A distressed parent wrote to The Gleaner‘s – Ask the Doc feature, complaining that she went to pick up her four-year-old son at school only to hear his teacher abusing him because he was unable to differentiate between the letter ‘s’ and the numeral ’2′.
“When I got to the door I heard the teacher snapping at him telling him, ‘tun the thing the right way bwoy, everything you write, you write back way, you must have cock eye’,” the mother complained.
She was devastated.
“I am very worried and nervous,” she said “… I felt so ashamed to know that a teacher could be cursing a four-year-old child like that. I realised he had a problem in writing letters like ‘s’ and the number ’2′ but based on what his teacher was saying – he was writing everything backwards.”
The mother said that her eight-year-old daughter does very well at school.
“I am desperately in need of your help as I really want him to do well so that teachers don’t have to cuss him at school, which I know for certain will damage his sense of esteem and he will hate school.”
Child psychologist Dr Orlean Brown Earle tells her how to handle this situation on Page D1 of today’s Gleaner.
What would you do if you were this parent? Should this teacher be fired? Is the mother too sensitive? Give us your views.