\n| \n This story hits too close to home. Ron Mayfield
\n became an ESL teacher late in life, although he always wanted to be an
\n educator. Taking
\n early retirement after 20
\n years working on the railroad, he went back to school to get a
\n teaching degree from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas in 1992, the
\n same year his son, Robert, graduated from college. This was followed
\n by stints teaching English in Japan and Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n Finally, tired of traveling, he returned home and got a job teaching
\n English to non-native speakers at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School.
\n By all accounts he was a stable and sober man. Then, late last year hew
\n was accused of "assaulting" a student in a wheelchair. He said he was
\n merely trying to get the attention of the misbehaving and disruptive
\n student.<\/p>\n Despite his word, testimony of other students, Mayfield’s spotless record,
\n an apology from the students parents and a police investigation
\n which completely cleared the teacher, his life was turned upside down. His
\n picture was shown in the newspaper and on TV, neighbors began to whisper
\n about him, and he got more and more depressed.<\/p>\n So one late October morning he drove down the Blue Ridge Parkway to
\n a scenic 2-lane bridge 200 feet above
\n the
\n rushing
\n Roanoke
\n River where
\n he often
\n went
\n fishing for catfish with his son, and had gone as a child with his father,
\n a
\n photo of which he had installed as a screen
\n saver
\n on his
\n computer. He
\n left his car carefully parked in a scenic overview parking area, slipped
\n a
\n neatly folded not into the bible on the front seat, and walked
\n to the middle of the span. He took out his cell phone and called
\n his wife for a muted goodbye she didn’t understand. Then
\n he carefully placed the phone on the sidewalk and jumped.<\/p>\n False accusations against teachers are rising at an unprecedented rate.
\n It has gotten to the point where the Dowbrigade is so worried about inadvertent
\n touching that he teaches with his hands in his pockets, which makes blackboard
\n notation difficult and has convinced his students he is some sort of
\n pervert, negating the whole point of the maneuver.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n"There is a culture now where students know how to get rid of a
\n teacher, they know how to get a teacher removed from a classroom," said
\n Greg Lawler, general counsel for the Colorado Education Association. <\/p>\n Mayfield was warned about the troubled boy, Abdul Nahibkhil, at the
\n start of the school year by a colleague who said the boy disrupted
\n her class the year before. Abdul’s parents, Abdul and Shina Nahibkhil,
\n had come to the United States from India about 27 months earlier.
\n The parents, who speak no English, were interviewed with their daughter
\n Jasmine, 20, serving as interpreter.<\/p>\n "When the investigators came, my parents told them that in India,
\n teachers hit students all the time and they didn’t care if Mr. Mayfield
\n hit
\n Abdul or not," the daughter said. "They said if he hit
\n him, he deserved it. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t care if he
\n hit him
\n or not. They wanted the matter dropped, and they said that they would
\n make Abdul go to school and apologize to Mr. Mayfield."<\/p>\n When [his wife] got his final phone call at 8:01 a.m., he did not
\n tell her that was where he had gone. In the minutes after he dropped
\n into
\n the river, his cellphone, abandoned on the sidewalk, rang again and
\n again without answer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n from the Boston Globe<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This story hits too close to home. Ron Mayfield became an ESL teacher late in life, although he always wanted to be an educator. Taking early retirement after 20 years working on the railroad, he went back to school to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |