This teacher graduated from the John Steward school of “humor.” This is called mean teasing and it is bullying.
If the child that young is failing to get homework assignments in, a professional teacher with a brain would inform the kid that there is a problem and try to find out what is going on under the excuses. Sometimes it is a chaotic home life and sometimes it is skills in organization that are the problem. It could be just laziness and resistence.
A professional teacher would try to find out the problem and help the kid resolve it. Teachers do not ridicule other people’s children (nor sexualize them) unless they are teaching a bully’s art of riducle to the children (or sexually grooming them for adult sexual activity).
Things have changed. When I blew off homework in the third grade my teacher marched me to the principle’s office (after two previous warnings) where the principle explained that my chronic offenses would no longer be tolerated, laid some serious wood across my rear end, then as was custom shook my hand and encouraged me to mend my underachieving ways.
Let’s be honest. It’s the so called baby mamma that’s the joke here. More great parenting by a dufuss who can’t/won’t teach her child responsibility. After all, isn’t it up to the government to make her kid feel good?
As for my own school experience, corporal and emotional punishment were common. Although I was a very compliant child and good student, I was **terrified** that the nun or teacher's anger would be directed at me. I dreaded going to school. Not only is emotional or physical abuse damaging to child who is the direct path of the teacher's anger or frustration, but the children witnessing it are brutalized emotionally as well.
My 8th grade nun had a “stupid aisle”. All the quizzes for the week were tallied and those with the very lowest scores were sentenced to the stupid aisle for the following week. No matter how well the class did, as a whole, those scoring the lowest got the stupid aisle. We had good kids in class and it was a struggle for the nun to actually get failures. She did manage, though. One way was to give a spelling test and then demand that the words also be punctuated with the accent on the correct syllable. A correct history test answer was not sufficient. The student had to write **exactly** word for word what was written in the textbook. I dreaded Mondays.
Those people, regardless of who they are,who physically, sexually, or emotionally brutalize children will answer to God. It will have been better for them if a mill stone had been tied to their necks and that they had been thrown into to the depths of the sea.
So? A bit of directed mean spiritedness and shaming may be just what the little slacker needs to realize this isn’t somewhere she wants to be, and change before habits become too set.
The teacher was trying to show the child, with humor, that irresponsible behavior can have undesirable consequences; the mother is trying to convey the opposite lesson, that there should be no consequences for irresponsible behavior. Seems to me like the teacher’s lesson is the more valuable one.
At the end of the school year she told me when she handed out awards, I would receive the Cripple of the Year Award. I seriously thought she would do it, too, and I remember not wanting to go to school because of it.
The UK Mail should get an award for being ‘America’s Best Newspaper’...the ones on this side of the pond are beyond worthless.
39,000 comments most of them (over 90%) agree with the teacher.