I have had some reader pushback in the last few days. Many readers think I am being too harsh on the sixteen-year-old kid who stole his teacher’s phone. I understand that position. Good people go into education, the kinds who want to rescue kids, not sue them. But sometimes I think we give too many chances. At ten, a kid should get extra help and extra chances regularly. By sixteen, though, consequences are in order. O.K., maybe the boy should not be in jail, but he should have to pay one whopper of a fine, enough to teach that boy a lesson and, more importantly, enough to teach a lesson to all the kids around him. In my middle school, we expelled a girl for the remainder of one year for blackmailing another girl with possible online distribution of a photo. It’s all fun and games until somebody says, “Do this or I’ll post your photo.” At that point, we have landed deep inside bullying territory. Students need to understand that.

Cyberbullying has become endemic and this particular phone incident is cyberbullying in its purest form. We need to be clear: teachers can be bullied, too. Teachers can be bullied by students, administrators and even superintendents. What should we call taking personal pictures off a phone without permission and then distributing those pictures to students except cyberbullying? The intent was clearly to deliberately embarrass and humiliate that teacher

In my view, one legacy of No Child Left Behind has been increasing, systematic bullying of educators. In some schools, if test scores are not going up, administrators are taking out their frustrations on teachers. Given that those administrators face loss of their own jobs due to poor scores, that behavior may be understandable, but it remains entirely unacceptable. Blaming teachers for problems that stem from home circumstances, lack of recreational reading, and even an influx of students who do not speak English at home has to stop. I have  listened to too many stories in the recent past in which teachers ended up taking the blame for circumstances outside their control.

For one mistake, leaving her phone in a classroom while she watched a hallway during a passing period, this woman lost her job. Somehow, I think those years of lesson planning, teaching, grading and home phone calls ought to count enough to earn her at most a reprimand, but that superintendent’s reaction went completely over the top.

The Superintendent’s comments about the so-called “delinquency of a minor”? The culprit is a sixteen-year-old boy. Those are not his first nude photos, not by years. I’m sure they are not his most explicit either. Older adults often do not understand the effects of living in the internet age, but if that Superintendent does not understand what I just wrote, then I’d say he’s  too old for his job.

She should not have to quit. He should retire, instead.

P.S. If I keep substituting and blogging while also trying to write, this book will never get done. I am going to step away from daily posting for awhile. Or try to, anyway. I’ll be around, but not so often.