Monday, November 23, 2009

Paris Public School Teacher Wanting Her Students to Concentrate Receives a Letter From the Class Telling Her to Go F*** Herself

While Americans debate public health care in the wake of the well-known (and utterly undeniable) benefits of the public education system, the reactions to a public school teacher in Paris who wanted (who wants) her (final year) high school students to listen in English class and refrain from using cel phones, putting on makeup, and otherwise failing to concentrate were as following, reports Maryline Baumard in Le Monde:
  • She was threatened verbally and her USB memory card was stolen
  • Nearly all the students signed a letter to the school director "strongly" advising him (vivement) "to undertake a change of teach"
  • When the director refused, they sent a letter to "the teach", advising Claudine Lespagnol, 58, to change her attitude and to "stop making remarks every time we have a phone in our hands, because it is a waste of time". If such were not to happen, they concluded in a parody of a school report ("if there is no effort to change on your part…"), "we have only but a few words to tell you: Go f••• yourself" (allez vous faire enc..." — the article does not mention whether the "masking" of the word "enc•ler" — which actually happens to be stronger than the F word in English (since it only involves sodomy) — was the reporter's doing or if it was "masked" in the students' original letter, but it seems fair to assume that it was the former).
Subsequent to the teacher's complaint (regarding the letter, the threats, and the theft), according to Maryline Baumard's report, the school director happened (cough cough) to fall ill and go on sick leave, an inspector stated that those facts are unacceptable while adding, deploringly, that "collective sanctions do not exist", and a teacher's union representative reported that during a meeting regarding the problem, "the idea of proceeding with the exchange of English teachers was invoked in the name of 'continuity of public service'."

Even someone working for a leftist, statist news paper, like Maryline Baumard, could only have a common-sense reaction: Does the continuity of public service mean simply having someone standing in front of the classroom or does it entail teaching a subject?

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