And what the world is seeing is rather ugly: School teachers engaging in bizarre and certainly unacceptable behavior to try and get students to behave. Now granted, school teaching is a thankless job. I have nothing but compassion for the courage of individuals who have chosen to be schoolteachers, working for very low pay inside a system of public education that is in desperate need of reform, and trying to help students achieve in life.
Yet that is no excuse for the behavior of teachers who have clearly violated well-accepted standards of ethics and discipline, berating and even verbally assaulting their students. And frankly, I think the presence of recording devices in classrooms is a positive thing, because from now on teachers will never know when they're being recorded. Sooner or later they will get the idea that they must stop these disciplinary abuses and work to adhere to higher standards of behavior, or risk having their tirades published on the internet.
School districts are outraged by students carrying recording devices into classrooms, and there will be increasing attempts to get these devices banned. Why don't school districts like them? It embarrasses the schools by pointing out the bizarre, and sometimes psychotic behavior of their teachers. School districts don't want that to go public. They'd rather keep it hidden and silent, where it's just the word of the teacher versus the word of the student, and you know the way that always goes.
During my days in the public school system, I remember thinking there were quite a number of teachers who simply didn't belong there. They were either completely ineffective at actually teaching, or they were overly disciplinarian, even downright cruel, and should have been banned from school districts.
And yet those kinds of teachers still exist in public schools all across the country. The school districts are not rooting them out and firing them; they're protecting them. When one student recently recorded the tirade of a teacher verbally assaulting another student, the student who made the recording was expelled from the school, and the teacher received no disciplinary action whatsoever. Thus the school was saying that it's the fault of the student for recording these events, not the fault of the teacher for acting them out.
The message from school districts is clear. "Hear no evil. See no evil. Speak no evil. We don't want anyone to record or know about the evils going on in the classroom today." From the point of view of school districts and many school administrators, any kind of recording device is unacceptable, and they will attempt to ban those devices and confiscate them from students.
I'm going to make a prediction right here and say that school districts are going to lose this battle due to the miniaturization of recording devices. Video cameras and audio recording devices are getting ever smaller, and as they get smaller, they become easier to sneak into classrooms. They are also more affordable, meaning that younger and younger students can afford -- and are likely to own -- these devices.
So if you're reading this, spread the word. If you know someone in a public school, or if you're a student yourself, take note. Get yourself some kind of MP3 recording device or video recorder, take it to class with you, and see what you can do to record the most outrageous teacher you can find. I would love nothing more than to shed some light on what's going on in the classrooms today, and I'm willing to make it worth your time financially.
Here's how it will work. If you have a recording, contact us at the email address listed on the left. Tell us you have a recording of audio or of video. Then, you can arrange to send us that recording for review. We won't use it until we have your permission to do so. Once we review the recording, we will make you a financial offer of how much we think it is worth. Video is obviously worth more than audio, and a more outrageous recording is worth more than a common everyday recording.
And if you so desire, we will protect your identity so that you do not get expelled from school for making these recordings. In fact, we don't even want to know your name. Don't tell us your name when you send these over, because we don't want the courts saying we have to reveal our sources. We can make payment anonymously to you using Paypal, or some other method that we can discuss via email.
Now I know some of the teachers out there, the good teachers, are going to be very frustrated by this. They're going to say, "Mike, you're making all teachers look bad by doing this!" There may be some truth to that, but the fact is I have great respect for school teachers. School teachers have been very influential in my life, and I think they work long hours with very little pay and often very little recognition for a job well done.
But there are some teachers that are emotionally harming students. They are creating trauma for these students, and that trauma can stay with those students for years. These dangerous school teachers need to be out of the system, but the school teachers union (NEA) and school administrators are doing nothing but circling the wagons. And often, other teachers have their hands tied and can't point out dangerous teachers because of fear of retribution. So, it's really up to a grassroots campaign like this to shed some light on the dangerous, unacceptable teachers out there, and get them removed from the school system.
So for all teachers out there, you are now on notice. If you engage in verbal assaults on students, if you threaten students, if you treat them like animals, if you curse at them, or if you engage in other unacceptable behavior, you will have your bad behavior recorded and broadcast on the internet.
Now at the same time, I'm also willing to pay for footage of students doing crazy things in the classroom. So if you're a student who is tired of some other student picking fights or engaging in some kind of outrageous and disrupting troublemaking, maybe even assaulting teachers, then record it. I'd be more than happy to pay you for it, and run that on the internet as well. So it's not just crazy teacher behavior, but also crazy student behavior, that's on notice now. We now live in a world where recording devices are common, so we should all realize that all our public actions could be recorded, and if they are interesting or outrageous enough, could end up published on the internet.
So once again, to wrap this up, the offer's on the table -- up to $500 for an interesting classroom video, and up to $100 for interesting audio. All recordings must be authentic; no recordings may be staged.
Stay tuned to this website. You're about to see some interesting videos of teacher and student tirades, and verbal assaults. This is not about sensationalism, it's about shedding light on an issue that desperately needs public attention as a way to initiate fundamental reform. After all, if this problem stays behind closed doors, it will never change.