by alterom | 2025-04-02 10:17:04+00:00
>You seem very angry yourself

To whom? Not to me. Please don't try to assert you know what someone else is feeling.

What they wrote wasn't angry.

>and willing to let that anger guide you to harming someone.

It's not anger that's guiding the call to fire the teacher that willfully mis-grades a correct answer because "they got mad" at the student for understanding the material at above-average level.

It's the compassion for their students.

>Are you so different from that teacher?

Yes. The teacher is given authority over children, and we trust them to be fair and just in their job.

They have violated the trust and abused the authority.

And what got them mad was the student doing what we expect the students to do very well — they learned.

The teacher got mad at their student for learning, and abused the student in retaliation.

The retaliation affected someone who didn't have a choice about being in that position, and who was required to be in that class (by law, among other things), and the consequences of bad grades have lifelong effects.

Meanwhile, the commentor you're responding to observed that the teacher has failed our trust and abused the authority, and deemed such harm to students unacceptable to an extent that warrants revoking this person privilege to teach.

Nobody here has authority over the teacher, nobody trusts us to treat the teacher fairly; the teacher is free to work elsewhere; and we're being displeased about the teacher not merely doing his job badly, but harming his students.

To think these two situations are comparable is a failure of critical thinking, as well as empathy.

>In fact, you might be worse, while he only gave a grade (one of many surely, likely to have no long term impact on life prospects or survival), you would have this man made homeless?

Nobody said anything about making the teacher homeless.

His need of having a home doesn't grant him a right to hurt children.

If you're not happy about firing potentially leading to homelessness, you may advocate for things like housing guarantees, income guarantees, and so on.

The Soviet Union, where that was the case, had its merits after all. Saying this without sarcasm, as someone born in the USSR.

But you appear to be talking in bad faith here (or, at least, without thinking it through), because by your logic, one shouldn't say that anyone should be fired for doing a bad job, by equating firing to homelessness (something specific to the US, BTW).

People are called to be fired (and are fired) for much lesser offenses than willfully hurting children in retaliation.

Most US states are at-will employment states, where anyone can be fired for nearly any reason (the few exceptions are well known).

In light of that, your argument rings hollow.

>Don't be so quick to assume a teacher (at least in the us) has been able to accrue sufficient savings to endure a ruined livelihood.

As someone who's left academia, and has many friends teaching in college or high school: that teacher will likely be better off financially doing anything else anyway.

That said, the system where we pay shit to shitty teachers and justify harm to children by shit pay is shitty all around.

See, the real issue with your rhetoric is that you completely ignore what the teacher has done.

Which is, again, abusing the trust and authority over children (we trust grading to be fair, and a lot depends on it), willfully, in retaliation, for the student having learned a lot.

Whatever the offense was, though, your argument can be repeated verbatim, without any changes, and will be still consistent.

Replace mis-grading with sexual assault, and you can still ask all the same questions you did.

Think about that for a minute. Try it.

...Don't be so quick to assume a teacher (at least in the us) has been able to accrue sufficient savings to endure a ruined livelihood. Sounds very, very extreme to me....

>Might there be a more charitable interpretation of the words, might there be information that we don't have that would, say, humanize the human being you'd like to ruin?

Gee, I must've missed that line in the US Constitution where we're all guaranteed the right to pursuit of happiness, teaching high school classes, and harming students entrusted to our authority by willfully mis-grading them.

Unironically — wouldn't anyone please think of the children?

The teacher's potentially poor finances don't equate to having a right to abuse trust and authority over children.

He has abused that trust in a way that leaves very little hope for him changing his ways (if you think that teacher will ever be happy to see that his student learned more than the teacher knew, I have a bridge to sell to you).

Consequently, there's no reason to believe the teacher should continue having the privilege to have authority over children.

>Maybe we could take the time to understand these impulses in ourselves and be the example we want rather than reflecting the pain we hate to ever increasing magnitudes.

Maybe we could avoid writing empty platitudes and try understanding the points we're responding to.

By "we", I mean "you" (just as you did).

I, for one, have already taught my fair share of mathematics classes over my years in academia, and (imagine it!) not even once I felt the impulse to mis-grade a student for any reason — much less so for being exceptionally good.

The very few times I've had the pleasure to teach someone who I felt was better than I was in the subject that I was teaching, I felt genuinely happy to have such luck.

So I'm all set on being the example.

Now, your turn.

Try to understand what I'm saying here before responding (or otherwise emotionally reacting).

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TL;DR: abuse of authority over children warrants revoking the privilege to have such authority.

Simple as.