Toronto Sun – Sat, December 23, 2006:
A Grade 3 student is the little girl who gave too much.
Stephanie Templeton, 8, arrived on two separate occasions with a bag full of canned goods for her North York school’s food drive.
On Tuesday when Stephanie arrived with her second load of six cans, her teacher at Derrydown Public School in the Keele St. and Finch Ave. W. area sent them back home with her because she was making other students feel bad, Stephanie’s dad, Frank Templeton, said yesterday.
“The teacher said she was showing up the other kids,” the shocked father said. “We teach her to do the best she can, and they basically just stuffed the cans back in her knapsack and sent her home with them.”
Principal Yvonne Castello said the teacher was worried Stephanie was collecting food with a little too much zeal.
“The teacher was a little concerned,” Castello said. “She didn’t want any of the other kids to feel pressured — especially those kids who aren’t able to bring anything.”
She said it was not school policy to limit the amount of food a student could donate.
The school late yesterday accepted Stephanie’s extra donations.
Jerks. They should accept the donations and use the girl as a good example, of course explaining to the other kids they shouldn’t feel bad, the important thing is trying and so on. If the generous girls is clearly acting to show off they should guide her. If these morons are unable to do such simple things they shouldn’t be in the educational system in the first place.
I kept thinking, why wouldn’t the teacher just keep the food. Whatever insane fears she has about the other students’ self-esteem, she could deal with that after the food collection–but help the poor first.
But it dawned on me that this was never about charity. I suspect the teacher, and maybe the whole building was seeing this as a competition. This school probably wanted to encourage competition to increase food collection. The teacher did not want to see the rest of her class face the consequence of losing by too much. Bad combination.
This is clearly stupid. But, if we had the internet and youtube 75 or 100 years ago, we would have story after story of teachers and parents using fear and humiliation to encourage hard work from their children and students. At some point we decided that was extreme and counterproductive. In rectifying this problem, we swung too much in the opposite direction in order to protect children’s self-esteem, but we are starting to right ourselves. Some are still on the silly side of the esteem question, and some have gone too far back in the direction of the bad old days where they confuse discipline and firmness with fear and terror.
What a communist pinko fag…She should be sent back to mother Russia! (Along with that Jesus character!)
Dear Stephanie, I am very sorry; that was really idiotic on the teacher’s part. Hard as it may seem, you need to understand that the teacher and principal can’t really help themselves, they are dough heads and the public school system is going down the toilet. This teacher is desperately clinging to the rim of the bowl but will hopefully slip off soon, go down the drain and be replaced with skilled teacher.
Keep up the good work Stephanie and don’t let the staff at your school ruin your mind.
Santa
There are lots of ways that kids seem to go wrong these days, but collecting too much food for the underprivileged is not one of them. She wasn’t shoplifting the food, she wasn’t taking it at gunpoint, and she wasn’t caught lacing it with drugs or poison.
If she learns history and math as well as she’s learned charity, she’ll graduate at the top of her class.
Of course, my other impulse is to say “Expel that bitch. How dare she bring so much food!” But that’s my evil nature, and I try to keep it in check on Christmas Eve morning 😉
Well damn, there is a bit of hostility this Christmas Season. But then trolls don’t really need a reason to spew.
I don’t think the teacher was far out of line. She was thinking of her entire class, not one person. Her motives were good. North York is an area of Toronto that includes about 500,000 people. There are quite few very poor included.
At eight years old, children still have little concept of charity and underprivileged. It is a concept they are still developing. I am reasonable sure she took the food from her pantry and didn’t pay for it out of her own pocket. While it sounds good on the surface, I don’t think bringing all that food to class was necessarily a great idea.
There are many food drives available in Toronto. Most grocery stores collect for Second Harvest. If giving was the primarily intent, she could have given to them.
It’s funny how it’s always the teachers fault and parenting skills are never questioned. I am assuming that the teacher nor the 8 year old reported this to ‘the media’ so who does that leave? It’s nice to see integrity hasn’t been lost this Christmas.
This is almost as bad as the virgin Mary pee stain.
Yah know, people just need to understand that teachers are people too. You have a group of people (teacher and administrator) that are trained intensively to look for “problems”. They are also trained to react to “problems” when they see them. This is what you get. Any small issue gets the “treatment:”
This is a management issue. The “looking for problems” and the teaching functions of schools need to be separated. Just like you separate quality assurance from manufacturing processes in a factory. Then you just adjust the number of quality assurance personnel to get the level of quality (or problem detection) feedback that you need to operate the school effectively.
On the other had, I suspect the school board is run by conservatives, and they like to train the kids to be mean and cruel and militant capitalists. Therefore, smacking kids down for being too generous is to be expected and encouraged.
This kid is going to be working in Social Services in 15 yrs.
You can kiss and choke that girl JonBenet style, I’m siding with the kids with the deadbeat parents who only gave a can of sweet peas.
Hooray! The overachieving bitch got what she deserved.
#11 — That comment is inappropriate.
What do you expect? It’s Canada!
I guess Bill & Melinda Gates will have to stop giving as well. They sure make the rest of us look bad.
Humility ISNT among many of you, even in satire.
You give what you can, IF you can…But, please ask your parents.