And today in “WHAT THE EFF IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD,” we have this: Kids are apparently making video tutorials teaching other kids how to get their teachers fired and posting them on YouTube.
According to My Fox Houston, it’s become stupidly easy to find these kinds of tutorials. All you need to do is search YouTube for something like “How I got my teacher fired,” and loads of videos pop up. Some of them are life stories told during a gameplay video for Call of Duty; others are simply talking heads, mouthing off in the way that vloggers do. The most horrifying one I found is of two first graders — first graders! — who for some reason have their own YouTube channel (who lets a six-year-old have their own YouTube channel?!). I am so aghast that I'm reluctant to even embed any of them for you — and even worse, the president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, Gayle Fallon, says that videos like this have “almost become an epidemic.”
The Daily Dot did a little digging and found that YouTuber Corey Drake seems to be “the granddaddy of the ‘genre,’ as it were.” In a series of videos that he has since taken down, Drake detailed step-by-step instructions on how to get your teacher fired. Most of Drake’s videos are comedic in nature, so, as the Daily Dot notes, it’s difficult to know whether these particular ones were intended to be funny or true — but even if they were simply meant as a joke, it was kind of poor judgment to post them in the first place. Here’s a soundbyte for you from the My Fox Houston report:
“So I had this teacher, right—Ms. Keller—and I just didn’t like her, you know? So I was like, let me just get her fired. So I went to the principal. And instead of saying I was molested, you need to play the victim.”
Um...
Seriously. It's true that some teachers do very bad things and definitely shouldn’t be teachers (hey there, Mary Kay Letourneau!). But totally destroying someone’s life just because you don’t like them? How are we teaching kids that this is an OK thing to do?
Gayle Fallon noted, “I don’t think that at the age that some of those students are, that they realize they can ruin a person’s home life; they can ruin their career; they ruin their reputation in the community.” Maybe not — but at that age, they should at least know that their actions have consequences, and that it is not acceptable to tell awful lies about other people. We’re the ones who should be teaching them these lessons, but apparently we’re failing spectacularly. It’s time to step up our game when it comes to the whole “right and wrong” thing — otherwise the world really is going to end, and it will be totally our own faults.
Here. Have some pictures of some cute animals wearing clothing. It'll make you feel better.
