Terror in the Trenches of Teaching

WAGGAMAN,
        La. — A public school
teacher fed up with his students’ behavior found a way to berate them
in the context of a class assignment. The Jefferson Parish teacher
wrote and distributed a two-page essay to his fourth-grade
      students saying he hated his job,
blasting the children’s “animal”behavior, and even identifying some of
them by name.
       
 Titled
“I Wonder Why?” the essay ended with an assignment for each student to
write a 200-word essay on how the teacher should treat them.
       
       
“Make sure you tell me why I need to treat you a certain way,” the
assignment reads. “I want to make sure that I no longer cheat and act
unfairly.”
       
In the
essay, the teacher detailed the loud, disobedient behavior of his students on a particular day
and how some ridiculed him while others accused   him of cheating
for a competing class during a spelling bee. The teacher  said he was tired because
pain from a root canal had kept him awake most  of the previous night.

Without
breaking our cardinal rule to never blog about specific students, we
can certainly say we have seen our share of “animal” behavior, 
usually involving the ingestion of food or the excretion of bodily
fluids.  Despite often having been insulted, frustrated to the
point of tears or profoundly offended by student  behavior, we
have never lashed out in retaliation, either orally or in writing. Of
course, there was the time an entire class reported that “a dog had
eaten their homework” which was rather  strange seeing as they
were all foreign students living in dorm rooms. We subsequently forced
them to march down to the Student Center wearing their underwear on the
outside of their clothes, but we were tired because  a massive
inadvertent dose of Methylenedioxyamphetamine had kept us awake most of
the previous night.

from the Washington Post