New teacher told to stop stamping faces of her good, bad students
A new grade-three elementary school teacher has come under fire for branding the faces of students who act up in class with blue ink, while her good students had their forehead stamped with a red-ink flower in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province.
The teacher, surnamed Guo, who is in her first month as a teacher at the Shangfen Elementary School, was quoted by the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Daily as saying that she only intended to encourage some underperforming students to catch up with their well-behaved peers.
A student claimed the teacher refused his request to have his hand stamped and was warned not to wash his face until he got home, the newspaper reported, adding that many of the students were laughed at and ridiculed.
"It is an isolate case and the school has already ordered the teacher to stop," a staff member from the school told the Global Times.
Li Yu, deputy headmaster of the school, told the Guangzhou newspaper that the teacher is a fresh graduate with little experience and she had good intention.
"Even as a new, inexperienced teacher, she should have known the action would hurt her students' feelings," a neighbor of a student, surnamed Zhang, told the Global Times. "The school is just trying to cover up for the teacher."
"The teacher is wrong for showing a lack of respect for the students' dignity," said Xiong Bingqi, an education expert with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, adding that this kind of inappropriate behavior usually ends up with apologies instead of holding the teacher truly accountable.
An elementary school in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, also got into trouble for publicly humiliating unruly students when it made them wear green scarves instead of the traditional red scarves that most school kids wear with pride. The school called off the green scarf punishment in October 2011.