It has recently been announced that Rutgers University will be removing their head basketball coach from his position after a video of the coach yelling, shoving, grabbing, and using gay slurs towards his players was released. The video was shocking and it was difficult to see a person that was supposed to be a leader, guide, and role model to these young players, treat them so poorly. The coach has remarked that he is deeply remorseful and sorry and luckily the players seem to be able to move pass this, but it does bring up the issue of how much coach, or teacher, to student abuse occurs in schools, and how damaging can it be to students?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbaYqcMMZ6A – video of Rutgers coach
This post is a sort of addition to my last article about how it can sometimes to be difficult to tell how good of an educator a teacher is. Unless an officially is willing to sit in for every class, every day of the year, which seems virtually impossible, the going-ons within a classroom can really become a mystery.
Most of the people in this class were probably very quick learners in grade school, and most-likely fairly well behaved, probably a teacher’s dream. But we all know that not everyone is like that. For many kids it takes a while to learn material, and when it is difficult the struggle can become even more intense, and that is when they need a teacher most. A teacher must be patient and nuturing because if they themselves become frustrated with the student’s lack of progress and decide to move on or become upset with the student it can have detrimental affects on that student for the rest of his life.
One mother tells the story of her son, a boy she describes as “smart as a whip” but who suffered from ADHD. She criticized the way schools run their curriculum where it is read, memorize, and spit out and claimed that her son was just unable to learn that way. So when he found himself getting poor grades or marks on a consistent basis the teacher, rather than helping, made an example out of him. He displayed the boy’s failing term paper to the rest of the class as an example of what “the worst paper he had ever read” looked like and told the boy in front of all of his peers that he would amount to nothing and that he was plain stupid. The mother claims that this was the turning point in her son’s life. As a 13 year old he was at an age where so many things were changing already and being told that he had no future he turned to drugs, alcohol, and fighting. She claims that if the teacher would have been more supportive and willing to their job, not abuse her son for his attempts at school, then who knows what his future would have been like.
Another teacher in Florida made her sixth grade students write out the words that they missed on their spelling tests using sandpaper on their hands. All of the students claimed that by the end of the day they were bleeding and could hardly use their hands to write anything else down. As college students many of us would most-likely just leave the room and report such abuse, but because most of these kids were ten and eleven years old they feared the further punishment from their teacher and let this continue for months.
One of the most disgusting forms of teacher abuse comes in the form of how some teachers treat disabled students. Cheyenne was a 14 year old special needs student from Ohio who complained to her parents about bullying in school. While at first they thought it was just other students what they found was the abuse was coming from her teacher. Because of the fact that she was special needs many people thought that she might have been lying or twisting the story, but after they put a tape recorder on the girl, what they found was shocking.
“Cheyenne, are you kidding me? Are you that dumb? Oh my God, you are that dumb! Cheyenne, don’t you want to do something to get rid of that belly? Well, evidently you don’t because you don’t do anything at home. You sit at home and watch TV. ” And there was more. “I’m not going to bother grading this test because I know you failed.”
These were all words uttered by someone who was supposed to be helping Cheyenne grow as a person, when instead she was tearing her down.
I won’t even start to go into the other types of abuse that can occur in schools and is sexual related but one can only imagine what that kind of relationship does to a young student.
In teacher’s defense we are living in a society that is very quick to jump to the lawsuit. While I don’t doubt any of these testimonies given I have personally seen situations where a student will purposely push a teacher to their limit just to get a reaction out of them and then complain about how that teacher got mad at them. Or when a teacher will give an extended deadline or offer extra help to a student who refuses to take it and then becomes upset with their less than desirable grade and the teacher’s disappointment in them. Of course in the case of children this abuse is inexcusable but I know a lot of high school students that learned how to work the system in their favor and turn the abuse around.
The classroom or the basketball court is a place where a trusted adult should be there to help students grow and develop. It has been proven that students will do this best in an environment that is nuturing and they are constantly encouraged to improve with constructive criticism. When teachers or coaches become a negative force in a child’s life it can affect that child for the rest of their life. As soon as a teacher calls a student stupid or tells them they have no future it becomes a lot more likely that they are right.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-kasdin/after-a-teacher-calls-you_b_1103566.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57566947-504083/fla-teacher-accused-of-abusing-students-with-sandpaper-until-their-fingers-bled/
http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/bullying-teachers.html
But boomboxes were heavy, plus, they caused a lot of problems for people like Radio Raheem. People wanted to listen to their music while they walked, or rode buses, but having it just blasting from a boombox was disrespectful, noisy, and got a lot of dirty looks if it included profanity. This meant that companies had to design products that could be small enough to carry, but also that could have small, loudspeakers, or headphones, get plugged in to. The results were Walkmans first, and then CD players, and the headphones looked a little something like this. 
I’m sure many of you rocked these headphones on car rides back from grandma’s house plenty of times in your childhoods. But they problem was the were so big and uncomfortable. Also if the little soft padding ripped they would rub up harshly against your ears and made listening to the Backstreet Boys far less enjoyable. Then our little minds were blown when the iPod came out. Not only was the mp3 itself revolutionary since it could hold your entire CD collection, but each one also came with its own set of strange little ear buds that popped right into your earholes. Intrusive…maybe. But eventually you had to convert. Anyone caught with the old school headphones was associated with someone who was still carrying around a CD player and thus was not cool enough to sit next to you on the bus while you wore your sleek, stylish, ear buds.
