I’ve been in full 1000 seat lecture halls in first year university classes where the majority of people are somewhere around 18. Fresh out of high school. Food and drink? Allowed. Bathroom breaks? Allowed without even having to ask. If it’s too disruptive in a small classroom setting, how do colleges and universities function?
Same goes for smaller first year classes. The ones that many fewer people take and are around more like 60ish students by the time people have finished re-working classes and schedules. Food and drink? Allowed. Bathroom breaks? Don’t ask, just go.
Labs? As in biology and chemistry labs at a university level with chemicals that are actually dangerous if accidentally ingested? Food and water must be left outside/somewhere contained and just not consumed in the room. Need food or water? Go get it, leave the room, consume it and come back. Need the bathroom? Also just go.
Like. Sure. Most of my experiences in university weren’t with classes full of mostly 18 year olds, but my first year classes sure were. If professors can keep control of classes at least twice the size of most high school classes and at most 1000+ of teens AND masters students who are TAs on the side can keep control of roughly 30 eighteen year olds without stripping them of agency over their basic needs and marking their needs *as* needs and not things they do to inconvenience you as the adult in charge, why are there teachers still not letting their students use a goddamn bathroom or take a fucking drink from a water bottle in class?
Sure, if you have like. Kindergarten students, then it’s reasonable to require they be supervised for those things because they’re little humans who are inexperienced, have very little control of their fine motor skills, and aren’t mature enough to take care of their needs on their own or understand complex consequences that aren’t predominantly or exclusively directed at them.
But if you teach high school, what’s your excuse for treating your students as sub-humans who exist to only inconvenience you and should only be allowed to take care of their basic needs when you give them that privilege, which if they use even slightly incorrectly you frame as them as taking advantage of your kindness to let them care for their needs. These are human fucking people for god’s sake.
When I was in high school I sometimes would ask to go to the bathroom and stay there all class. Want to know why? And here’s a hint, it wasn’t because I was taking advantage of my teachers in order to talk to friends or drink alcohol or do drugs or skip school.
It was because I had undiagnosed chronic conditions, illnesses, and disabilities that I was struggling to manage because I didn’t even know I was managing anything abnormal.
Are there kids who do take advantage of being let out of class? Sure. But there are also students who legitimately need time out of class, for reasons like my own, or maybe because they just really need to pee and don’t want to do it in their pants in your classroom in front of their peers.
We can’t be stripping students of the right to take care of their basic needs because someone might take advantage of the freedom. And honestly, I think if teachers started treating their teenaged students like people and not as robotic demons who exist only to take advantage of them, they would also start respecting their teachers more because they’re not being treated worse than a captive animal.
