I hated school because it was boring.
A setting where one person is required to explain something and maintain discipline, and twenty persons don't care about the subject and are bored to death... is pretty much doomed to be frustrating for all participants.
Is there a solution? Seems like an official solution is that every teacher is supposed to have some unspecified magical power which solves the problem. Confessing that I don't have this kind of power is very bad signalling in school, but I honestly don't, and I suspect neither do others. There is also a collection of non-magical powers (such as speaking clearly, putting things into proper context, inserting a few jokes, being fair and friendly, using analogies and pictures when necessary, etc) which sometimes work, but because of their lack of magic, they also sometimes fail. More often if someone is determined to make them fail, and there is no credible threat to stop them.
How to fix it? One possibility is to make the lesson interesting to everyone. However, "interesting" is not an inherent property of the lesson, not even of the lesson+teacher configuration. (Many people fail to recognize this. They think there is a way to make the lesson inherently interesting, and a good teacher should be able to make it so.) A solution would be to make the lesson voluntary, but that is incompatible with the compulsory education.
Other possibility is to cope with the boredom rationally; accept that it exists, that to some degree it is inevitable, and just try to minimize harm. Again, admitting this openly is bad signalling (that is, if a teacher admits it). How exactly would the rational solution look like? My offer would be "you can do what you want, as long as you are silent and do not distract me or your classmates, for example read a book, and there will be no consequences for doing it; however at the end of year you will be graded fairly based on your answers in the test". Unfortunately, such agreement with students below age 18 predictably fails. First, many students seem unable to spend 45 minutes in silence. Second, students react differently to a possibility of bad grades at the beginning of the year (in far mode) and at the end of the year (in near mode), so even if they would agree at the beginning, they would feel cheated in the end. This could be fixed by giving a short test at the beginning of each lesson, and then allowing the opportunity to read a book only to those who passed a test, but the students who failed the test would still be bored during the lesson. Also, for those who didn't try it, group negotiation is really hard. (It's like playing a Prisonners' Dilemma against 20 players simultaneously, but if 1 or 2 of them defect, you lose your payoff in all outcome matrices. For example if 18 students are silent and 2 are noisy, there is a noise in the whole room.)
I'm not sure that status explains this adequately, but from the inside it felt as least as much as that I wanted to feel as though I wasn't of intractably low status rather than that I was trying to get higher status.
I know. A big part of the "teenage rebellion" is an evolutionary pressure to rise up from what is percieved as a bottom of the social ladder. And our society does not handle it well -- it does not provide teenagers enough meaningful ways to rise their status in a nondestructive way. My guess is that teenagers who already get their status from somewhere else (are respected by their families or are successful in some hobby) don't need to rebel in the classroom, but the remaining ones don't have much choice, or even skills to use the few existing options.
Unfortunately, this is not something a teacher can fix during 45 minutes, while also providing the necessary information on the subject. Perhaps if I had 5 lessons a week, I could sacrifice one, but I was teaching 1 lesson a week, so I didn't have this option. In theory, a form teacher should do this. In reality, either they don't try enough, or they try and fail (and I don't blame them for either, because the work requirements are simply unrealistic).
These days, I do understand that teachers are human beings. However, thanks for the idea that teachers are expected to have "magic", and that this is unreasonable.
I've heard claims that some teachers can get useful dominance quickly over otherwise difficult classes, but I don't know whether those claims are true.
If it's any consolation, I only disrupted classes less than a dozen times, possibly less than half a dozen.
One of the questions I asked in those informal surveys was what the respondents liked about school, and the answer was always something about being social and never about learning things, even though the school was probably academically better than most.
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?