The New York Times has released a video of a 1st grade teacher’s reaction to a student’s wrong answer in math, surreptitiously filmed by an assistant teacher in 2014, and it is heartbreaking. My children are in HS at a private school that emphasizes academic risk taking - this teacher is demonstrating the exact opposite of that.
I feel for the child who received the punishment and for all the kids in the class given the fear and intimidation they must have experienced. I have a hard time believing that this was a momentary lapse in judgment on the teacher’s part:
Wow! Hard to believe its a one-off situation. I’m sure the assistant filmed it because it happens all the time. I have one child who was always been extremely sensitive to criticism, even when directed towards others. That would have been an impossible environment. The kids seem so stoic sitting there! Probably afraid to move an inch!
Well, if a certain candidate doesn’t get elected President, he’d fit right in as a first grade teacher at that school. This is the Success Academy! Failure is for losers! Etc.
She’s in need of mentoring and supervision, and if that doesn’t give her better classroom management skills, she needs to be removed. Not everyone has the temperament to teach – it takes an unbelievable amount of patience, humor, planning, compassion, grace, intelligence and more patience every single day. Teachers have bad days, for sure. This is not that, and she embarasses the profession. Sometimes blowing the whistle is the most ethical thing to do, so let’s hope the assistant is okay.
Harsh teachers can have fairly long term effects. S had a teacher in 7th and 8th grades who really disliked him. It made him reticent to talk to teachers. Fortunately, we switched him to a private school with mostly more supportive teachers and he recovered nicely.
D opted out of GT class who had an out of control teacher who daily made the kids cry. She really needed to switch professions too.
It is very sad that I expected the video to be much worse. While it is obvious that that teacher should not be working with children, I have observed so much worse in the urban school where I taught and the urban public school that my son attended. Before registering a child for a magnet program, a parent had to visit the home school first. The day that I visited the assigned school kindergarten, the teacher, among other things, yelled at the top of her lungs, “Sit down and shut up!” I was horrified that she would speak that way to 5 year old children and that she would do it in front of a prospective parent (and she knew that I was a former teacher).
I came home from the visit and told my husband that if s didn’t get into the magnet, I would move, even if it meant leaving my husband. Kids are pretty resilient but even the strongest get worn down.
^^I expected worse too. I don’t condone this woman’s actions by any means, but I’ve seen and experienced much worse, especially going to Catholic school in the 60s and 70s.
I’m not saying that her behavior was appropriate for any grade, but why would someone like that be teaching little ones??? A certain toughness can be needed in the high school years…but who talks this way to 6 year olds???
I think we need to consider the age of these kids. that same teacher saying those same things to a 16 year old would not be as “offensive” as it is to a 1st grader.
@Bestfriendsgirl We all attended Catholic schools, and yes some teachers were tough…but not to 1st graders. Are you saying that you experiences worse in the first grade?
Abso-damn-loutely they were, and I didn’t even get the worst of it. My first-grade teacher, whom I also had for third grade, was a German nun and later on when I found out about the Nazis, I wondered if she wasn’t an escaped war criminal hiding out at the convent. My parents were no help at all. They thought it was good for us and no one ever, ever dared question a nun.
The reason this one is getting extra airplay is that it’s from a divisive charter school chain in NYC that purports to get better test scores through methods such as this (when not doing their own version of bunny-drowning with confirmed push-these-kids out lists.) The Times had been mostly defending them so it’s interesting that they featured this.
As a teacher who has interviewed at several NYC charter schools (including this one!), I believe this video is only a more extreme version of the strategies they do promote and expect teachers to follow.
Teachers like that can definitely have a serious effect. It’s been a very long time since I was in second grade, but I distinctly remember how terrified I was of Miss T., and the way she continually yelled at and spoke harshly to the 6 and 7 year old children in the class simply for making mistakes – often, in assignments she didn’t explain adequately, and/or in her rules about margins and line spacing. My mother used to help me put on my “invisible armor” every morning before school, so I could feel symbolically protected and not be so frightened…
Sad to say, while I disagree with this teacher’s actions and attitude, she was nowhere near as harsh as some of the elementary school teachers I’ve observed while going through K-6 in the '80s.
Got expelled from one Catholic elementary school a few weeks into first grade as a 5 year old for “being too rambunctious” in the words of the principal. Something which the vast majority of adult neighbors familiar with the school and even my normally “teachers are always right” father thought was ridiculously unreasonable considering my age and the fact 8 years before another first grader known to us as a highly intelligent well-behaved boy had been expelled for the exact same reasons. Only commonalities were we were both a bit fidgety at 5-ish and Asian-American*.
Ironically, both that boy and I ended up attending the same NYC Specialized HS and he ended up turning down a full FA package to MIT to attend Annapolis so he’d have a better shot at being assigned to nuclear submarines at graduation…which he got.
At the second Catholic elementary school, I lucked out by having really kind nice teachers who’d never yelled at us for making academic mistakes.
However, the kindergarteners and second graders next door to my first grade class weren’t as fortunate as both of them were known to be nasty as their yelling and yes, temper tantrums were loud enough to be heard all over the entire floor. Even back then, many of us first graders felt it was odd the K teacher was one of the teachers known to have a very short fuze and inclined to loud screaming temper tantrums.
However, this was the '80s and in a neighborhood where parents inclined to send their kids to such schools felt this was a valid disciplinary practice to discourage potential juvenile delinquency and chaotic classrooms endemic in the local neighborhood public schools of the time.
Also, some of my elementary school classmates’ parents’ disciplinary practices were much more harsh. One classmate in third grade had a father who was a 20+ year Marine who served stints in Vietnam and at Parris Island as a drill sergeant. One time when he heard the classmate was getting a bit rowdy and disruptive one day, he treated his son like a recalcitrant Marine recruit by forcing him to do pushups, running, and other “PT him to death” exercises in a public park where everyone can see him. Keep in mind my classmate was 8 and this was a regular punishment for his son…and one which most parents in the old neighborhood was a sign of a “good parent”…especially the fathers/grandfathers.
My father was one of the few who despite being old-schoolish in some respects regarding discipline felt this was too excessive and tried interceding on my classmate’s behalf to no avail despite having some cred for completing his 2 years of mandated military service as a junior officer in the ROC(Taiwan) during the '50s.
The classmate’s father was also a real “tiger dad” except his target wasn’t Ivy/elite universities, but FSAs and he prepped his son for that end including insisting he kept his room so well organized it could have passed the SAMI inspections a cousin described he had to undergo during his year at USAFA. There was a lot of discord when his father pointedly and angrily expressed his disappointment with his son when he failed to attain admission to any FSA despite the fact he earned a full AROTC scholarship to a local private college.
Ugh ! my youngest had the meanest teacher when she was in the first grade. As a sensitive child, she was affected and yes, scarred by this teacher.
Why she was teaching is beyond me. She had a reputation for crushing the spirits of many children that had the misfortune of having her as a teacher. In all the years of dealing with my children’s teachers…she was without a doubt the worst.
Mean as a snake, and defended by admin because of her tenure. Years later, a lot of my daughter’s first grade classmates shared their awful memories of this horrible woman
My daughter’s kindergarten teacher missed her calling – she was meant to be a drill sergeant. Every day when I put her on the school bus I felt like I was feeding her to the lions.
I told my daughter that she got the worst one out of the way first.
The following year, her 1st grade teacher invited the kids to talk about what kindergarten had been like. I heard all about it later from the teacher. She said it was practically a group therapy session.