<p>[Teacher</a> bullies students and writes ?loser? on sixth grade student?s assignments](<a href=“Examiner is back - Examiner.com”>Examiner is back - Examiner.com)</p>
<p>What a cruel thing to do. I hope they fire him, he’s not fit to be a teacher.</p>
<p>Cruel and unprofessional, and the teacher is deserving of at least a reprimand, but why is this considered a news story? I’m sure that similar stupid, unprofessional things happen all of the time and aren’t in the national news. Surely there are more important things --including problems with children’s education-- to put in the media.</p>
<p>It is sad, but often harsher words are needed. We are all used to You are great - You are wonderful crap. I do not know if writing ‘loser’ is the appropriate choice of words or not.</p>
<p>Recently, I had a 4th grade student who gave me a note and asked me to read it and give it to his regular teacher. He wrote,“I know I am Stupid”…I spent about five mins. talking to him. At the end of my 'conversation I asked him if he still wanted me to leave the note for his teacher. I was pleased that he crumbled the note and tossed it away. But I guess that was just temporary. He was already checked out.</p>
<p>When my oldest son was in middle school he had trouble with his math teacher. He was and has never been good at math, he is an artistic type. He just made her crazy because he would not become enthusiastic about math. She was really hard on him and I was quiet and observed, I felt he needed to learn how to deal with this type of thing. I finally stepped in and called the principal when she began holding my son up as the “looser” you do not want to be to her other classes. She was required to call us and apologize to him and to us, but it was pretty lame and mostly consisted of her defending and justifying herself. But she did quit using our son and and example of a looser.</p>
<p>I think it is news because people who have the charge of those who are more vulnerable than they are, need to be reminded that " it isn’t funny & it won’t be tolerated & we are watching".</p>
<p>Especially when children are the target, other children are watching to see how adults in their lives handle it. If they don’t say anything, those children will remember. If they do speak out, those children will remember that too.</p>
<p>He really should be fired. I might be less inclined to say so had this not been the first time that he did it, but there really is no excuse for this- and calling it a quirky way of teaching is ridiculous.</p>
<p>I think it should be news. After all, kids are committing suicide right and left because of bullying, and it’s horrific (not exaggerating) that teachers aren’t just apathetic about it – they join in!</p>
<p>My 12 year old had a teacher like this in the first grade. There were never encouraging words written on her papers. There were plenty of criticisms , ( i.e. " you can do better " ) and this was on her hand-traced turkey that she colored…she was an awful , awful teacher. I have learned that I was not the only parent that complained and wanted my young daughter removed from her class…this teacher , now retired thankfully had a horrible reputation for being mean and hateful to her students.
There is nothing like a mean teacher to crush the spirit of their students</p>
<p>This guy is a jerk. Plain and simple. And a stupid one at that. It is bad enough to be a mean, immature teacher but why would you leave written evidence of what an a** you are? I don’t care what your “teaching style” is. Using inappropriate words and actions is not a “style”. More likely it is a personality disorder. Some teachers go into the classroom because they have unfinished business in their own maturation process. This guy needs to get out of the classroom first and get into a therapist’s office second.</p>
<p>The teacher is apparently very popular with the kids, parents and school, and uses terminology like that all of the time, and it is thought to be “cool” by everyone except this student and her mother.</p>
<p>My fourth grade teacher asked me “why you want to hang around with those dummies?”, referring to my friends, then threw the eraser at someones head. We liked her, too.</p>
<p>Wow, that brings back a memory.</p>
<p>My daughter had a geometry teacher in 9th grade who bullied his students that way.</p>
<p>One day my daughter walked into class and as she was handing in her homework assignment, the teacher made a comment to her, calling her a “loser”.</p>
<p>The classroom door was open, and my daughter had noticed that the assistant principal was standing right outside the door in the hallway.</p>
<p>So my daughter said in a very loud voice: “What did you call me, Mr. H? Did you call me a LOSER?! Why would you say something like that? What a terrible thing to say to a student!”</p>
<p>Mission accomplished. (partly). </p>
<p>The teacher continued to bully other students, but he never messed with my d. again. But my d. also frequently came to the defense of other students in the class with the same basic tactic. </p>
<p>The news article (above), says “all she wants is for her daughter to know that she is far from a loser and can do anything she sets her sights on.” I think my daughter would be 100% in agreement with that statement.</p>
<p>I have had teachers like that. They were so cool that they could get away with things like that and it was even considered part of their persona. Everyone is happy until someone who does not feel in on the whole thing gets insulted. I can tell you that sometimes it is the most popular, well regarded teachers that can cause the most pain and damage.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think it is possible, especially for an adult, especially for a *teacher<a href=“many%20if%20not%20most%20teachers%20are%20extremely%20well-educated%20and%20intelligent%20people”>/i</a> to distinguish between “fawning, mindless praise” and “childish silliness”. Maybe instead of writing “loser” or “You are great you are wonderful”, this teacher could have told the student what was wrong with her work.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t know if that’s true or not, but here’s another memory from my kids’ high school days.</p>
<p>My son had a history teacher who suddenly started acting oddly, setting a bunch of new rules in class and encouraging the students to make harassing phone calls (on the school’s internal lines) as a “joke” on another teacher, who happened to be openly gay. My son liked the other teacher and had a sense that the harassment was because of the gay teacher’s sexual orientation. My son refused to participate in the calls, even when the teacher threatened him with detention for not going along with the joke. </p>
<p>However, the class was the rise of fascism and WWII at the time, and as soon as my son reported the odd and very much out-of-character conduct of the history teacher, I felt that the teacher was trying to replicate a [Third</a> Wave](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave]Third”>Third wave - Wikipedia) type of experiment, so I explained my suspicions to my son. I turned out to be correct – in fact, when my son kept on protesting the teacher’s actions openly in class, the teacher took him aside, told my son that he was smart enough to figure out what was going on, but asked my son to go along with the game for the sake of getting the lesson across to others. That led to a little bit of a dilemma for my son - he wrestled with it somewhat, and then decided to continue his open resistance. Needless to say, the “experiment” didn’t have the results the teacher intended. </p>
<p>I’m just raising this because if you’ve got a bully in charge, then it would be very typical for the “in” crowd to be quite fond of him - and especially at the middle school level, both overt and covert bullying is very common among students. So the perceived popularity of the teacher is part of the problem – he is modeling and encouraging the very behavior that is so hurtful to vulnerable and sensitive students. A lot of cruelty passes under the radar as a “joke” – but especially in group settings it can be very hurtful to the individuals who always seem to be the brunt of the jokes, and it definitely can encourage victimization of particular students outside of class, when the kids carry on with the “teasing” that started in the classroom.</p>
<p>There was a very popular gym teacher in our district who was fired because he was in the habit of giving kids nicknames, and one kid and family objected to the nickname given to him or her. It may be that he has been told to cease and desist before this and slipped, I’m not sure. Many of the students were up in arms about it, but he lost his job anyway.</p>
<p>Teachers should give constructive feedback on writing assignments and the like. They should tell the kid what is wrong with the paper and give tips on how to improve it. 6th grade is hard on a lot of kids. Having a teacher who gives inappropriate feedback is not helpful.</p>
<p>
The same geometry teacher who called my daughter a “loser” was also inept at teaching math, but graded on strict curve. He’s the one who gave my daughter an A+ on an easy quiz where she had only 27% right – when I asked her how 27% could be “A+” – she told me I should see the curve, most of the kids had grades of about 14%. </p>
<p>So being abusive and insulting doesn’t always correspond to appropriate feedback.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You “don’t know”? Seriously? And you’re a teacher?</p>