Official Off Topic Discussion Thread #1
- Thread starter Chrisplosion
- Start date
While scrolling through YouTube shorts I found an interesting video of a young Chinese man harvesting some kind of Cyanobacteria from a pond. The pond was quite large, and it seemed that he grew the stuff. He proceeded to dry the Cyanobacteria out, and cooked it in a wok with green onions. He made little dumplings with Cyanobacteria. Never knew you could eat that! You learn a new thing every day!
Well,it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the teacher was merely joking and what he said was taken the wrong way ,as so many things tend to be these days.
Even if it was a joke, it’s not ok to joke to one of your students about kicking them in the shins. And especially if a student has autism, or some disability that affects their learning and ways of processing.
Hello; I have no knowledge as to the intent/circumstance of the teacher. I do have a couple of observations from being a public school teacher myself. First was back in 2000 when i was filling in for one school year for a H S Biology teacher on leave having a baby. In the hallway between classes I observed a boy giving two girls a hard time. He was loudly calling them names and seemed a threat. I went over and put a stop to his action. I did not have to physically do any thing but did give him a good chewing out and a warning to not let me catch him bothering the girls again. I took him to his next class.
Later on i was called in for a conference with the school principal. Turns out the boy was one of the "special" students. I was new to the school and did not know who the special students were. I was going by behavior I saw to be out of line. I do not recall the exact problems that particular boy had now 22 years later, but even now I do not see allowing bad behavior. By the way that boy did not bother any girls in my section of the school any more.
The other observation was a middle school boy who was diagnosed with turrets. He was verbal which I let go. The spitting on other students was too much for me. He was also known outside of school to be cruel. Killing animals and shooting kids with a pellet gun. I was not dealing with the outside stuff. I did not want him to continue spitting on others and poking with pencils. ( Note- he only bothered girls and much smaller boys. Boys his size he left alone which led me to believe his condition was controlable. )
Turned out his lunch time was the same as my planning period. So I started collecting him in the lunch line and had him eat with me in my room. The change in his behavior in my room was night and day. The spitting and pencil stabbing stopped as i told him why he was eating his lunch with me away from the other kids. Only lasted a couple of weeks tho. His parents came in a raised a stink about it and stopped the eating lunch with me. That his behavior had improved did not faze them at all. ( For what it is worth knowing this guy and two others was a reason i got my carry permit when it first became available in KY. )
They got their way as had become the norm by then. Now i had many other "special" students over the years and nearly all were well behaved so i am not making a blanket indictment of those with special problems. It is just that the two incidents showed to me that like any other privilege given to a few, some take advantage. I also saw that discipline when needed can work on behavior, even with special diagnosis.
I will close with one more example of a student with severe physical restrictions. She was smart but had to use two canes to walk and moved very slowly. One day during a fire drill some full classes of students, including my class, could not get down the stairs in a good time. This girl was holding up the classes as she slowly made her way down the stairs.
At the next faculty meeting I brought this up as a safety problem. In the event of a real emergency there would be big problems. First if every one was polite a lot of students could be in danger by being slowed down. In reality if there was a fire it is likely she would be run over by an escaping mob in the panic. I suggested she only have classes on the ground floor or that a couple of us men teachers be assigned to carry her out. The decision was she had more rights to leave things as they were than the rest of us had rights to be safer during an emergency.
My points being in some cases the "special needs" of a few are abused by individuals and that in other cases the "rights" of and individual run roughshod over the better interest of the many. How my stories apply to this teacher being fired for making a threat which he/she did not act out is not clear. The full context of that story is not so far been known. My stories have fuller context at least.
Here is my take on teaching in public schools the last few decades. Anytime i meet someone thinking about teaching I try hard to talk them out of it. There is much more context behind this than these few stories but i will not go further today.
I'm not going to go back and forth about it.I can recall our teachers saying similar things to us when we were kids and no big deal was ever made out of it but times and people were different back then,people are a lot more sensitive nowadays.
You could be right. But I wont know. I tried to keep it vague because that’s the solid information I knew. Now there are rumors about that she actually “used karate moves and broke his legs”, and “Sent the kid to the hospital”, so the only true story I would know is from the principal/admin.
