Again, no link to an article in the headline but I have two articles here to further illustrate my point, that our schools are spiraling out of control, with no one but the administration to blame.
In South Carolina, a 49-year-old teacher, Karen Robbins, had sex with a 15-year-old student. The link for the article is on CNN.
In Tampa Bay, FL, a teacher in a classroom had problems with some disruptive students, culminating in "...one of them directed an offensive remark at a teacher, bringing her to tears."
The teacher left the room and another teacher came in, with two older kids in tow, to being the room under control. What follows is nothing short of abuse towards children, not just by the children but by the adults involved as well. Read about it here.
As the mother to a child who has been bullied pretty much non-stop since we moved to Arizona three years ago, I feel this is why our schools are out of control; the teachers don't want to teach, they want to be "friends" with their students. There are no boundaries any longer between the adults and the children they are responsible for.
In the teacher sex scandal in South Carolina, there is mention in the link provided of another teacher, this time a woman named Wendie Ann Schweikert, an elementary school teacher, had sex with an 11-year-old boy. This one sickens me to no end. How does anyone look at children and think, "Oh, yeah, I gotta have me some of that."
Today's world seems to be failing our children. They are not giving them the once proud educations of our forefathers, where a child could do algebra, and beyond, by the age of ten. We were once a country filled with accountability, where one was expected to take responsibility for their actions, and said actions were required to be the example for future generations. Now we are a country of "not me" and all we are teaching our children is that enough money and perseverance can keep you out of jail.
Over the last twenty years or so, psychologists have led us to believe that our actions are not our actions, but the result of someone else's mistreatment or abuse. We are now permitted to define ourselves by what has been heaped upon us in the past.
Example: I am the adult child of an alcoholic. My father was a horribly abusive alcoholic who hit me several times a week. My mother was powerless to stop it given the financial circumstances in their marriage and she was being abused as well. When I was in my early thirty's, I decided to go to an Al-Anon meeting for adult children of alcoholics. I went once and never went back. I heard so many people whining about how the alcoholic shaped their life and how it had repetitive repercussions on their present. "My father's being so abusive towards me now has me choosing relationships that are abusive." "My mother and her emotionally distancing me from her has me doing the same to my husband and children." Nowhere was anyone saying they were taking responsibility for their emotional problems. As long as we have someone to blame, we don't have to blame ourselves. These people are permitting the abusers to control their lives still by failing to shed the adjectives and move on.
I am an adult child of an alcoholic. It's not who I am, it's what I am, and even then, it's not a very big part of me either. I'm sure, when it's all said and done, these teachers are going to play some kind of pity card, giving mitigating circumstances related to the abuse of these students. I'm sure it'll play out in the courts as, "I was abused as a child and I can't recognize anything else as normal." Boo-hoo, cry me a river. Whomever abused you in the past, if it even happened, wasn't there to prompt you to commit the heinous acts you committed. They didn't hold a gun to your head and MAKE you abuse someone else.
These people make me sick and I believe they should all be locked away, in a dark room that has no key.
But who I am to judge? That's just my two cents.
