I think, however, that this more shows she had poor role models among her experienced colleagues, than that texting and meeting students after school hours is an okay idea. I think it’s a terrible idea. Because of stuff like this. But she can hardly be blamed personally, if it’s the prevailing custom.
Just asked my high school kid if teachers text students at her school - she says nup. Which is frankly what I’d expect. In fact, I wouldn’t want my kids to have the phone numbers of their teachers - if nothing else, because teachers deserve to have a life, and not be on call for a bunch of needy teenagers 24/7
No. This appears to be a student who was outside of the mentoring program. The mentoring program would not be a replacement for counseling.
My bolding.
If you believe everything that one of the parties in a highly charged said, the more power to you. I don’t think we can naively accept that as the absolute truth.
I would take a something like a written policy as more evidence or more stories.
Moreover, you didn’t quote her entire comments.
It’s not so absolutely clear to what Andrews, the board member opposed to firing the teacher, is referring to. Did they not have training on how to deal with people with DBP? Did they not have the basic training for everyone about keeping people in the loop? I wouldn’t expect the former, it would be really nice to have the latter.
The question I would have for Andrew is what she means by “We didn’t help her through the process.” I can see her supervisors not being aware that she was free lancing? Was there an environment which made it difficult to ask questions?
I would hope that she would feel free enough to be able to go to her supervisor or colleagues and say she felt out of her league and ask the hell should she do. Did it not occur to her? Was it not suggested? Not a policy? Did she just feel that she was competent and proceed to let it blow up despite being warned in general or was there truly no help at all?
I don’t think we can read too much into one or two people’s comments.
Excuse me for asking, but this thread made me wonder: is there such a thing as straight out “personality disorder”? Or is it “borderline personality” disorder?
There are various types of personality disorder (narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, etc). Borderline personality disorder is one of them. It doesn’t mean that you’re on the borderline of having a personality disorder; it means you have a specific personality disorder called ‘borderline’.
The things about most people with most personality disorders is that they are incredibly, breathtakingly perceptive and manipulative when it comes to getting what they want - whether that’s attention, power, money, drama, anything. They can smell one drop of vulnerability miles away, and zero right in on it. And then they will figure out *exactly *how to work it to their advantage. And they’re incredibly destructive.
If this girl had a personality disorder (and I’m not diagnosing her from a bunch of articles, I’m only saying if), then the teacher - in spite of being ten years older - was wayyyyyyy out of her league. Next to someone with a personality disorder, just about any non-PD person counts as terminally naive and gullible - never mind some twentysomething with stars in her eyes about saaaving all the poor kiddies who no one else really understaaaands. The teacher never had a hope in hell. This was always going to end horribly for her.
Personality disorders are extremely hard to treat, and often untreatable (although dialectical behavioural therapy seems to have some success with borderlines). If this girl has a PD, she needs a professional with specific training and experience. A listening ear and some Jesus texts aren’t going to cut it.
Sure, the teacher fucked up by not setting better boundaries, and by not realising that this was above her pay grade and calling in backup. One of the things people with personality disorders do very, very, very well is getting other people to abandon boundaries for them. If you’re going to encourage teachers to act as mentors to students, you have got to provide them with full training that will let them recognise when a problem is more than they’re able to cope with, show them how to spot when they’re being manipulated, and teach them procedures for establishing and maintaining boundaries.
You want a written policy of a training program that doesn’t exist? Um…okay. I’m not sure how to provide that.
This woman whose job it was to make sure the teacher was sufficiently trained said she feels bad that she wasn’t sufficiently trained. She’s keeping her job after threats of being fired, she isn’t being charged with a serious crime that was suggested. The entire story is full of examples of things that shouldn’t happen if someone is sufficiently trained. She’s an otherwise respected and valued teacher, so much so that the community and came to her defense and pressured the administration to keep her (note: that rarely happens when a teacher is even suggested to have behaved badly, so they must *really *like her) and a school board member fought to keep her even though she brought negative publicity to the district (note: that’s so rare as to be a unicorn sighting.)
Everything points to: good teacher, valuable member of the community, made some questionable decisions when she was in over her head because she wasn’t sufficiently trained.
If it’s your claim that she was sufficiently trained and all this happened anyway because she’s an evil or reckless person, what’s your evidence for that?
There’s probably more that the school could have done to caution its teachers about emotional involvement and reporting of contacts. Past some point, though, I kind of think that if she needed training to tell her not to be the BFF/godmother who personally and secretly picks the runaway kid up late at night after she might or might not have been abused, then possibly no amount of training would have reached her. Personally, I think she’s codependent and would benefit from therapy, or else she’ll be vulnerable to something like this happening again.
Yeah… when you’re doing that it’s less a training issue and more a personal common sense issue. Plus, if the article narrative is to be believed the teacher had a ton of instances of this kid just making shit up,** that the teacher knew she had lied about**. (ie father’s education etc )
When a known (to you) chronic bullshitter has you running out at night to rescue them when they claim to have run away from home that’s just epic naive stupidity. There is no amount of training that can compensate for a willingness to ignore red flags that are flapping in your face.
A board member’s job is not specifically to make sure individual members are trained.
The superintendent’s job does involve making sure that all of the teachers are trained and yet he(?) obviously feels differently.
I’m saying that we don’t know.
Can you cite where I made that claim?
I have repeatedly stated that based on two sympathetic articles that we don’t know enough to make this judgment. I don’t particularly trust this type of article to be the end off of investigative journalism.
You seem to “know” much more about the situation, though.
No, which is why I said, “If…” I think there’s plenty of evidence that there was a lack of adequate training here.
I don’t have knowledge of this specific situation, but I do have personal and professional experience dealing with troubled teens, people with bipolar disorder - diagnosed and undiagnosed - and I was raised by a teacher who would often mentor troubled students in the off hours. My house growing up was often host to angry young men working off their aggression doing yardwork for their teacher and sharing dinner with us. These things were perfectly acceptable and for which she received professional accolades in the 1980s, but she admits she would not do them today. Not because there was anything wrong with it - in fact she saved several lives - but because the sociopolitical climate has changed and it wouldn’t be safe for her anymore. And I think it’s a damn shame that we put fear of losing one’s job and going to jail ahead of what’s good for kids. This particular kid was probably beyond the teacher’s skillset to help, but I hate to see the attempt turned into an attack, as it’s likely to make her and her colleagues less likely to reach out and help those who can be helped in the future.
Out of curiosity how did the person who raised you deal with girls or boys who tried to manipulate her or get her to go past professional boundaries? Or did she go past these boundaries (as they would exist today) in assisting kids and was just lucky enough not to get caught up in a situation?
She never had a problem. I suspect her training and experience led her to identify those students who were troubled because of things she could fix, and only those were invited into our home.
I will add that the one big difference - and here is where better training would be most helpful - is that she always, always, let the kids’ parents know what was going on. She would often frame it as, “I’ve got this garden I really need some help with, would you mind if I borrowed Nathan on Saturday and put him to work? I’ll feed him after.” I don’t know how specific she got with the parents about the kids’ emotional or behavioral problems, but the parents *always *knew she was having contact outside of school hours, where they were, and what they were doing. If they wanted to come pick the kid up, that would have been possible, because she’d given the parents our address and phone number. Otherwise, she’d pick the kid up in her car and drive them home when done.
(Nathan was a real kid. We taught him how to make homemade noodles. He went home and tried to duplicate them, got distracted, and left a cookie sheet of half formed noodles under his bed. His mom called my mom, and was all, “Um…?” My mom reminded him, rather sternly, that the last step in cooking is to CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF! His mom appreciated the lesson. And later, she appreciated a new batch of homemade noodles made by her son. Many years later, my mom was invited to Nathan’s wedding, and he’s a great husband, father, and human being now.)
I would have said the teacher was very naïve in texting the student. Seems to me that teacher/student texting can lead to nothing but bad news. But then I read:
Really? And she follows it up with:
For real? So teachers texting students is no big deal and teachers meeting students at their request is expected behavior? I know the times have a changed since I was in high school, but it just sounds too bizarre.
Hindsight is 20/20. This didn’t happen all at once, but over months of a fib here, an embellishment there, a flat out lie next. The article states the teacher had never encountered anyone with BPD (has the girl been diagnosed?) before and probably took her at face value.
At least she gets to keep teaching. I’d like to know if the student is getting counseling. I also wonder how much the father, who is an attorney, contributed to this legal mess.
Just a little bit of a sidetrack, but back in the days of Psychoanalysis and Freudianism, there was a distinction between a person having either a neurosis, or a psychosis. People with neuroses had a mental illness, and needed treatment, but were in touch with reality. People with Psychoses were not in touch with reality, and sometimes just had to be managed in an institution.
Occasionally people were on the border between neurosis and psychosis. Someone who could carry on a conversation about what was going on in the world, and did not have a lot of bizarre perceptions, but nonetheless harbored a lot of false beliefs, and sometimes was a paranoiac was someone “on the borderline.”
So in the first DSM, which was written when the neuroses/psychoses distinction still existed, included “Borderline” people as a potential diagnosis, and described them with diagnostic criteria.
At some point, the “personality disorders” came into being, and “Borderline” as a diagnosis became “Borderline Personality Disorder.”
Eventually, Freudianism, and the whole neuroses/psychoses dichotomy got thrown out, but the personality disorders remained, including Borderline, which describes a real disorder. There are a lot of people who fit it very neatly and clearly, and it is a useful category, even if the name is now an anachronism.
I have heard a number of people propose new names for it, because the term “Borderline” is almost as dated as “Consumption” or “Bad Blood” (Syphilis), but no one has come up with something that fully encompasses the disorder, and that everyone can agree on, so it persists. The latest one I heard was “Emotional disregulation disorder.” You can see for yourself why that wouldn’t catch on.
Tokyo, my nephew was just sent home after 5 months in the field. He essentially had a nervous breakdown post-MTC and it took several months before the Church would release hIM to come home and get REAL psych help. Stoopid mo-fos, keeping 19-year-old kids hostage, may they rot. (Yes, I’m an ex-Mormon, why do you ask?)
In my experience, students and teachers texting is pretty common, though I think this varies a great deal by location. Most of it is incredibly banal: “Is today an A day or a B day?” “Are you in your room? I need to make up a test”, that sort of thing. For coaches and sponsors, texting is invaluable: “Practice has been moved to 112” “Everyone remember your permission slip! I need it ASAP!”. That sort of thing shades into “OMG! I got a 1430 on my SAT!” and “What should I take next year?” And once you’ve gotten to that point, sometimes more personal advice-giving type texts start to happen.
It’s very difficult to be a young teacher and work out how to maintain healthy boundaries. Most things in life, you can just radically over-compensate just to be safe. But the key to good teaching is to see students as real people, and to be personally invested in their progress. So you have to stay relatively open while maintaining a sort of objectivity. I always tell new teachers keep it a one-way street–they share their hopes and dreams and fears, you keep yours to yourself. But there’s a real knack to it and it takes practice.
Again, I’m at the college level . . . but my cell contact is sacrosanct. Students can reach me via email, online course space, phone, or office hours. K-12 teachers are far more available in person to their students than I am, so the part I don’t get is why a teacher would even want/need to be available 24/7 by text as well. It’s freakin’ exhausting being constantly barraged!
I got off Facebook because students were sending friend requests that I had to refuse and it got stressful. My private life is exactly that.
I’m not whaling on K-12 teachers, they do amazing, dedicated work and the most hair-raising student/teacher inappropriate relationships I’ve witnessed have been at college level, and more than a few have been related to texting and social media outside of the classroom.
What sort on institution are you at? I think a high school is often a community in a way that most universities are not. Interactions go beyond the classroom–extracurriculars, tutoring. We see kids a lot more and in much more intimate circumstances. Furthermore, teachers are held much more responsible for motivating students: these are KIDS, not adults, and they all need prodding and reminding and encouragment. That’s a traditional role of the k-12 teacher. Kids need personal investment in their success or failure–and that requires blurrier boundaries.
To me, social media/texting is safer than face to face communication. A kid can lie about what I said in private, but texts can be produced, if there is controversy.
Many years later, my mom was invited to Nathan’s wedding, and he’s a great husband, father, and human being now.)