By Jim Hagarty
2007
I can hardly believe the state to which teaching has fallen. Having once been a teacher who gave copious amounts of misdirection to dozens of high school and college students, I fear for the state of the profession.
It has come to this. It is no longer permissible for a teacher to bite the thigh of a student who is trying to give him a wedgie. I joke not. A high school wrestling coach in Oregon has been disciplined for chomping down on a student’s leg after a half dozen huge wrestlers pounced on him and tried to wedgie him. (For the uninitiated, to administer a wedgie is to grab a person’s underwear at the back and hoist it up around his ears, a painful and embarrassing exercise.)
A state commission blasted Peter Porath for leaving “distinct teeth marks” on the inside of the student’s leg when he tried to get the wrestlers off him. In its wisdom, the commission called that “gross neglect of duty” and put him on probation for two years. As well, Porath must complete a class on appropriate behaviour and write a public apology to the student he bit.
Where oh where have the good old days gone when a teacher could gnaw away at a student’s limbs and not hear a thing about it? In fact, if a student thus bitten made the mistake of reporting it to his parents he would be apt to receive another bite or two from his father for his troubles. Now, apparently, it is wrong to do such a thing. However, it is OK, apparently, for a half dozen wrestling students to jump on a coach and try to strangle him with his own undershorts.
This is my dilemma. I am trying to think back to my days as a high school student to imagine what might have been the result of my joining a group of students to yank on the undergarments of one of our teachers. These were teachers not far removed from the days of unbridled corporal punishment in the schools. A vice-principal at my school once backhanded a girl across the face and heard not a word about it. I don’t think she had her hand anywhere near his underapparel at the time of what today, of course, would be called assault.
But this is Oregon, I guess I should remember, and maybe things are a bit different south of the border where, it appears, a not-unheard-of job hazard for teachers is the occasional beating by gangs and a wound or two from a gunblast. I hope they’re paid well to endure the abuse.
Beatings and bullets aside, however, wedgies at the hands of your students have to rank right up there as some sort of last straw and I’ve got to say I can’t blame poor old Peter Porath for putting his chompers to work. I am sure his arms and legs were rendered of no use to him by the wrestlers and so his pearly whites were about all he had left to bring about a bit of payback and hopefully a reprieve from the the thrashing. I have to say if I was in his position, I would hope I would have had the presence of mind to do the same thing – state commission reprimand or not.
If I had had to write a public apology to that student, this is what I would have written: “I am sorry that I was silly enough to turn my backs on the students that I am trying to guide into adulthood and for whom I am giving up time to teach them the sport of wrestling, without taking into account the notion that I might one day be jumped by them and have my underwear tugged at and stretched till it looked like a flowery rubber band. I am sorry that in my desperation to be free of six out-of-control young athletes, I took it upon myself to administer a bit of pain of my own.
“Most of all, I’m sorry I didn’t bite down a bit harder.”
