A reader sent me a chastising email I don’t post enough about teachers gone bad. He cited a recent spate of videos – many of which appeared on news websites – that show educators "attacking" students. He queried, "Why don't you ever post the videos?"
Here's why. We have no idea what’s going on in most of them.
Most are short clips of a longer incident. For instance, a grainy video making the rounds this week appears to show an administrator pushing a teen to the floor. We don’t know what happened before the two figures enter the video frame. There's no audio so we don’t know what's being said. We don't know whether the student had just been choking a classmate. Yes, we see an administrator pushing one teen, but was he protecting another?
Is it possible the administrator in the video was wrong? Sure, but the video is not sufficient evidence.
A 6-second video lacks context and circumstance. Let me provide a personal example of an incident that occurred before we lived under 24-hour surveillance.
When my twins were infants, I walked them in a double stroller. I lived minutes from the local elementary school, and I’d often pass my 7-year-old son’s class on the playground. Among his classmates was a boy who acted out in class a lot including striking other children.
On this bright morning, the boy ran up and asked if he could push my babies in the carriage. I let him but kept my hands on the stroller handle. But the boy immediately yanked the carriage out of my hands and tore down the sidewalk, deliberately and violently bumping the twins up and down. I caught up with him within seconds, and pushed him away from the carriage and the terrified babies.
Had a video only caught only that last moment – where I forcefully pull a 7-year-old’s hands from the carriage – I would have come across as a nutcase mistreating a sweet-faced child.
We live in an era where students post cellphone videos of teachers allegedly in the midst of wrongdoing. News sites are all too eager to share these cellphone scenes, and viewers are quick to demand the teachers be fired or prosecuted.
I am reading a John Gregory Dunne novel where the narrator deplores the “gluttonous 24/7 news cycle” and remarks, “I think I would have preferred to live in the age of the pony express, allowing as it did, I would like to think, a time for contemplation before action was deemed necessary.”
I think we all need to contemplate more and deem less.
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