Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Out of Touch

I love it when one of our elected officials says something so stupid it reinforces how completely out of touch they are.

"While incidents of violence against teachers always concern me greatly, fortunately they are relatively infrequent in New Zealand."

Well, that's a relief, especially for teachers, I'm sure.

Except, in just the paragraph before, the report says that in 2007 there were 815 reported assaults on teachers by pupils. 815.

Do the math. 52 weeks less school holidays, five days in each of those weeks, not taking into account teacher-only days and public holidays, 815 assualts on teachers by pupils in one school year, if my math is correct makes a little over 4 per day.

Four assaults on teachers by pupils every day in New Zealand. And those are the reported ones. How many go unreported?

I would like to ask the Honourable Anne Tolley what, if not four per day, constitutes "relatively frequent"?

You could break it down further, could you not? The school day is six hours long. Four assaults per day. That means a teacher is assaulted by a pupil every hour and a half in New Zealand.

"Relatively infrequent"? Good one Anne.

1 comment:

Art Mama said...

I'm not condoning violence, but we've outlawed smacking as a means of parental discipline, but isn't it ironic that it's only a minor problem when teachers get assualted, as it happens "relatively infrequently". Oh, ok. Something is very wrong here.