25 Biggest Mistakes Teachers Make and How to Avoid Them

Mistake 6: Physiological Discrimination
When I was a kid, I can remember
an advertisement in comic
books about the “skinny 90 lb weakling”
that was bullied by a big
mu scular guy on the beach. The
weakling was humiliated in front of
his girlfriend. The ad was for an
arm exerciser that a person would
pull and stretch to develop his muscles.
Of course, in the end, the “90 lb
weakling” was transformed into a
very muscular hunk that returned
and beat up the bully and got the
girl. Unfortunately, the child in this
scenario did not have a magical
exerciser that could zap him with
muscles that would enable him to
get some payback from the teacher
bully. Instead, he turned the teacher’s
sarcasm and the humiliating
laughter of the class inward and
internalized it.
SCENARIOS 6.6 and 6.7
Stuff and Nonsense
There are two possible explanations
for this teacher’s boorish behavior.
It appears that he was unprepared
for his class and lacked interesting,
engaging material that was supported
with visual artifacts or appropriate
media. This teacher’s actions speak
volumes about his ineptitude as a
teacher and his lack of preparation for
this lesson. He was teaching a lesson
on foods. A knowledgeable teacher
would have instructional objectives
(Gronlund, 2000); humiliating a student
would certainly not be one of
those objectives. This mistake could
have been avoided if the teacher had
planned properly and if he had a personal
policy of respecting students’
boundaries. No teacher should make a
hostile assault on a child’s person no
matter how minor that assault may be
perceived by the teacher.
I went to Catholic school. My teacher was a nun named Sister M. J. The experience was
if you wrote with your left hand you were the devil’s child. Well, guess which hand I
wrote with? You are correct; I wrote with my left hand. She came from behind me and
surprised me with a swift slap with a ruler she held fast in her hands. Not only did she
physically hurt me, but Sister M. J. verbally lashed out that I was damned for “conspiring
with the devil.” A second student recounts, “I’ve been left-handed since birth, but
when I entered third grade, my teacher Ms. G. wanted to make me right-handed by
hitting my left hand. She also would say the left hand was the devil’s hand.
I remember being in kindergarten. My teacher asked the class to put the hand you write
with on the paper in front of you. The teacher then walked around nodding “yes . . .
yes . . . yes” and then stopped when she got to me. I had my left hand on the paper. She
said, “No, we write with our right hand.” She gently corrected me and placed my other
hand on the paper, uniformly like all the other children. At this time, I guess teachers were
allowed to do things like this to make their life a little easier when teaching how to write.
The uninformed often resort
to superstition to explain and
justify that which mystifies. The term
sinistral or sinister, which dates back
to Middle English, sometimes means
left, or left hand. For years, some
folklore has equated left or the left
hand with something sinister or evil.
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