What is the point of the internet, if not to watch viral videos of teachers berating children? From a cursory glance, there are literally hundreds of these sorts of videos on Youtube, a yellow-brick road of nervous breakdowns captured in all their grainy glory. And even substitute teachers are not immune: a student at Edison Middle School in West Orange captured the sound of a substitute math teacher having such a verbal freak out on his cell phone. The sub yelled at the students, "You must have a learning disability because you don't pay attention" and "You're always doing this. You're a big pain for me and I'm getting sick of you too."
According to Fox, the sub also said, "If you're going to be like this, you're going to end up on the street...You belong in another wing of the building where they put the angry kids." Now, from our hazy memories of middle school, there definitely were kids who needed to be yelled at; but in this age of cell phone cameras and itchy trigger-finger lawsuits, there is no room for even the most well-intentioned verbal smackdown anymore. According to Kathy Reinstein, a parent of a girl in the class, the teacher in question was fired immediately after the video came to the school's attention; she added that the principal told her that if he hadn't seen the video with his own eyes, he wouldn't have believed it, which is an ultra-comforting thought. You can see the full Fox report below, including segments from the student's video.
