BEING RUDE to your teacher should be met with zero tolerance.
Cuffing and kicking your teacher? Even worse!
Spit at that same teacher and you are gone! No compromise.
But after all that, though, I have to say that I have a soft spot for the Ellerslie Secondary School student who made the headlines last week for her apparent disorderly, violent and generally unacceptable conduct.
If she were my child she would still be regretting it today – but still I have a soft spot for her.
You see, the teachers have their unions to represent them; the principals have their unions to represent them; the ministers have their Cabinet and state mechanism to represent them – but this lowly 14-year-old student has no organisation batting for her.
And again, don’t get the impression I am condoning her conduct, but at 14 years, barely into the teenage stage of life, no mistake of this sort should be fatal. After all, look at how many grown men in our society who have committed wilful, callous murder who are now being given a second chance.
At 14, a child still has so much to learn about life that we who lead ought to be very careful how we condemn them when they act stupidly.
In fact, there are many of us today who hold positions of respect, who if we were honest, would admit that were it not for those who looked past our youthful indiscretions we would never have made it.
On the face of it, I have no problem with the call from Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union (BSTU) president Mary Redman or her colleague at the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT) Pedro Shepherd for the child to be expelled. The governance procedures for our secondary schools make provision for this.
However, our Education Act requires that every child under the age of 16 must attend school, and therefore given the nature of our system, expulsion really amounts to a “transfer” to another school.
The problem I have with this process is that by and large all our schools are the same. They include “good” and “bad” children, dedicated as well as “wuffless” teachers; and generally social influences that no child should have to put up with – so the moment this Ellerslie School student’s “punishment” is completed she will be back in the same environment, albeit at a new address.
Alternative school
In 2016, at this stage in our national development and seeing the direction in which our society has been headed for some time, we should have had already an alternative school campus purpose-built to handle children with such “special” needs.
And in fairness to the two teachers’ unions, they have been calling for such a facility for quite a while. Where I differ with the BUT head, however, is the suggestion that it should be some kind of boot camp on an old plantation teaching “skills”.
Intelligent children can be deviant and it is wrong to operate on the premise that because a youngster is giving trouble and being disruptive in the regular school environment all he or she has is the capacity to be is a carpenter, maid or mechanic.
I would dare to suggest that these disruptive “factors” might make for some of the leading lawyers and teachers of the future.
But while I might not agree with his concept for such a school, the point is that Shepherd too accepts that youthful indiscretions should not be fatal for the children involved.
Where there is a weakness it is with our Government, both Barbados Labour Party and Democratic Labour Party, because we have been talking about such an institution for a very long time. If I am not mistaken, The Edna Nicholls Centre in St Peter was supposed to be a place for children on suspension, where attendance lasts no more than two weeks.
What’s lacking in Barbados today is a full education institution, even with a residential component where necessary, to give children a genuine shot at rehabilitation and reintegration. Let’s get our act together, people.
PS: In the final analysis, though, in the instance of this Ellerslie student, those investigating need to determine what factors influenced or provoked the conduct, because we would all have to be missing some screws to believe that one morning out of the blue a totally crazy child turned up in Black Rock and just “let loose” on her teacher. Life does not work like that.
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I’VE GOT A MESSAGE for Jon Doe of HOTT 95 fame. When you’re running things on radio this morning I want you to play some Lady Saw music – you’ll know which tune. Because I’ve got your bread and you can’t noting about it.
Last Wednesday I went into Carol Roberts’ VOB studio to say hello and she offered me a tiny sample of some cake she had made.
When she saw how my face lit up at the taste, she declared: “You can have it. . . . No, go along with it. It was for John Doe and he will probably kill me, but I does bring bread for him all the time.”
Jon Doe, I did not look back. I went to my desk and murdered that cake – well as much as some of the greedy people in my newsroom would allow me to have.
Carol is supposed to bring some more for me today, but she didn’t tell me if she was bringing a slice for you too. So if you don’t get any, call me. If I’m in a good mood, I might save a slice for you.
Now I’ve been trying to find words to describe Carol Roberts’ cooking for quite some time and I’m always falling short. So I’ll do it by analogy: If Carol Roberts was my woman she could horn me any time, or every time. It would not bother me as long as she’s not sharing my food. She could share anything else.
With Carol’s cooking which man would not be satisfied? Which reasonable man could want more?
•••••••
TALKING ABOUT FOOD, did you read the letter in last Thursday’s DAILY NATION by tourist Rita Campbell, commenting on our story about Chickmont Foods investing millions in their new state-of-the-art poultry farm?
Campbell, paying attention to the report that the pen would be 20 000 square feet and would accommodate 30 000 birds, calculated that each bird would exist in an area the size of a sheet of letter-size paper. She described this as a “horrific life of hell” for a chicken, complaining they would never have the opportunity to forage for grass, eat naturally or feel the sun on their backs or the breeze between their feathers.
The operators of the farm are lacking humanity for the birds, she said, warning that one day we will answer for how we treated God’s creatures. She called on Barbadians to only buy chicken raised in a “kindly, natural fashion and are killed by the most humane method”.
Alternatively, she suggested we become a nation of vegetarians.
After reading this letter I was thinking about going to Chefette and ordering a snack box of carrot sticks and potato slices, but it occurred to me that before long some bleeding heart would come along and accuse us of being inhumane to plants. Who gave us the right to kill and eat vegetables?
My good friend Stephanie Chase will have to give up her love for barbecue pigtails. It’s inhumane to the pigs, and then lathering their tails with barbecue sauce. A beauty queen like you should know better.