Whilst I can’t understand why a teacher wouldn’t have spotted their students performing oral sex in the classroom, I don’t think that the teacher’s role in this story is the critical one. What I want to know is how on earth do 8 year olds end up behaving like that in the first place?
An unnamed teacher at Tallulah Elementary School in Tallulah, Louisiana has been fired from her job as a teacher for not noticing two third graders engaged in oral sex underneath a table, according to the local News Star.
District Superintendent Lisa Wilmore made it clear to the paper that the teacher was fired because the incident occurred on her watch.
Wilmore said, according to the News-Star,
“The principal felt that she was not monitoring the classroom adequately. The principal made a decision, and I supported the principal. We have to make sure we have people in these classrooms who are monitoring our students.”
The district of Tallulah has been dealing with several problems this year. Recently another teacher was placed on leave for a substance abuse problem.
The School District also announced that while the two children are going through counseling they are not going to be disciplined or have their studies hurt.
Both teacher dismissals were part of what Wilmore is calling her program of “Changing the culture” in the school district.
It doesn’t matter how many teachers that school fires, they won’t come close to changing the culture of the school without investigating the behaviour of their students. What are these children exposed to at home? Are these kids exposed to pornographic material? Did they now what they were doing? What are their parents’ role in this incident?
It is not enough to focus on the teacher. Yes, the teacher could have prevented it from happening by being more alert. Yes, teachers who don’t notice major incidents under their watch have some serious questions to answer. But that should never prevent the school from investigating the reasons behind the incident and find out what caused their students to act that way.
Sacking teachers in the name of an improved school culture is useless when third grade children feel the need to engage in sex acts and seemingly nothing is done about it.
Sometimes it is absolutely vital to call a spade a spade. There is no good reason to protect the honour or devise a defence for a teacher that incites her class to stand for a minute silence for a known terrorist. It doesn’t matter how troubled this teacher may have been, there was no excuse for this incredibly irresponsible act:
A French teacher was suspended on Friday for allegedly urging her class to observe a minute’s silence for serial killer Mohamed Merah, the day after he was shot dead by police.
Education Minister Luc Chatel had called for the teacher to be suspended after her class reported she called Merah a “victim” and said his links to Al-Qaeda were invented by the media and “Sarko”, referring to President Nicolas Sarkozy.
“An immediate suspension has been decided along with a ban on entering the school,” the local education authority’s Florence Robine told journalists, adding that the suspension did not imply any guilt. She “clearly said that Mohamed Merah was a victim, that the link with Al-Qaeda had been invented by the media and ‘Sarko’,” said the letter, a copy of which was published by the Paris Normandie newspaper.
“This is not the political act of an extremist but the act of a colleague who has health concerns, who is fragile and who is receiving psychological treatment,” the local head of the SGEN-CFDT union, Pascal Bossuyt, told AFP.
“She said something unfortunate in a particular context and she immediately regretted what she said,” he added.
Police shot Merah dead on Thursday at his flat in southwest France where he was holed up after going on a jihadist-inspired killing spree. His victims included three young Jewish children and three paratroopers.
It is a shame that “fragile” teachers with “health concerns” are often allowed to practice until they do something inappropriate. This was more than the act of a teacher requiring “psychological treatment.”
This was the act of a teacher who is completely unfit for teaching.
I am not sure if ADHD exists or not. Since I am not a doctor or medical professional, I will decide to err on the side of caution and give ADHD the benefit of the doubt. But whether or not it exists doesn’t seem to be the pressing issue. The issue seems more to do with the poor children misdiagnosed with ADHD in what seems to be a completely haphazard fashion:
A STUDY of almost a million Canadian children has found those born in December, the last month of the school year intake, are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and medicated for it than those born in January.
Relative immaturity may result in the inappropriate diagnosis of ADHD, the University of British Columbia researchers suggest.
They raise “concerns about the potential harms of overdiagnosis and overprescribing” for the condition. Children given medication for ADHD may suffer adverse effects on sleep, appetite and growth and face increased risk of cardiovascular events, the paper says.
Inappropriate diagnosis may lead teachers and parents to treat the child differently and change self-perceptions.
The study in this month’s Canadian Medical Association Journal, found boys born in December were 30 per cent more likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD than boys born in January and 41 per cent more likely to be given medication for ADHD.
The medical fraternity has let themselves down with ADHD. It seems from this untrained eye that too many kids are being diagnosed with this condition and therefore, too many kids are needlessly medicated. What this does is bunch real sufferers of ADHD with kids who have come down with a bout of, for example, immaturity.
For an absent-minded teacher like myself, this is very encouraging news. To think that we could be smarter, regardless of whether we know what day it is or recall what our passwords are, is surprising to say the least:
Is your child absent-minded? You should feel happy, for a new study says that it may well be a sign that the kid is intelligent. Researchers have found that children who have wandering minds actually have sharper brains — in fact, those who are constantly distracted are able to hold far more information than their diligent peers.
The study has shown that those who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”, giving them the ability to do two things at the same time, the Daily Mail reported.
Those who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”.
Participants in the study had to either press a button in response to the appearance of a certain letter on a screen, or tap in time with their breath. The researchers checked periodically to ask if their minds were wandering.
At the end, they measured the participants’ working memory capacity, giving them a score for their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with easy maths questions.
Daniel Levinson of University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study, said those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks” even though their performance was not compromised.
The results are the first to show the association with mind wandering and intelligence. It is thought the extra mental workspace is used, for instance, when adding up two spoken numbers without being able to write them down. Its capacity has been associated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ score.
I could sit here and show-off about these findings but I’m too busy trying to find my darn car keys …. again!
I’ve been of the opinion for quite a while that cyberbullying is the form of bullying that does the most harm and is the hardest to address. By invading the home of the child, cyberbullying takes an environment that was traditionally safe and has ensured that victims of such bullying have nowhere to hide. Cyberbullying also reaches a far wider audience, replacing the half a dozen or so witnesses in a playground incident with literally thousands online.
Children think face-to-face bullying is more harmful than cyber bullying but new research shows that perception to be false.
Researchers from Queensland University of Technology surveyed over 3000 students in Years 6 to 12 from 30 schools nationally and found 45 per cent said they were bullied.
The victims of face-to-face bullying, often referred to as traditional bullying, reported it had harsher impacts than victims of cyber bullying. However, other signs show the opposite to be true.
Lead researcher, Associate Professor Marilyn Campbell, said victims of cyber bullying reported higher levels of anxiety and depression than children who had been bullied face-to-face.
“When we measured their social problems, children who had been cyber bullied had much higher scores than victims of traditional bullying but they didn’t see it themselves,” Campbell told Education Review.
Campbell said children were usually bullied by kids they knew and often because they were different.
“It’s a cycle. They go to school, they get bullied. They go home and get cyber bullied. They go back to school and are bullied again.”
It is absolutely vital that schools stop sitting on their hands and start becoming more proactive when it comes to fighting cyberbullying. Schools are quick to point out that since the bullying is done outside school gates it becomes a parenting issue rather than a school issue. That may be true when it comes to legal obligations but not moral obligations. Schools should be expected to do what they can to ensure that their students are protected from being harassed or bullied by other students, regardless of where the harassment takes place.
Schools have got to stop obsessing about potential lawsuits and handballing issues to other stakeholders. They must show they care and fight for the wellbeing of their students!
It’s bad enough this teacher made a shocking spur of the moment decision to break up a school corridor kiss between teen students by dousing them with a bucket of water. To then go on Facebook to justify it and call for the support of others is just horrible. Surely the teacher in question has enough sense to see that the punishment did not in any way match the crime. Public humiliation is a very serious offence.
A US teacher has been suspended after throwing a bucket of water on two students he thought were kissing and hugging in a school corridor.
The unnamed teacher was unapologetic despite being placed on administrative leave by John Overton High School in Nashville while the incident is being investigated, WKRN-TV reported.
The teacher reportedly posted afterwards on Facebook that his actions “seemed to work”.
“Got in trouble at school today,” he wrote.
“Threw a bucket of water on two kids hooking in the hallway of the high school where I plan to send my oldest daughter next year.
“It seemed to work and they stopped. Keep me in your prayers peeps.”
A mother of one of the students told WKRN-TV that there was no excuse for the teacher’s treatment of her 16-year-old son and his 17-year-old girlfriend.
Maggie Tiefenthal said her teenage son, who she claims was only hugging his girlfriend, was “embarrassed and upset” after the incident.
“They are not dogs. That is what you do to dogs and they are not animals,” she said.
Ms Tiefenthal said the principal had seen CCTV footage of the incident, but she had yet to see it.
“The administrator said based on the video, the kids did nothing inappropriate,” she told WKRN-TV.
Ms Tiefenthal said the girl’s parents were also upset by the incident.
She added that the teacher’s Facebook post had only made it worse.
School spokeswoman Olivia Brown said that the school had never had problems with the teacher before and he had a “good standing”.
Parent Martha Foote has submitted a brilliant piece to the New York Times. In a resounding defense of teachers she called for the end of teacher data reporting:
“TDRs are a four-letter word!” That was my son’s favorite slogan when the parents and teachers at his school, Public School 321 in Park Slope, held a rally in the fall of 2010 to protest the imminent release of the teacher data reports. We were not alone. Sister rallies were held the same day at Brooklyn’s Public School 24, Public School 29, Middle School 51, Public School 154, and the John Jay Campus Community, and more than 5,000 letters of protest were signed across all five boroughs condemning the public humiliation of teachers as well as the release of what we believed were inaccurate scores. Sadly, though, after months of legal appeals, the teacher data reports were finally made public last week. And what have we learned?
So what do we do now? How do we move forward? To begin, I believe we must stop these attacks on our teachers. It is no way to treat one another (did we learn nothing in kindergarten?), and it is no way to improve education. We must turn away from this punitive blame game and instead work in a collaborative endeavor for the greater good. Look to the models. Look to Finland, where teachers are respected and trusted, and continual professional development is paramount. Look to Montgomery County, Md., where a successful system of teacher evaluation consists of mentoring struggling teachers combined with a panel of teachers and principals to decide if a teacher must be fired. (I only hope that New York State’s new system of teacher evaluation does not preclude the use of such successful strategies.) And stop relying on a score from a single high-stakes test to trump all the other 180 days in the classroom.
As for parents, of course we want our children to have excellent teachers. But as we have learned, these rankings tell us nothing. It is time to rely on our own observations, both direct and indirect, to gauge our children’s learning experiences in the classroom. Look at the types of assignments our children receive, the kinds of books they bring home to read, the quality of feedback they receive on their written work. It is this type of information that will tell us whether our child has a great teacher – and whether we need to be advocating for changes in the classroom.
If only the media and politicians thought the same way.
It must be so difficult on parents to keep their child’s spirit up when they are getting bullied at school or online. My heart goes out to parents of bullied children. It must take quite an emotional toll.
A government partnership with Facebook is also on the cards to try and stamp out the scourge after schoolgirl Catherine Bernard took her own life earlier this month.
She died after returning home from her first day of year 12.
The 17-year-old Emmaus College student from Melbourne’s eastern suburbs told her dad Michael the night she died she had been bullied at school, and later on Facebook.
An emotional Mr Bernard this morning thanked Education Minister Martin Dixon for taking the issue seriously.
“He has pledged money to support the cause and if he does what he says then it can only be a good thing,” he said.
“All I wanted is to open people’s eyes and I think that is happening.
“People have to take this issue seriously.
“If we can save just one person then it means Catherine didn’t die in vain.”
SIGNS TO LOOK FOR
– Aggressive behaviour beyond the usual sibling spats at home.
– Talking aggressively or negatively about others at school.
– Coming home with money or items that don’t belong to them.
– Spending more time on the internet than usual.
– Being hyped up, aggressive or arrogant after time on the internet.
WHAT PARENTS CAN DO
– Model good behaviour. Don’t be aggressive towards your child.
– Teach them appropriate ways to interact with others from a young age.
– Teach them appropriate coping strategies to deal with life’s challenges and disappointments.
– Keep the lines of communication open with your child. Talk to them often.
– Don’t be in denial. Work with your child’s school to address the bullying.
As a child, I absolutely adored the Berenstain Bears books. I made my parents read them to me over and over again. I particularly loved “The Bike Lesson”, a father’s cautionary tale to his young son on how not to ride a bike. I have since started reading the books to my daughter and on occasion, to my students.
Jan Berenstain, who with her husband, Stan, wrote and illustrated the Berenstain Bears books that have charmed children and their parents for 50 years, has died. She was 88.
Berenstain, a long-time resident of Solebury in south-eastern Pennsylvania, suffered a severe stroke on Thursday and died on Friday without regaining consciousness, her son Mike Berenstain said.
The gentle tales of Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Brother Bear and Sister Bear were inspired by the Berenstain children, and later their grandchildren. The stories address children’s common concerns and aim to offer guidance on subjects like dentist visits, peer pressure, a new sibling or summer camp.
Thank you Jan for contributing to my love of reading and literature. You have left a legacy that will continue to entertain children. May you rest in peace.
Teachers have never been more criticised and devalued than they are right now. Whilst you can’t blame all negative incidents on a political and media campaign against teaching standards, I’m sure children pick up on the discontent in the wider community.
To read that three children in the 5th Grade twice attempted to poison their teacher, makes me wonder how children as young as that can rationalise in their own minds that killing their teacher would be a worthwhile solution to their problems:
Three California fifth-graders who confessed to using rat poison in attempts to harm their teacher are being moved to other schools.
The three students at Balderas Elementary School in Fresno admitted lacing the teacher’s coffee and a cupcake with rat poison in two separate incidents, according to the Fresno Teachers Association and published reports.
Miraculously, the teacher never took a sip of the coffee or a bite of the cupcake.
One of the three accused students apparently had a change of heart and knocked the coffee cup out of the teacher’s hand before she could drink from it.
The mid-December incidents came to light two months after they happened because a parent of one of the students bragged that her boy saved a teacher’s life.
No criminal charges have been filed against the two boys and one girl, according to ABC’s Fresno affiliate KFSN. The Fresno Police Department is continuing to investigate, but says there is little or no physical evidence remaining from the December incidents. The Fresno County district attorney’s office will decide whether to press charges against the children.
All three students have been expelled and moved to other schools, according to KFSN. The two boys are being transfered to the Phoenix Academy, which does not sit well with at least one of its teachers.
This story is quite sickening. I wonder if those students involved were in any way incited by a general lack of community respect for the teaching fraternity.
Topical Teaching 