I've never been a teacher. And thank god, because I can say with 98% certainty that the majority of my day would consist of me, standing in front of a room full of unruly "tweens" who Just Won't Listen, stroking a piece of cutlery and fantasizing aloud about plunging said cutlery into the bodies of those unruly students. Any teacher would. But apparently in "today's America," this behavior is frowned upon.
OH MY GOD JUSTIN! SHUT UPPPPPPPPPPP! HAHAHAHEEEEEEEEEEE! Sorry, were you trying to read a blog post? That was just an unruly middle school girl interrupting your thought process with high-pitched inanities. If you're a teacher, this happens all day, every day. It's only natural to, once in a while, verbalize your sincere desire to stab all of these students like some half-mad Freddy Krueger of education.( Maybe then they would "learn.") That's what anyone would do. And that's what New York City teacher Jacqueline Baffoni did. But now, surprise surprise, stuffed-shirt bureaucrats who do not have to spend all day in a classroom full of kids are getting this overstressed teacher in hot water. From the NY Post:
"I feel like stabbing some of these kids - I have a knife here," the teacher said, a student in the eighth-grade class told probers from the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation (SCI).
Another student said the teacher, who kept a blade in her desk for slicing fruit, added, "I have a knife in this room, and I wish I could stab them!"
These completely normal alleged offhand remarks may have been the cause for Baffoni's firing last year. So now who will teach these kids? A robotic android, crafted by scientists to not want to stab middle school students? Good luck with that pipe dream. We're dealing with humans here. And humans want to stab middle school students. The sooner we get realistic about this fact, the sooner we can push these kids the hell out the door and let the high school teachers fantasize about stabbing them.
[NYP. Photo: Dave Crosby/ Flickr]