It's pretty clear that not every teacher agrees with me:
When you send your child off to school in the morning, especially on a historic Inauguration Day, is there ever a moment when you imagine something like this could happen in front of the class? At W.H. Adamson High School in Dallas, Texas, art students were treated to an epic meltdown by their teacher, Payal Modi, who screamed "DIE!" and shot President Trump's image with a water gun while students watched his inauguration by video. Someone filmed it and Modi posted it to her Instagram account. She has since removed the video, but it is traveling around Twitter.Initially she wasn't ashamed of her behavior, as she posted the video to her own Instagram account. But since it took place during school, I wonder what, if anything, will happen:
The school released a statement saying, “The teacher has been placed on administrative leave and the district has opened an investigation. This is a personnel matter and, as such, we cannot comment."Of course they can't.
I don't think she should be fired. No one got hurt, no one could have gotten hurt. It was poor judgement, nothing more, and should be treated that way. Hopefully the shame of having everyone know she acted like an immature idiot will be part of the punishment. Hopefully that shame was at least partly responsible for her having removed the video from her account.
I am not sure. Her actions appear to be the act of an unstable person. Not sure I want an unstable person that appears to lash out without warning teaching my child. Additionally, if she did not know that her actions were of unsound judgement, not sure she should be teaching. Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteI think that her punishment should be similar to the punishment of the boy who broke the gun laws by making one with his hand or by biting a poptart into a gun's shape.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, in this day and age, with cell phones in every student's hand, this teacher is an idiot to act out in that fashion. She is young enough to know that it would get posted on social media even if she did it as a joke.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, this lack of circumspection toward her own behavior makes her judgment questionable. If she doesn't grasp the difference between what is public behavior and what is private behavior, what other boundaries is she going to breech?
Third, as a teacher who has had to deal with people like this in a faculty, she has made the work of every single other teacher that much harder by making us all appear to be political clowns.
And finally, if she was doing this to achieve some sort of "cool teacher" mantle, she blew it.
It disgusts me that she's an art teacher in Texas--a state where there are plenty of good art teachers looking for work.
Fire her. Fire her now.