Inapropro In The Workplace
In the past 3 years I have heard some things that give me the heeby jeebies, and I need to put em in writing somewhere. I’ve spoken about it with people but I feel like it needs to be written.
Background information you might find helps while reading: I was born a man and identify as a man.
I teach at a primary school in a city, I’ve written about it before, I’ve never been surrounded by this many cultural backgrounds. I love it, I have never learned as much in any one place. The team is a little less diverse than the pupils, but whatever. The one person I struggle most with, is not someone from a radically different background than mine. This woman came from the next city over, you can hear that from the dialect she never managed to ditch. That’s fine. You don’t have to leave behind whoever you are when moving away.
What I don’t feel is fine, is the words she chooses. We both teach 8-10 year olds, her room is next to mine. I know a number of the pupils in her class quite well. I know the stories some kids have had to live through, in just 8 years these kids have more live experience than I had in 25 years, give or take.
One of these kids, father is not in the picture anymore, mother’s struggling a little with this girl and her little sister. Not being in the picture is being too nice, they got a restraining order against the dude, he’s not allowed anywhere near his kids’ house or the school because he came knocking last year. Literally tried to force his way into the school to take his own kids away. This girl apparently had a couple of boyfriends since last summer, which doesn’t mean shit because she’s eight fucking years old. Her teacher, my coworker, told me this and called the girl a hooker. A hooker. I am not kidding, this is a small 8 year old child we were talking about, a child under her care during the day. A girl that’s quite small for her age, is growing up in an unsafe environment and thus needs some help. She can be a little mean, but I sometimes think that’s just her defense mechanism. Being small and vulnerable, you gotta show ‘em not to mess with you.
This is not the first time I heard this coworker say shit like this and I am always too flabbergasted to properly respond. I wish I was able to shut it down but I just can’t calculate what this woman’s saying in time to build a response. Last year she walked out of her classroom during a particularly tough day and she said to me “they’re all just a bunch of idiots.” Okay lady, even if none of them heard you say that, they know exactly how you feel. Children are extremely sensitive to these kinds of things. “No they don’t” she said when I told her that a while later. Yes they do. I knew when a teacher didn’t like me. In that same year I heard her tell two different 11-year-olds that they had a nice butt. And this is the part where the previously supplied background information is relevant. If I were to say such a thing, I’d have two pairs of arms either lifting me up and carry me off to a striped van with blue flashing lights on top, or pin me to the floor under threat of more violence. How the fuck does this person feel like this is okay to say?
These kids need a strong system, some of them have 0 parents, many of them are traumatized in some way, and you feel like you need to objectivy two young children because why? All you had to do was say nothing, which seems to be extremely hard for you? These children need to know they matter for who they are, need to learn how to be a good person, a strong future grownup, how to stand up for themselves when shit goes down because the streets they grow up in can be real unsafe. But nah, just reduce these already vulnurable girls to something they have no control over, completely down to genetics, because you just couldn’t keep your mouth shut.
I think I could write an entire book about this woman, I am not kidding. A final story I need to get off my chest is that we had a kid that was sick quite often. Mother seemed to be a little unstable, also has a story. This woman, this coworker, this teacher with over 20 years of experience had the balls to exclaim, in the presence of the entire staff, that this mother was a case of Munchhausen by proxy, making her child sick for whatever reason. No. You cannot. You are not a psychiatrist. You are not a doctor. How dare you? You are the #2 most experienced person here, others might look up to you (I hope they don’t) and take whatever you say as fact. I know that I know better, but my even younger coworkers might not. I knew the child she was talking about, I’ve met her mother, and yes this child was sick a little more often than the average child but that’s what average is. Some more, some less, together average.
Before anyone thinks about what I’m actively trying to do about this, I am keeping an open line of communication with my superiors but they haven’t been able to get through to her. There’s a massive teacher shortage in the city so it’s not like she can realistically be fired but god this is frustrating. I need to train myself to be able to respond in the moment. Even if there’s kids around at the moment, she needs to be put in her place for once.
/rant