I don't see how that follows. If a kid swears off team sports forever, well, so what? The emotional cruelty is wrong, of course, but if we lose a potential weekend softball league shortstop, it's no big loss. You make a kid hate learning by humiliating him in class, you've got a real big problem. It seems to me that by allowing kids to be humiliated in gym but not in math class, we're tacitly acknowleding math is more important.Darth Wong wrote:The really sad thing is that while you can't single out kids for poor academic performance, you can single them out for poor athletic performance. Any kid who isn't athletically inclined will be publicly humiliated in every gym class until he learns to hate all team sports. And of course, no one has any problem with that kind of treatment because sports, apparently, is more important than learning.
I don't see how public ridicule of the fuckups is going to fix anything. I have some in my classes, and humiliating them in front of their peers isn't going to make them see the error of their ways. Meanwhile, if I pick on a kid who I think is a lazy asshole but in reality is trying to deal with a shit homelife or a learning disability or what have you, not only have I lost any hope of turning that kid around, but I'm a world class piece of shit. Not to mention, come down too hard on a few kids, and get a reputation as a sadist--not just a tough teacher, but someone who out and out enjoys humiliating people--and I could lose the entire class. There's a good reason the dunce cap was retired.