Calling All Teachers
Just look at what is happening with
teaching and the Internet, and go to Google or Yahoo and check out
"Rate My Teachers".
My logical mind kicked in, after the
first emotional feeling.
Here are points of logic on this matter,
of seeing under-age minors freely saying whatever they want about a teacher who has disciplined them for talking all the time
in class, for reading newspapers and comics in class, or spending half the time going to the washroom.
Yes, of course, there are not very good
teachers, and there are teachers are assured of sheltered unionizeds or government jobs who never care at all for the unprotected
ESL teachers
out in Asia.
The general tendency of these sites
to multiply rapidly is terrifying in its potentials.
All professionals can be rated thus:
Rate Your Doctors
Rate Your Dentists
Rate Your Lawyers
Rates Your Judges
Except they won't be rated by legal
minors who are not able to be held responsible in a court of law for their hasty malicious comments.
We could even go farther:
Rate Your Mothers
Rate Your Fathers
A teacher is not a popular singer, or
a servant, or a factory worker. All workers are not the same, though lately a difficult job climate seems to lump everyone
looking for work together.
The teacher must have distance to have
respect, they must enforce a little authority and discipline upon a classroom, just as daycare workers must enforce rules
upon toddlers, because some orderliness and quiet is needed in a room of twenty or thirty lively young people.
The teacher unlike a rock star of football
star does not have to be popular in the sense of having a crowd pleasing personality.
I believed general stresses in the educational
system will be taken out upon teachers, and with a darkening climate, students forced to pay more and more, less openings
at prestigious universities, taxation cuts, etc. we should just look at the law as it is written in democracies.
1. Saying something bad about another
person in print is LIBEL.
2. Saying something bad about another
person that causes them to love their job, their money, or their standing in the community is REALLY LIBEL with damages to
be awarded for the loss of reputation.
3. The teacher so criticized is also tried
outside the court, they are being violated in their basic processes of democratic lawy. What is happening to our collective
memory of how life should be lived in our countries of England, Ireland, Canada, etc?
4. There may be hidden economic reasons
for these ugly sites. The breaking of teaching as union- and government- work leaves the field open for part-time teacher
agencies which will be run more as businesses, with no worker bwenefits, no job stability, etc.
These tendencies might benefit some teachers
doing ESL.
However, the cruelty to teachers and the
lack of respectfulness is shocking to me, who always respected my teachers when I was a child, and my parents respected them
too.
Even an unionized blue collar worker can
go to his job in the morning without feeling everyone has been talking about him behind his back.
This Internet discussion is gossiping
and talking about the worker behind their back in a paradoxcical way.
By the time the teacher has "the right
to defend" herself and himself, they have been so humiliated, they must just feel like quitting.
Do you remember who were the Most Popular
boys and girls at school, adolescents are led by those who are the strongest in personality, and even two or three negative
comments from a group may influence the others.
No, I am getting too far into this, this
should be stopped at the first doorway, and the doorway is Libel.
Ideas For Teachers
Consider libel as the issue.
Move quickly on this issue.
Consider class-action lawsuits.
If the student is under-age, his parents
have some responsibility for libel.
Protect even less popular teachers, you
are no cabaret dancers, and are not working for crowd-pleasing.
Other professionals, such as doctors and
lawyers, may well be next.
Even cleaning ladies and ditch-siggers
are not subjected to such humiliation and shaming, such cruelty and horribleness.
In one Asian area,
a small handful of teachers have been
driven to suicide recently by the return of these customs. What are the economic reasons for these teacher harrassments?
Why just teachers?
I am throwing these questions out, to
teach by asking questions.
