namecannotbe..

I have been a teacher before. Five years. JHS class teacher. Basic education. So before you engage with this conversation, let me establish that I am not speaking from theory. I am speaking from experience. When I was a class teacher, I noticed something. Parents were not showing up. Not for PTA. Not for report card day. Not for anything. Some of my students would disappear for a whole week and their parents would not call once. Not once. So I made a decision. I put my number on the board. Every student in my class had to give their parent my number directly. If your child is not coming to school, you call me and tell me why. Simple. Do you know what happened after I did that? Female students. JHS students. Started sending me pictures of themselves in the bathroom. These are the same girls we see on TikTok. They had access to their teacher's number and that is what they chose to do with it. Now I want you to stop and think about that for a second. Imagine I was a bad person. Imagine I did not have the upbringing I had. Imagine I did not see that behavior as a disgrace to myself and to everything my parents taught me. I would have done exactly what that teacher did to that student. Exactly. But I was raised well. So I reported it to the headmaster. The headmaster called the parents. The matter was dealt with. That is the conversation @highesteri_ was trying to open. Not defending the teacher. The teacher is wrong 100% and that is not up for debate. But she was asking a question that nobody on this platform wants to answer honestly. What are these children being shown at home? Because I have sat in a classroom and watched it firsthand. Parents who do not visit the school once in a term. Parents who put money on the table and disappear. Children who have nobody to talk to at home so they confide in whoever is closest to them. And when the wrong adult is closest to them, you already know what happens. And let me ask the men on this platform something honestly. How many of you can resist it if your partner walks naked in front of you? Be honest. How many? And those are grown men in relationships. Now put a teacher in a classroom with a student who is sending explicit pictures and has nobody at home holding her accountable. And you want to only blame the teacher? The teacher is wrong. Say it with me. The teacher is wrong. But being wrong and being alone in causing the problem are two different things. We have a parenting problem in this country. We have a digital literacy problem. We have a school reporting system where the person you report abuse to is also a predator. We have GES announcing investigations and then going silent. We have transfers being used as punishment, which means the predator simply moves to the next school and finds the next victim. @highesteri_ addressed all of this. In context. With nuance. And X clipped ten seconds of it and turned her into a villain. That is not a community. That is a mob. And until we learn the difference, we will keep attacking the people brave enough to tell us the truth while protecting the systems that are failing our children. @kwadwosheldon