Debate Humiliation Warrants Firing?

I don't care the situation. That was entirely uncalled for. A coach is role model that's supposed to help kids learn, and care about the sport. The self esteem of a thirteen year old boy is very shaky with most. I have a brother that age, and know how they react to things. It's usually not with much calm and grace. What if the kid had commited suicide? Did the coach take that into his head? On the surface the kid may have seemed stable, but how can he know what's going on undereneath?

I think the coach deserved to be fired, and if the parents sued him I wouldn't hold it against them. At that age children are developing their identity, and stuff like that can scar.

 

No need to get snotty about it.

And what's so different about this case? The point is, you can't single out a student to be ridiculed for a trait which is purely based on your opinion of their behavior - it wouldn't be appropriate to mock the kid for his race, his appearance, etc, so why is it OK for a coach - an adult who's supposed to be providing guidance and support - to publically demean him for whining?

You may think it's trivial, but not everyone necessarily shares your strong sense of self-confidence and your ability to look at the larger picture and laugh off insults.

Well, yeah, we already knew that. ;P

Kids teasing each other is one thing. A coach doing it is completely different.

And just because it's common, that makes it alright? Bigotry is common too, you know. So is theft. So is rape. Yeah, I realize these may be more extreme examples, but still.

Um... so? That just proves to me that there needs to be more attention paid to preventing coaches from feeling that verbally abusing and humiliating students is acceptible.

Good for you, if you can ignore something so blatantly inappropriate. But just because the ideal thing to do is to not let someone else's abusive, bigoted behavior affect you doesn't mean they should go unpunished.

Yes, there's a huge difference between name-calling in the heat of the moment and public humiliation. If the coach wanted to call the student a crybaby, he could have done it in private. Sure, the kid would still have been hurt, but not in front of his peers. It's almost a given that coaches are going to use profanity and insult their players on the field, which may be motivational for some people. But this issue... totally different.

The fact that the coach specifically told the boy to attend because he was getting a "special award" might be the sickest part of this whole thing. It was premeditated, not just a prank or a spontaneous insult. Any reasonable person would rethink something like that. Sure, it's funny in theory, but to actually go through with it shows a marked lack of conscience on the coach's part.


Now, having read the updated article, I question whether firing the coach is the best option. Certainly, he deserves to suffer some form of punishment - but if he honestly didn't mean any harm by it (I find that hard to swallow, but still...), then he absolutely needs sensitivity training and should make a formal, public apology. Perhaps he needs to look into working with older teens who are less likely to take things like that to heart. The trouble is, the damage has already been done for the student.

 

Well, as sorry as I am for the kid, I do agree that the coach shouldn't be fired over something like this. After all, what grounds is he going to be fired on? Publicly humiliating a kid? In the eyes of a school board, I don't think the crime he committed was heinous enough to merit firing. I do, however, think he needs to make a public apology to the kid (the way Dilandau suggested), and be warned that if he continues this sort of behavior, nobody will hesitate to fire him.

 

Another update:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-05-05-crybaby-award_x.htm

I think this is the ideal solution and hope he isn't fired entirely. Clearly the man is not fit to coach, but the situation has virtually nothing to do with his ability to teach. Still, if he *is* totally fired, I certainly won't lose any sleep over it.

 

I think a lot of the problem in this situation is that the "context" of the award was something only the coach was apparently aware of. If everyone was getting insulting awards, it wouldn't have been an issue - it would have looked like a joke, not a malicious slap in the face.

What I'm getting from these articles is that the coach thought he was sending one message - 'focus more on your game and not on complaining,' which is a justifiable thing to say (though not in public, not the way it was handled) - whereas to everyone else, including the student, it was nothing more than crude abuse. I'd say the coach is in serious need of better taste and tact.

 

If this was a joke then it was pretty sick, this is simply harassment and i think that it would be a good idea to fire the coach to make an example of him.

It's not far for the coach to single out this kid just because he wanted to prove himself in the game. I mean thats why he joined the team in the first place, and then the coach denies him to play in the game and then singles him out for arguing that he was not able to take part. This is the fault of the coach and not the kids.

 

But precisely how do we know this kid was not some holier-than-thou snot who kept trying to flaunt supposed superiority or something? How do we know the kid didn't keep annoying the coach with his request over and over and over and over again? Fact of the matter is, we don't. We don't know to what extent he whined, we don't know in which ways he whined, we don\t know how the kid treated other players, we don't know how tolerant the coach had been up to this point. THIS is why Ark and I refuse to pass judgement - we don't have enough specific info.

 

That's perfectly fine, Neph. But what I (And I'm assuming the school board) believe is that none of that matters - No matter how horrible the student acted, what the coach did was totally inappropriate. Heck, if the boy really was that much of a snot, the coach could have just cut him from the team and avoided this whole mess.

 

I dunno. After all, you have to prune a Bonsai tree, no?

 

I think his point is that you prune the tree, you don't then set it on fire

- Ark

 

Yes, but if you snip off too much, you're kinda screwed.

I agree with Billy277 - the point isn't whether the kid deserved it, it's that the coach was out of bounds. The only thing that should really merit discussion here is whether he did it maliciously, or was just really tactless. I think people are a bit too willing to accept his conduct because he's a coach and a little abuse is "common" in sports - or at least, that's the justification I'm seeing used. But would that behavior be as acceptible if the student's math teacher had done it?

 

As far as I knew, Math is not a team effort. Hey, does anybody remember Dunce Caps? Why did my father never get traumatized?

 

Because anyone who acted up in class could get the dreaded dunce cap, and it was never a premeditated act on the part of the teacher. The crybaby award was targeted at a single student and was planned well in advance.

 

Isn't it "being planned in advance" making it "premeditated"? After all, that's what "premeditated" means. ;P No single student may have been singled out when the idea was developed but alas, technically if you consider neither was this idea either as in one of the articles YOU posted, the Crybaby Award was given out to another person.

Using your logic used alongside of the dunce cap idea, this means that it is just as meaningless and pathetically miniscule as the dunce cap.

On the other hand, perhaps the dunce cap was just as humiliating. I mean, here, you have a teacher throwing you into a corner to stare at a wall, putting this hat upon your head that forever marked you as an idiot to your classmates. The word would travel and kids would find out more and more about it and more and more he would become traumatized.

This is all using the logic displayed here to defend firing the coach.

Looks like a dilemma to me.

 

Well, for one, the dunce cap is no longer widely considered an appropriate form of discipline, is it?

For another, everyone knew they could be put in the corner with the dunce cap; it was a given if you misbehaved. It wasn't a situation where the teacher would tell you "Make sure you're here tomorrow for a special reward," and then stick the dunce cap on your head. There was an immediate cause and effect relationship which everyone was aware of.

Besides, getting the dunce cap in class for something you were doing then and there is different from being humiliated at a special event, with no warning and no reason to suspect it, after having been told to expect something good. There was deception there.

 

Fact of the matter is, I don't hear people complaining about the dunce cap, even people who got it when it was used don't complain about it. Again, for all we know this kid was some snotty little punk who had a superiority complex who kept harassing the coach and demanding this and that. BUT the article doesn't give enough information, and I doubt we'll ever know the full story.

Hell, I had a teacher who repeatedly taunted my mathematics skill and made fun of my dream to be a pilot. How old was I? 14, with massive confidence problems. Did I do anything to deserve this? No; unless you consider having some difficulties with new mathematical concepts to be deserving of it. And this didn't happen once or twice, this happened at least once a week for a whole semester. It's been a while since I was in high school, but let's call it at 18 incidents (which is a low figure, but I'm willing to cut some slack here).

Did I end up being massively traumatized or even more insecure? No, I ended up improving my skills until I won the Academic Award for Mathematics for my entire grade (which had several hundred people in it, each one taking math).

Obviously there are differences between my situation and this kids (mostly in the fact that I didnt expect a good thing after the first time; though one should not expect to hear taunts and jibes after saying he wants to be a pilot), but the point still stands - it may not be as bad as it sounds.

 

A final update:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/cu...07may07,0,4680918.story?coll=sfla-news-fringe

I'm happy with the end result. The guy didn't lose his job (Which I agree would have been too harsh), but got hit with sanctions and can't officially coach anymore.

 

Alas we lose a coach because parents are uptight. Hell, now this should be fun, seeing all these kids come home crying now about how their teachers are mean and cruel and parents filing law suits and the likes. ^_^ It'll be total chaos that shall follow in suit to the poor decision.

You gotta love America, impressionable youth and court-crazy parents.