An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. That’s all well and good and actionable in a fair fight, but what if the eye you’re trying to get for your eye is decomposing in a box. Is it REALLY the high road if you don’t still take that easily takeable eye? Who’s REALLY the bigger person? The answer almost universally not the guy mocking a defenseless deceased teenager. ALMOST always.
Originally posted on Your Daily Media
Being a teacher is a pretty thankless job. You spend all day trying to educate not-quite-yet-people who almost universally have no respect for you or what you do and who at best, put in the barest minimum of effort while mocking all of your life’s choices. I get it, that’s kind of a rough profession. But I had always assumed that this was what the teacher’s lounge was for: an escape where those unappreciated, beaten down educational souls could all come together, chalk stained hands raising stale coffee-sloshed mugs to their lips and bitch ceaselessly about this student or that, getting it out of their system so that they could move on with their day. And really, that’s a much healthier way to vent your displeasure than taking a posthumous swipe at a problem student on Facebook. Like one teacher in Australia did.
It seems an Australian teacher just couldn’t let dead students lie and had to launch his unprovoked attack on a thoroughly defenseless ex-student via the social media outlet, which, I had just sort of assumed didn’t even exist in Australia ‘cause, you know, they’re not exactly what most of the world would call “a country”. I just kind of thought they all used “rooSpace” or something else adorably almost the same as what everyone else uses.
Social media sort of has a tendency to bring out the worst in people. From tucked safely behind a keyboard, not having to actually face another person we’re emboldened with a courage to say stupid things that normal social interaction would normally limit. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By simply flexing just the slightest bit of restraint and/or common sense you can go from a terrible, heartless monster to a passive aggressive dick. And while the latter might not seem like an optimal choice, it certainly beats the former, especially when you’re a teacher, and especially when you’re talking about how little sympathy you have for a sixteen year old student who just 24 hours before committed suicide.
Simon Cox (a name which, lets be honest, may have helped develop an overly acute bully-dar) posted what could politely be called an “unfortunately worded eulogy” the day after the suicide of a student at the school in which he taught:
The boy’s family denied the bullying accusations and pointed to the “hundreds of tributes flooding the student’s Facebook page were proof he was popular, loved and a ‘good kid’”.
So, what ever the conflict was between this teacher and student, ultimately Mr. Cox is going to be fired, and thus loses one more time to this kid. So let this be a lesson to all of us; feel free to type out all the hateful things you’d like to say in that status box, but instead of hitting “enter”, try “delete”. You don’t end up looking like the bully you’re decrying, and you get to keep your job of silently hating children for another day. Everybody’s a winner. I mean, except you Mr. Cox. Never you. How’s that make you feel?
via: Your Daily Media