Finally, a horrible educational situation that didn't happen in California.
An Ohio teacher has been fired for reading students' thoughts on other students. Apparently, the thoughts weren't happy ones.
Larry Knapp says the Edgewood district let him go last week after receiving complaints about the incident. Knapp says some of the essays were embarrassing or hurtful.
Johnson had asked students to write about what classmates might be doing 20 years from now.
This is ridiculous. Let's not punish the students for writing such things. Let's fire the teacher for reading them.
Although my preface was that of relief that it hadn't happened in Sunny SoCal, that's not all true. It just hasn't made the papers. A local teacher at a private school near me was recently fired three weeks before the school's end because one of her students kept provoking her and provoking her and the teacher finally held her end of a promise to punish the student. (Nothing physically harmful to the student, of course.) The student's parent, who has had it in for this teacher since day one, complained and got this otherwise excellent teacher fired. Not only has this hurt the teacher, but the other students in the class who loved her are really upset over having her one day and seeing her pack up her desk the next.
This is a new generation. If my teachers told my parents I was misbehaving, my parents didn't even question the teacher. I just got punished. Certainly this new crop of parents don't understand what a horrible lesson they're teaching their children: that authority is always wrong, and you're always the victim.
Posted by Portia at June 13, 2006 07:17 AM | TrackBack
