"Mr. Yubo had shaving cream all over his hair and his suit," Nimary told me. She was recounting something that happened the day before, when a group of eighth graders, not her class, decided to go crazy when their teacher was out. Mr. Yubo was covering the class.
"They were throwing desks and chairs around, kids were running out of the class. Somebody had lotion and shaving cream and they were throwing it at Mr. Yubo."
"What did Mr. Yubo do?" I asked.
"He didn't do nothin'. He's like Mr. Trana, he just stands there like nothing's happening and is like, 'I don't care, I get paid whether you learn or not.'"
"What I don't get about you girls," I said to Nimary and her friends, all of whom were smart ambitious, considered getting a verbal reprimand from a teacher big trouble, "is how you learned how to behave. You don't need the teacher to tell you how to behave. Somehow you just know."
"You see, I'm just lazy," she said. "I don't have the energy to get up and run around like those kids."
She said it like it would have been an option otherwise.
So what should have Mr. Yubo done. Of course he reported it all to the Dean and to the Principal. Of course, they'll try to do something, but imagine yourself in his position. What do you do when someone throws shaving cream at you? What is the proper response. Are they teaching this in Teaching Schools? Is the proper response, "I quit?"
I'm only half-joking.
In the police blotter Friday morning, I read the following- "An Eastchester middle school teacher was arrested after he grabbed an 11-year olf student by the throat and dragged him out of his classroom,cops said."
A quick google search revealed that this was not this teacher's first brush with the law, or his first corporal punishment charge.
An eighth-grade boy attacked teacher Osagie Ehigie in a detention room at Junior High School 142 in Edenwald, the Bronx, punching him in the jaw, chest and groin, according to teachers and the Education Department.
The boy told authorities the teacher kneed him in the chest.
That was in 2003. Since the teacher, Mr. Ehigie, returned to his job- at the same school, even- must mean that the boy' s charges were dropped. I don't claim to know anything more about this teacher or these charges, but I do know that teachers in New York are routinely put into situations that would test the tolerance of any reasonable person.
Last year a friend of mine joined the teaching fellows program. He was place, inadequately prepared (as if there is an adequate preparation) into a rat-infested bilingual special ed. class. He quit after about a week and a half. He explained that it wasn't the kids that forced him to quit. He liked the kids and wanted to help them. He saw that they were more or less out of their own control. He quit because he was afraid of himself. Which I think is a reasonable response to the situation he was in. He didn't know what he would do the next time a kid ran up to him like he was going to throw a punch, or a kid ran around the room tripping on every desk and getting hit by every student. He tried "Sit down" He ran through, "Sientete!" And ended up with grabbing the kid by the arms. And then he had the moment of self-realization. He couldn't work there anymore.
New York City lost another ambitious, smart, bilingual teacher.
So what do you do? A kid throws a punch, throws shaving cream. Do you scream, curse, grab the kid by the neck. No, you can't do that. A teacher has to be above all of that.
Two years ago another friend of mine was puched by a student. He was an experience teacher, three years at the school. He was taking a doo-rag off the kid's head and the kid snapped, jumped up and punched him in the face. (I wrote about this closer to the event in the Slate Diary.) His glasses were knocked off his face, flew across the room, leaving him blind. A group of kids grabbed the puncher, pulled him out into the hallway, and Mr. Rosenberg tried to return to his class.
The next week he wrote it up, they had a hearing for a superintendant's suspension, which would have taken the kid out of the building for a couple of months. He recieved minimal punishment. Mr. Rosenberg was then charged with corporal punishment for taking the doo-rag (which is banned in school) off the kid's head. Unknown to Rosenberg, the kid was wearing it to cover up stitched on the back of his head. He had a note from the principal allowing it, although he didn't show it to Mr. Rosenberg. At the hearing the charges were dropped, the kid returned to the school and everything moved on like nothing happened. Rosenberg saw the kid slapping other kids, punching the Dean, hitting girls on the street for the rest of the year, and the following year he transferred to an experimental charter school in Manhattan.
Again, we lost another teacher. Maybe that's the point. Maybe it's a way of letting people know when it's time to move on. But wouldn't needy schools do better to hold onto some of these teachers?
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