I was surprised and somewhat shocked after I read this article:
Reprinted from Reuters, February 27, 2007.
Milan teacher cuts pupil's tongue with scissors
MILAN - A Milan teacher cut an unruly 7-year-old pupil's tongue with scissors to silence him, police and school officials said on Tuesday.
The child, of North African origin, needed to go to hospital for five stitches to close the wound. The boy's family has filed suit against the teacher, who has been suspended after last week's incident. Police are trying to find out whether the injury was inflicted intentionally or was a joke gone wrong, a police source said. "We are carrying out a full inquiry to find out what really happened," said Anna Maria Dominici, in charge of schools in the Lombardy region. The teacher, a support tutor on a temporary contract, risks being fired from the elementary school. "She is a young teacher but the episode is so serious that inexperience has nothing to do with it," Dominici added.
After reading this article, most of us would assume that the female teacher who did this is mentally imbalanced. That's certainly the first thing that crossed my mind. I then wondered why the Italian school system would let a potentially unstable person become a qualified teacher. Surely the most basic teacher training would state that no matter how badly a child is misbehaving, scissors to the tongue is just not an option.
If the same incident occurred in a prison, I would think to myself, "Well, no surprise here, the offender was already a criminal." But the fact that this happened in a school, and was committed by someone in whom a lot of trust is placed, is what makes this so shocking. This is also why I immediately assume nascent insanity, rather than thinking the woman is just sadistic.
Perhaps it's also easier to forgive her actions if I can say, "Well, she only did that because she's not in her right mind. A person in their right mind would never have done that." Unfortunately, according to that line of reasoning it would seem everyone who commits heinous acts of cruelty or violence is simply "not in their right mind". That's where we move into a grey area.
It would be nice if every person on the planet was inherently pure and virtuous, and for faulty brain chemistry to be the only reason behind acts of violence and cruelty. But I don't think this is the case. Violence is a way of life for some people. To them, violent behaviour is acceptable, not immoral in the least, and over time the behaviour becomes too hard to shake. Should people like this be referred to as "mentally deranged" or do they simply possess different standards of morality?
If I got to see video footage of this teacher, and it turned out she did indeed have a slightly crazed demeanour, maybe I would feel better about the state of humanity. Because I could then say to myself, "I knew it! She's obviously got a screw loose. That's why she did what she did."
2 comments:
Whenever someone arrives at a situation that is outside their routine, and they have to consider their actions, they do all sorts of weird things.
Getting trained for something in the safety of the classroom and having a rambunctious horde of rascallions to suppress are two different things.
In a moment your subjective mind can move far from what you might otherwise consider a reasonable frame of mind. Pressure, tiredness, busyness, negative emotions and other extraneous factors can easily cloud your judgement. Actions are done real-time without the necessary leeway to think things through or and even if there were, your logic would be framed within a skewed subjective mind.
I can remember back to moments in my language school days where I can't help but don a retrospective frown for some of the things I got up to. The primary teaching also had moments like that.
The cutting of a tongue does seem a tad extreme - but you could almost picture the scene: A young boy, with a poor family background, has not been responding to any form of behavioral control that the teacher had been taught. She had begged the principal to deal with the child but had been unsuccessful. The child would not stop talking - saying some of the most horrendous things that children at that age should not be saying - and was the ringleader in all sorts of misdemeanours. On top of that she was up to her eyeballs in debt and in a tight employment market couldn't bear to leave her job. Her car had been recently repossessed and had trouble getting from her home to school with enough time. Being on a temporary contract too, she needed to show her ability - and was so badly showing that she couldn't handle things.
The scissors were meant to be a just threat - it was said in a moment of weakness - and if you don't follow through with the threat you're seen to be hollow. And he just wouldn't stop talking. So she grabbed the boy and held the scissors close to his mouth - and he wasn't stopping his talk and his threats, and he struggled and struggled... snip...
Or alternatively she could have been bonkers - but I think that more sane people do crazy things than those who can be deemed psychologically dysfunctional.
I agree that everyone has their moments of weakness, especially when there are various unfavourable circumstances conspiring against them. She might well have had difficult personal problems going on, but I think that being a teacher requires a lot of patience and tolerance and a better-than-average ability to cope with pressure.
Teachers are rarely lucky enough to be given an entire class of innocent, bright-eyed, ready-to-learn students - there will always be troublemakers out to disrupt the teaching process. I think the discipline methods used by Supernanny would be quite helpful to correct the behaviour of the young "rambunctious rascallions".
I'm aware that teachers don't always have best-practice teaching methods at their disposal, and the culture in some schools is one of "students vs teachers". I wonder if strung-out teachers all over the world secretly said to themselves, "Yeah! Chalk one up for the teachers!" after they heard this news story.
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