Central Bucks teacher: Truth teller or ineffective educator?

Writer and commentator Michael Kinsley once said, “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” 

Central Bucks East High School teacher Natalie Munroe might argue that that’s what she was punished for when she was suspended earlier this month for saying nasty things about unnamed students and colleagues on her personal blog.  I think the issue is deeper than that. 

In case you’ve been in a coma in the last two weeks and missed the story in the national media, Sarah Larson, editor of the Doylestown-Buckingham-New Britain Patch, did a great job of reporting it and included some of the comments that got Munroe in trouble. According to Larson, these are a few ways Munroe wished she could describe some of her students to their parents:

*“A complete and utter jerk in all ways. Although academically ok, your child has no other redeeming qualities.”

* “One of the few students I can abide this semester!”

* “Lazy [expletive].”

* “Just as bad as his sibling. Don’t you know how to raise kids?”

* “Weirdest kid I’ve ever met.”

* “There’s no other way to say this: I hate your kid.”

Predictably, The-Trouble-with-Kids-Today curmudgeons lined up to defend Munroe for Daring to Tell the Truth about our disrespectful, lazy, no-good youth. 

Now, while the First Amendment allows me to say nasty things about the people I work with, it doesn’t necessarily prohibit my boss from firing me for doing it. As the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “There may be a constitutional right to talk politics but there is no constitutional right to be a policeman.”

More recent Supreme Court rulings on the question have been mixed.  For example, in the 1968 case of Pickering v. Board of Education, the court reinstated a teacher who was fired for writing a letter to a newspaper criticizing the local school board.

Teachers and students have bad-mouthed each other from time immemorial. But when they start doing it on a giant public bulletin board like the Internet, the question of how to handle it gets trickier. 

Comments posted about Munroe from people purporting to be current or former students made me wonder if the issue isn’t free speech so much as ineffective teaching. Larson provided a few excerpts:

*“You have cheated, screwed and under-cut every single one of your students this year. And I speak for everyone when I say you were a douche to all of your students in class and made no effort to help any of us achieve our academic goals.”

*“I’m not sure if you remember me, but you were by far the worst teacher I’ve ever had because you were simply a (unprintable word).”

*“I originally didn’t completely loath you like the rest of the junior class, but now my feelings have changed.”

*“The reason that you encounter any of these problems is because you are simply the most hated teacher in the school.”

Such comments, along with Munroe’s, should make any administrator look at her effectiveness as a teacher.  A teacher’s popularity or lack of it among students should by no means be the only gauge used to evaluate her. But these posts and Munroe’s set off all sorts of red flags.

Hang around students long enough and you’ll hear them talk about teachers who are hard but good, easy but bad and every variation in between. You might think kids would love all the easy graders and hate all the hard ones, but you’d be wrong.  My teenagers like best the slightly wacky ones, the ones who hold their attention by being funny, challenging and unpredictable.

One year during the first week of school I asked my older son how he liked two of his new teachers.  “Mom, they throw things at us,” he said in an awestruck voice. “But we’re not allowed to throw anything back.”

The teachers would occasionally bean a kid with an eraser if he or she wasn’t paying attention. For my sons, it was love at first toss. Those two public school teachers continued to surprise, challenge and engage students of different abilities; they would be among the first chosen if my kids were handing out “Teacher of the Year” awards.  

Most effective teachers have a range of tools for dealing with the kind of behavior Munroe railed against. I once asked a man who had taught for more than 30 years if the current crop of kids was generally more poorly behaved than the ones he had when he started. He wasn’t ready to concede that but said that teaching some difficult kids comes with the territory. “If you don’t want to fight fires, don’t become a fireman,” he told me.

So I don’t think Munroe should necessarily lose her job just because she put in writing what some teachers have said about students since Socrates was in the education biz. 

Maybe she’s a good teacher. But if the comments can be trusted, it seems that more than a few of her students feel the same way about her as she feels about them. If I were her supervisor, I’d want to know why.