Learning Strategies

A first-year teacher was fired last week for making a bad judgment call. Depending on the version of the story you believe, he either duct-taped a student’s mouth shut or gave her some masking tape and asked her to tape her own mouth shut. In either case, there’s no doubt that this was an error in judgment (worse in the first version than in the second). However, by all accounts he’s a great teacher, highly respected by his students, their parents, and his colleagues. As a first-year teacher, he had very little supervision and almost no collegial support, since he was the sole seventh- and eighth-grade science teacher in his school. And now how do you find a highly qualified science teacher halfway through a school year?

One of his students wrote this:

The parents just wanted the teacher to be warned not to do something like that again.

Another wrote the following [please pay no attentioin to the texting abbreviations and seventh-grade version of English]:

i think every single person in our grade needs to stand up for themselves and share our feelings about our teacher leaving. DUCT TAPE?! puhlease. it wasnt duct tape. everyone is just making a big deal but no one knows what rly went down unless you are us.. so stop making guessess and learn to be a news team. HUGGINS FOREVER!

Labels: teaching and learning