twenty four.
“My first year I was teaching at a very wealthy private Christian school, so my qualifications were very high. He had come to class upset and before the bell rang I pulled him aside and asked what was wrong, he said at lunch when a girl in class diagnosed him with ADHD. I scoffed and told my friend’s table that I was “not on my meds” that day, so he bounced off the wall and said maybe class was going to be a problem. His class was a rambunctious class, but essentially his fear was that if the class wasn’t behaving his best or (for example) said he lost the privilege of recess, all his friends would was to blame. So this poor kid was incredibly worried about his behavior and not embarrassing the class. “
“Obviously it’s no laughing matter to make fun of someone who has been diagnosed with a learning disability, but I didn’t listen to the actual conversation so I didn’t want to falsely accuse them, so I decided to just watch how the class went. Partner On the advice of my teacher, I later pulled the girl in question aside during recess and asked her to listen to her version of the story: “If she doesn’t understand what I’m saying, So I decided to talk to other students, including her twin sister, among whom she was very close, and all the other students, including her sister, told the boy Even her sister,” she said, warned the twins that they were being mean to the boy.
Still, I did not hear the conversation myself, so I did not intend to punish the girl on the basis of the student’s hearsay. Instead, I spoke to the entire class about the weight of our words and how even innocent remarks can sometimes hurt. I didn’t name a single student, nor did I specifically mention what happened from lunch. It was just a general conversation about kindness and choosing words wisely.
That night I received a nasty call from the father of the twin girls telling me that I had wrongly accused her of humiliating her daughter and mocking the sickness of a student. Her daughter was so embarrassed, he said, that she felt bullied by me and that she was being targeted in class. He then continued to write me long emails with the principal cc’ing, accusing me of bullying my daughter and blaming the principal for my accumulated trauma that I must have been bullied as a child. I said flatly that I must have hit the innocent heart of Mr. child. He said I was an educator’s joke and had a detrimental effect on the classroom.
The next morning, the principal called me into his office and allowed me to share what happened from my perspective. My partner’s teacher backed up my thoughts and insisted that I had done nothing wrong. Nevertheless, the principal told me, the school’s biggest donor, that I should apologize to the girl and her father for falling down with a sword. ”
-Anonymous
