Diane Tirado, a history teacher in Florida who has more than 15 years of experience in the school, was forced to pay for her education methods after she discovered a hard reality about the contemporary public school system.
To be more specific, it seems that shielding pupils from setbacks has become a higher priority in education than teaching them valuable life skills.
It all began when the history teacher decided to give her students a summer homework project that required them to maintain a form of journey journal, similar to those that the pioneers and explorers kept in the 1500s.
The objective of the project was to produce a notebook that would have maps, items, and text, all of which needed to be put together and finished within a period of two weeks.
After a few school days had passed, the history teacher was summoned into the office of the principal.In the days that immediately followed the delegating of the homework activity, both students and parents started to protest that the project, according to the former, was too demanding for their children to complete!
Some pupils came to class after the permitted two weeks had passed without having completed their homework assignment. These children were presumably encouraged to do so by their parents.
Because those kids had not provided the instructor anything to assess or evaluate, she utilized the evaluation guidelines that had been established and were being used at the school to assign them a score of “zero” (0).
The principal called the history teacher in for a second time and informed her that their “guidelines” actually meant that even when a student does not do anything at all, they are still supposed to be assigned a five (5), in order to prevent compromising the rest of their school year.
The educator was not of the same opinion since, in accordance with her code of ethics, a score of five (5) indicated a “job done poorly,” whilst those kids who had done nothing at all deserved a score of zero (0).
Her commitment to ethics and the law has been very expensive for her. In point of fact, the principle, who most certainly did not want to defend her in front of the mob of irate parents, made the decision to terminate her employment on the spot.
After Diane Tirado concluded her courses on a Friday afternoon, a school security officer removed her from the campus and demanded that she leave the school immediately and permanently.
She realized that there would be no way for her to say farewell to all of her pupils, so she wrote the following note on the whiteboard in the classroom and left it for everyone to read:
“Bye Kids. You are loved by Mrs. Tirado, and she hopes the best for you in life. My refusal to assign you a grade for not turning in anything resulted in my dismissal from the school”.