Description

The University of Central Florida (UCF) Forum is a weekly series of opinion columns presented by the UCF News & Information. The columns are the opinions of the writers, who serve on the UCF Forum panel of faculty members, staffers and students for a year. A new column is posted each Wednesday at UCF Today and then broadcast between 7:50 and 8 a.m. Sunday on WUCF-FM (89.9).

Publication Date

1-16-2013

Keywords

Education; Classroom; Student behavior; Violence; Mentally disturbed; Psychological problem; Mental disorder

Introduction

I am certainly not in a position to judge whether a student appears mentally disturbed or unstable in the sense that he or she might be a threat to society or to themselves. However, as a university-level educator who spends most of my working hours with young people in their late teens and early 20s, I have witnessed and experienced situations that were a cause for concern in which I felt compelled to act, intervene or respond in ways that we, as research professors, are often not trained to do. Although most of these situations have been resolved with a common-sense approach to the problem, every so often I have experienced a situation with a student that was more subtle and unpredictable.

Subjects

Education; Violence

Collection

UCF Forum

Publisher

University of Central Florida

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