I am not generally the kind of person who gets outraged by the morning news. Though an idealist in the sense that I think people are generally good and that both individuals and societies are improveable, I am a cynic in the sense that I think our culture contains a critical minority of outrageously stupid people working in ridiculously corrupt institutions, so when I read, as I did recently, that under the workings of our government bureaucracy, frozen cheese pizza and frozen pepperoni pizza are regulated by different agencies, I am not surprised enough to be outraged.
But this morning, I am outraged. My morning paper, the Lansing State Journal, ran a story on page B1 called "Student was taped to a chair." It tells of a teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan, about an hour from here, who has been suspended from her job because she duct-taped a third-grader to his chair.
Now, because she is tenured, the worst punishment she can receive without triggering a lengthy firing process is a three-day suspension. School officials don't think this is worth firing over--or they don't think they could get her fired for it--but they don't want her in the classroom, either. So, after she serves her 3-day suspension, she will spend the rest of the school year on paid leave.
What a punishment! If I were a tenured teacher in a public school, you can bet I'd forget the grading this weekend in favor of making sure I had a big roll of duct tape in the old bookbag. Or maybe I'd wait until, say, just after the next school year starts, in order to maximize my suffering. If four months of paid time off is the punishment for incompetence and cruelty, I'm going to have to start seriously re-thinking my life-long commitment to kindness and capability.
Posted by Su Penn at February 8, 2003 12:36 PM | TrackBackI don't excuse the teacher's behavior. But I wonder about it. I wonder what her current perspective is? Does she get it that she was being cruel to that child? What were the circumstances surrounding the incident? (Had this happened before? Had she tried appropriate methods of dealing with misbehavior? Do teachers in her school receive support for positive behavior management? Is she behaving out of character? Was her action a result of cruelty or massive ignorance? Was she re-enacting something that was accepted when she was a child?)
Teachers and parents are expected by our society to manage children's behavior. But I don't know any teachers, other than those receiving training in early childhood development, who receive practical preservice training in behavior and classroom management. The parents and teachers who get such training are those who seek it out on their own, who know without being told that what they know how to do is insufficient.
So I'm most interested in making sure that the child who was duct taped gets a clear message that he or she was not to blame, and receives opportunities to transform the shame that s/he must have experienced. I'm interested in knowing what that school is doing to support respectful interactions between students and teachers. I guess I'm less interested in canning the teacher, than in trying to discern whether this teacher can grow and learn.