Teachers violate trust with verbal reproachment
Web-posted May 13, 2004
By JAMES WINDELL
Special To The Daily Oakland Press
A teenage boy was told by his teacher to stop talking in class. He responded with a common adolescent response, "Just chill, OK."
The teacher snapped back, "You wouldn't have said that to the teacher in the school you were in a few weeks ago."
That, said Brian, a 15-year-older who had spent time in a juvenile detention center, was unfair.
"I got lots of questions from kids in my class and they all found out I'd been locked up," he said.
Fourteen-year-old Samantha was embarrassed by her teacher after she handed in a book report. "This report is pretty good," the teacher said to Samantha in front of the whole class. "Who wrote it? Your mother?"
Samantha, in reporting this event weeks later, was still seething over this remark which she saw as rude and humiliating. "I worked hard on that report and she was making fun of me and the report," she said.
Jeff, a 13-year-old boy, was livid when his teacher devastated him in his eighth-grade class one day. "I was having a bad day and I admit I wasn't paying attention," Jeff recalled. "I was talking to other kids too much and laughing too much."
Because he was being disruptive, the teacher said, "The reason why you're acting like this is because your mother is in prison."
Hearing that, Jeff flipped out and retaliated with personal comments about the teacher that were meant to be cutting and expressed his anger. However, in describing this incident, Jeff said what he really felt was humiliation and embarrassment. "I didn't want anyone to know that my mother was incarcerated," he said.
In each of these incidents, and perhaps in hundreds more like these each day in classrooms around the country, children are humiliated and ridiculed by teachers. Often, as in the remarks to Brian and Jeff, teachers reveal information that is both personal and confidential. When teachers do this, no matter what the provocation, there is a violation of the trust between children and their teachers.
Moreover, when teachers say things that are designed to hurt a child, their behavior represents a violation of the ethical standards for educators.
All professionals have ethical standards that govern their behavior. In Michigan, there is a code of ethics for educators.
Although these ethical standards are not nearly as comprehensive or as well known as those for other professionals - for instance, the American Psychological Association has a lengthy and well-defined code of ethics - they do call for teachers to respect the inherent dignity and worth of each student.
If teachers are not required by their professional code of ethics to keep personal information about students private and confidential, they ought to have a personal code that requires them to treat what they know in a professional manner.
Their goal in each interaction with a student should be to increase and improve mutual respect.
Embarrassment and humiliation has no role in a classroom because such behavior does not support the growth and development of the students in that classroom.
In each of the cases cited above, these students, although certainly not blameless in terms of their classroom behavior, were damaged by the careless and thoughtless remarks of the teacher. Such ethical violations will never result in improved behavior, nor an enhanced learning environment.
Each of these children was made to feel smaller and less human. And probably a good deal more angry and less respectful of teachers ingeneral.
Although teachers have many more stresses and concerns today than they have had in the past, there is never a legitimate reason or excuse to ignore professional standards of ethical behavior.