Assaulted teacher "provoked attack" by stating she would defend herself

The BBQ Pit
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Jolita Berry, an Art instructor at a Baltimore, MD school was attacked last week by a student after telling the kid to sit down. The incident was recorded by another student on a camera phone, and the video, complete with cheering, was posted on MySpace.

Literally adding insult to injury, her principal told Berry she provoked the attack by saying she would defend herself from the student. What was the lady supposed to say?

I’ve not been able to find any record of comment from the child’s parents.

Yeah, I’m an old fuck-I can’t fathom raising a hand to a teacher, save to fend off an assault, but then again, as students, we did what we were told. There were teachers I didn’t care for, but delivering a beatdown to them never entered my mind.

Hopefully, this hateful act will be properly punished, and Ms. Berry will return to the classroom. Unfortunately, it is something I doubt she will ever be able to forget.

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Totally agree with everything you say.

Why hasn’t the loathsome little brat been locked up?

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Yeah, it’s time for the systems to conspire against these people. Let’s start by not blaming the teacher, as I think the OP is saying (the quote is unclear to me). Let’s lower the definition of a juvenille to send a message “we’re not messing around”. Then, we need to refine the justice system to stop playing games with probation upon probation. Life plus 30? C’mon! Life MEANS life! And, if capital punishment is the only thing that people can understand, then that IS what it will take. Due process and then it’s “lights out” in a timely fashion. Too many are hanging around on death row. We’ve given people (animals, really) the benefit of the doubt, and look where we are.

If our schools are no longer safe, then no one is safe. If they do not value education, they value nothing. Without education, you have nothing. That’s all you’ll ever be. A zero. A parasite to society living by robbery after robbery, murder after murder. Yes, they are innocent until proven guilty, but we can be proactive to KEEP them innocent, or off to court at the first brawl. (Could you get away with that in a bar? airport?) They think tough; we think tougher! It’s time to stop living in a fool’s paradise.

Even if we have to build more prisons, up to super-max. They can add to the scenic line along I-10 in NM. (And, take away their cable TV, too!) Put them to work breaking large rocks into smaller rocks. No one gets a free ride in this world. Why should they?

Put cameras in all the classrooms. Heck, the technology is relatively dirt cheap nowadays, esp in bulk. Some schools already have satellite police stations in the Office. I’d hate to see it come to this, but this IS obviously what they want. We cannot count on the parents (most of which don’t care), and even good parents can still have kids they cannot control.

We need tough love. We cannot count on the home anymore. The needs of the many must outweigh the dangerous few…to let those who want to learn get an education. The tough guys need to be scared straight. We can’t afford to play their silly games anymore.

Maybe I’m too grim, but we (and our leaders) better get off their fat behinds and stop giving our social problems lip service. Time to face our darkest fears about what is becoming of our cities…and beyond.

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According to the story, not locked up is the least of it – not even taken out of school. The teacher says she encountered her in the hall later in the day.

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Reason #3,456,501 why you couldn’t pay me enough to become a teacher. What has happened to respect for authority/elders? Has the suspicion children are being taught of everyone gone so fas as to overrule common decency?

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If she hit another student, she’d be in suspension and possibly later expelled. But since it was a teacher…?

I think I’ve posted this elsewhere, but…

A fellow teacher saw a kid beating on a principal and pulled the kid off. The teacher had to go to court. It was none of my biz so I didn’t ask how it turned out. He’s still teaching but what a PITA to have to defend yourself for that. Hang around a teacher’s lounge for awhile and you’ll hear one of us say, “The kids have more rights than we do.”

Quoting from the article:

*English said her office has been receiving two or three complaints a day of assaults on teachers, many of which are not reported to the school system or police. *

I have a feeling it’s under-reported, that schools keep it hush-hush. But when students post it on myspace and it ends up on the news, officials have to admit what’s going on.

As for cameras in the classroom, I don’t know. There are already schools with metal detectors, police officers on campus, etc. Schools are looking more like jails than places to learn. But look at this case: there is actual video of the incident already (although granted, you can’t see the teacher’s face). That video isn’t providing a slam dunk.

I’ll probably say it a zillion times on various boards, but: the insinuation is always that teachers aren’t smart enough, aren’t doing enough, etc. so we need to legislate tests and standards and all this because teachers are the problem. Well, look at what we deal with. I’ve never been assaulted but I’ve been threatened.

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She wasn’t suspended immediately, but she was suspended.

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I’d be interested to know what the girl’s parents reaction was. Because if that was my kid, when I was done beating her half to death, I’d have called the teacher and asked her to meet me at the police station so that she could press charges.

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Unbelievable. Assault at the very least. She should be in jail.

For a while.

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I wonder exactly when she was suspended. As soon as the incident was reported, I would hope. Or was she suspended as soon as the school realized they couldn’t cover it up.

If Baltimore is like my school district, the teachers will be required to provide assignments for her while she’s in suspension. The general rule is that a kid’s grade can’t be lowered for misbehavior, except for truancy. Teachers will probably have to stay after school to tutor her and catch her up—so many times, when kids get in trouble, the teacher is also punished.

@DianaG: Given your attitude, I doubt any kid of yours would ever strike a teacher in the first place because the kid would know what an authority figure is and think, ‘There will be hell to pay.’

Remember Lionel Tate? Talk about the enabling mother of the century!

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After months of fake bomb threats, fake fire alarms and one incident of a Drano bomb, my daughter’s school installed cameras in the hallways and stairwells, the cafeteria, gym and auditorium, and all common areas throughout the entire school. The bomb threats and fire alarms stopped almost immediately. Most of the bomb threats came from the pay phones in the cafeteria or lobby.
This was after they disabled the fire alarm system due to it being pulled nearly every day. They also removed the outer doors from the bathrooms. (The stalls still had their doors)
This isn’t some inner-city school; it’s a large suburban high school in a relatively nice area. The threat of being caught was enough to stop it.

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No doubt that the student is guilty of assault, and deserves to have the book thrown at her. But some have said that the teacher saying “I’m going to defend myself” might come across as a dare to the little brat. Just playing devil’s advocate…

Is there a policy on how to immediately handle a potential physical confrontation with this type of student?

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I wonder if that’s because it’s in a nice area. I.e. maybe the kids in Baltimore don’t have much to lose or much parental involvement. More affluence correlates roughly with educated parents, and consequently, kids who understand threats better and have more to lose.

Not a nitpick, just an observation: those cameras wouldn’t have caught the assault b/c it was in a classroom.

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I’ll risk an assumption that this is directed to me. In general, for violence or drug issues, we get an administrator post haste. Many (most?) schools have phones in the classroom and some have email.

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I’m in Baltimore, but out in the county. Not exactly an affluent area, but it’s a lot nicer that the area where the attack in the OP happened.

This has been all over the news here, obviously. The teacher says she has been faulted for using ‘trigger words’ in response to the girl’s threats. WTF? Saying she will defend herself is a trigger that set this kid off? When I was in high school, no one would have dared to attack a teacher like this.

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I teach in an “urban” school, though not a particularly bad one: we are about 50% SES disadvantaged, and another 25% are probably right on the edge of that, and you’d never mistake us for the suburbs, but we do ok.

In six years, I have only ever seen a “serious” assault on a teacher–where actual damage was done–by students in our autistic unit, which is a stand-alone program for seriously autistic kids, many of whom have serious personal space issues and react very strongly when certain triggers occur. No idea what the solution is to that, and it doesn’t happen often–maybe twice in six years.

On the other hand, we do have, 1 or 2 (maybe 3) times a year, “technical” assaults. Students who grab teachers by the wrist, or shove a teacher. What is interesting about these assaults is that they tend to happen to the same one or two people. In fact, when someone left our campus, they declined. It’s not that these people are lying. It’s not that the students are in any way, shape, or form in the right. But almost every one of these cases, IME, involved a teacher who was habitually overwhelmingly disdainful of the students they confronted and made no attempt to avoid humiliation or provide any sort of dignified exit in any confrontation they initiated.

This doesn’t mean it is right to assault a teacher. And I certainly know nothing of the Baltimore situation and can easily believe that the student was completely out of line and the teacher acted totally professionally. In general, however, teaching in an urban school has shown me that there can be another side to these stories and that just because the student was wrong doesn’t mean the teacher is right. And it’s appropriate for a principal to try and address these sorts of patterns when they emerge.

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Good points. There are definitely those teachers who abuse their position, e.g. humiliating students for their own gratification or using their place as a pulpit. I learned as a student teacher, for instance, when I off-handedly called something a “stupid” mistake—you better call it a “silly” mistake. The whole communication between teacher and student requires a lot of filtering and care.

The other students cheering is the most disturbing aspect, to me, and may support the idea that the teacher had badgered them beyond belief, cornered them once too often, or whatever. That still doesn’t make it right of course, and if the teacher was abusive, kids would need to learn appropriate channels for dealing with such teachers.

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I imagine it was something along the lines of: “My little girl would never do anything like that!”

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What she said to the student doesn’t matter; as long as she was not assaulting the students, the violent response is unacceptable. In the linked article, it said schools aren’t suspending students because it will get them labeled as persistently dangerous schools- this mindset has to stop. Looking good on paper is a poor reason to let this kind of thing slide.

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Funny. And Americans don’t understand why I would possibly want to move abroad and raise my daughter in another country.