The teacher had been allowed to teach again despite previous incidents.
It’s shocking enough when news gets around of students harassing or abusing their teachers, but it’s perhaps more shocking when the teachers, who are supposed to be role models and the responsible adult in the situation, harass and abuse their students.
This was the case for students at Iwanishi Elementary School in Toyohashi City, Aichi. At lease five second-year students were subjected to corporal punishment by their homeroom teacher, a male in his 40s whose name has been withheld.
The most recent incident happened on October 6 when, dissatisfied with how a female student corrected an answer during a math lesson, the teacher grabbed her head and knocked her face repeatedly against the chalkboard while telling her to “look closely” at what was written on the board. The incident wasn’t brought to light until October 30, when the student’s parents contacted the school. The girl has not attended school since.
Investigations by the city’s board of education show that in July and October of this year, the teacher had used physical punishment against four other students in the same class, in the form of smacking them over the head with rulers and pinching their cheeks. The teacher remarked: “Even after explaining things to them over and over they didn’t understand, so I got irritated.”
▼ We suspect the cheek-pinching wasn’t
in the same loving way Grandma used to do it.
It has also been revealed that two years prior, the teacher pushed a student, causing him to fall and break his wrist. He had ordered the fifth-year student out into the hallway for not staying on task during class, pushing him out of the classroom and causing the student to fall and sustain injury. The school explained the situation to the parents, the teacher apologized, and it was reported to the board of education as an accident.
At a press conference on November 9, the city’s board of education issued an apology, though there is no word on what will happen to the teacher. While corporal punishment may have been no big deal in the past, most experts agree that it does more harm than good, and the general consensus is that it does not belong in the classroom. With this teacher’s history, it’s quite clear he’s not cut out to teach young students, and hopefully the decision will be made to not allow him back into the classroom.
Sources: Yomiuri Online, Asahi Shimbun Digital, Yahoo! Japan News
Top image: Pakutaso
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