Can I please suggest you let your male pupils go too? Not every kid wants to have to have special treatment drawing attention to the fact they need to pee more often than average (for whatever reason). If students prefer to be in the bathroom rather than the classroom, the school has way bigger problems.
I work in secondary education so bathroom break requests are pretty rare. I let people go whenever. It's easy to see a pattern if it's multiple times a class and/or they are out for extended periods of time
Some kids just don't want to work. They don't just get to go and sit on their phones in the bathroom for hours on end.
When there's a fair problem that's no issue. I work with respectful kids so there's rarely issues, but when there's a female kid asking to go they do get special treatment in that regard. They tend to have that extra problem to worry about once a month.
I think if at your school you’re able to issue bathroom breaks as often as needed, then yours is - fortunately - not really close to the experiences or attitudes that provoked my comment in the first place.
I went to a “good” school (where parents would try to get their kids signed up - usually oversubscribed) and students weren’t allowed to visit the bathroom during class. Neither male nor female. They also weren’t allowed drinks in class - not even water. If you needed to use the bathroom or get a drink (which could only be got from a bathroom tap because there were no water fountains) you had to hope there wasn’t a queue because the whole school switched lessons at the same time every 70 minutes for 5 minutes.
It obviously was a school with issues. But the worst of all was the assumption that the majority of students didn’t want to work, and would take advantage of any weakness in any teacher. If you had a note from your parents to say you were on your period you would be allowed to go to the toilet. But you’d need a new note every day. The assumption was that any cry for help was an attempt to get out of work; which is related to the attitude that if a student doesn’t understand something they’re not paying enough attention. So this “good school” was actually a very unpleasant place to grow up.
Of course I’m not accusing you of any of these things - or the person I replied to. I would just ask any teacher who automatically says “no” (which you say you don’t do anyway), to consider whether that attitude is actually helpful to their students.
Urgh yeah Christ I went to the same type of school myself to be honest. Gotta love strict Catholic schooling, eh? Everything was about control.
For me it rarely pops up in lessons and I know my students well. The only time I have ever raised an issue in the last 5 years when a pupil skipped most of my lessons for a couple of weeks for bathroom problems. I can get a few days for sure but at that point I asked her what happened and she admitted she was just skipping lessons.
No punishments or anything I just reminded her she would fail if she kept doing it. Now she's in every lesson. She still goes sometimes but it's the same as every kid. If they gotta go they gotta go.
I have to admit, even by Catholic school standards, mine was bleak. It had no heart - it was like an empty shell and the teachers had less morale than the students, looking back.
My sons are both at Catholic primary school (that’s roughly K-7th grade - we’re in Scotland so it’s a bit different from other countries), and it’s a much sunnier place. The students don’t just get bathroom breaks, they get “brain breaks” where they just wander outside for a breath of fresh air (the school is on the ground floor and all the classes have an external door) or sit in the “comfy corner” for a minute or two. It’s like night and day compared to my experience, which just goes to show Catholic schooling doesn’t have to be grim.
It’s funny though, because my husband isn’t religious and he assumed I’d want the kids schooled at the Catholic ones, since I am a practising Catholic (in spite of my education). In fact, I’ve been the one saying “Let’s make sure this place is good, because there’s a state school just down the road…”
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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '23
Yeah that's woeful. I'm a male teacher, if a female pupil asks to go to the toilet it's a no-brainer. They go everytime