There's no question that school bullies are a big problem, but one Brooklyn teacher seems to have taken the anti-bullying message just a tad too far; according to officials, she made a third-grader who was being punched by a classmate hit his tormentor back in front of the whole class.
The alleged incident went down last fall, when one student in Tamu Francis' third grade class at PS 191 in Brownsville started punching another kid. Francis separated the two, and according to Department of Education documents, made the eight-year-old bully stand up in front of the class, encouraging the kid he was tormenting to "hit him back." And that's not all—she allegedly also told the bully, who started to cry after being punched: "When you act like a dog, you get treated like a dog."
Francis, who has been an educator for 13 years, says she was just trying to teach the class a lesson about bullying; the DOE apparently wanted Francis fired, but she was fined $10,000 and demoted to a roving substitute in December. And so ends the saga of Francis' alleged Fight Club for Children—then again, we've seen some pretty bad misguided teacher lessons in our day.
