HN ↗

               If by tactical team parent means SWAT, no.

               If they mean explicitly stationed armed and vested police officers in level 1 trauma centers, absolutely.

               Personally, I'm in favor. An ED deals with a lot of situations that would normally be met with force by law enforcement, every average Tuesday.

               Having someone who's trained and comfortable with hospital procedures, staff, and "normal" there can mean avoiding prematurely escalating a confrontation and knowing when to immediately escalate to prevent injury or loss of life.

               1. forshaper · 1790785060 · focus · HN ↗

                  Not SWAT or SRT. They just called it the tactical team to differentiate them against regular security guards. The ones I've been around are not sworn peace officers, but are nonetheless armed. Usually they were previously peace officers or military combat arms, but I don't think that was a legal requirement. So they don't have the same use-of-force or arrest authority as peace officers, but can still act within the rights of the property owner.
      3. hogs_get_fat · 1790609050 · focus · HN ↗

         At the risk of asking rather unpopular questions, don't you think this has its roots not in any cowardice or contempt for educators or healthcare providers, but rather in a legal system and society, that's very sympathetic to those that engage in anti-social behavior?

         As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?

         1. nec4b · 1790624496 · focus · HN ↗

            I think you are exactly right. This is the product of society which has more empathy towards the bullies, because they are the real victims, ignored and left behind by the society. On the other hand there is very little empathy towards actual victims themselves. And to go further probably the majority of teachers believe, support and vote for people holding such ideas.

            1. ethbr1 · 1790685565 · focus · HN ↗

               I don't think society has sympathy for the bullies, in specific instances. It has sympathy for the bullies in aggregate, to the extent they represent societal social problems (especially in today's US).

               That sympathy towards the aggregate seems to be a byproduct from apathy about fixing the underlying issue -- government ensuring positive social outcomes broadly across the population.

               Post-90s US conservatism made it verboten to talk about the government's responsibility to create healthy social environments, especially for poor children, so there's no response portion of the conversation.

               And because we can't talk about the home situation of the child who assaulted this teacher, in the sense of policy towards fixing that, the two political parties are left debating whether or not we feel sympathy for the assaulter.

               ... with true sympathy for teachers, front line medical professionals, and other social first responders lost in the shuffle.

               If there was an inkling of a plan to strengthen the social safety net (e.g. funding mental healthcare for kids, recapitalizing shared public spaces, strengthening SNAP, universal kindergarten, mandating more parental leave), then we could face the problem honestly instead of treating teacher assaults as an awkward inconvenience of dysfunctional social policy.

      4. WarmWash · 1790610026 · focus · HN ↗

         Zero semblance of customer service.

         Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.

         I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".

         They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.

         1. _DeadFred_ · 1790613768 · focus · HN ↗

            Disagree. When you admit to a mistake you just took on a bunch of liability and risk being sued. Worker bees are not empowered to take on that liability. It is much cheaper to let things get bad and maybe get sued but the plantiffs have to prove their case versus hand people a slam dunk 'we messed up' in the eyes of management. Simple things I could address in the past I now have to just shut up and no longer talk to the customer at all. It all comes back to lawsuits causing societal level changes that yet again remove slack/productivity/the previous way a functioning society works.
         2. n8henrie · 1790618572 · focus · HN ↗

            Along these same lines, it seems to me that patients in the US can rarely afford the exorbitant and escalating cost of medical care, so with increasing frequency they expend considerable effort trying to identify any possible error that they think could get them a break on their bill or enough of a legal case to give them a fighting shot at beating medical bankruptcy.

            I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.

            1. ethbr1 · 1790686068 · focus · HN ↗

               > I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.

               +1 of providers eating the cost of care due to insurance misfilings (e.g. failure to secure prior auth when the patient's plan required it, which for-profit plans are increasingly using as a disingenuous bullshit way to legally and effectively limit payouts for care that should be covered)

         3. techjamie · 1790622425 · focus · HN ↗

            I don't work in medical or a hospital, but I am the person whose job it is to limit liability at my workplace. We have a bunch of language we have to advise people not to use when an incident happens.

            It might come off a little impersonal, but unfortunately one wrong word in the wrong place can give someone an entire case when maybe they didn't have one before, unfortunately.

      5. xattt · 1790613270 · focus · HN ↗

         The common thread is that nursing and grade-school education are both female-dominated professions.

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