RE: Teacher suspended for withdrawing rec. letter of student who displayed swasitka
February 11, 2017 at 4:48 pm
I feel like there's overreaction from many angles on this story.
First things first, can't we just acknowledge that 17 year olds do stupid stuff? When I was in HS we used to do trollish things all the time, in good taste and bad. Most often, we would do offensive things not because we meant what we said but to provoke a reaction of out of people for laughs. We had a tremendous amount of Jewish students at my HS and they would be the ones making holocaust jokes, that's what teenagers do, they offend, they like to break taboos and appear edgy.
So we have this 17 year old make a swastika out of tape? From what we know (which isn't much) to me it sounds like a teen being a dumb troll, not someone who is an actual Nazi, the police determined it wasn't a hate crime. Did he deserve discipline? Yes. Does he deserve to have his future potentially derailed for being an ass? No. And that's the power of rescinding a recommendation letter like this, so I disagree with the teacher who did that.
If I were the teacher, I'd have considered the school discipline punishment enough and moved on. Ideally, that student in 4 years time will be graduating university and be far more mature than he was in his "tape swastika" days and cringe whenever that memory comes up again. On the other hand I think the school is overreacting by punishing the teacher, they were well within their rights to rescind the letter, so why punish the teacher?
I see screw ups on all sides here.
First things first, can't we just acknowledge that 17 year olds do stupid stuff? When I was in HS we used to do trollish things all the time, in good taste and bad. Most often, we would do offensive things not because we meant what we said but to provoke a reaction of out of people for laughs. We had a tremendous amount of Jewish students at my HS and they would be the ones making holocaust jokes, that's what teenagers do, they offend, they like to break taboos and appear edgy.
So we have this 17 year old make a swastika out of tape? From what we know (which isn't much) to me it sounds like a teen being a dumb troll, not someone who is an actual Nazi, the police determined it wasn't a hate crime. Did he deserve discipline? Yes. Does he deserve to have his future potentially derailed for being an ass? No. And that's the power of rescinding a recommendation letter like this, so I disagree with the teacher who did that.
If I were the teacher, I'd have considered the school discipline punishment enough and moved on. Ideally, that student in 4 years time will be graduating university and be far more mature than he was in his "tape swastika" days and cringe whenever that memory comes up again. On the other hand I think the school is overreacting by punishing the teacher, they were well within their rights to rescind the letter, so why punish the teacher?
I see screw ups on all sides here.
