A primary school teacher was sacked after she taught pupils as young as nine how to do a TikTok dance.
Georgia Rogers was fired after bosses found she had “condoned” under-age students using the social media site – which bans children aged under 13.
She was also accused of breaching the school’s safeguarding procedure by failing to report her pupils’ use of the app, an employment tribunal heard
It was after, but not because of, teaching them a “TikTok Dance” (which meerely means something seen on a video there).
So, the kids saud “Please Miss, teach us this!” and she did. Nowt lacivious or what, just some dance steps. Filmed it on hte school iPad and that’s that. No, no uplopading or anything. Kiddies get to do what kiddies have seen and all have lots of fun.
So she gets fired. Because if 10 year olds are talking about TikTok then this means that they’ve been loking at it and they shouldn’t because they’re under 13. Therefore she needs to be fired because she didn’t nark on the 10 year olds watching TikTok.
Sounds a little Stasi, doesn’t it? Winston, where art thou now sort of stuff? Possiblky a whiff of Victory Gin about it?
It’s even possible that 10 year olds shouldn’t be watching TikTok but if this is the sort of end result of such an insistence might I recommend bloody revolution as a suitable response?
But she didn’t misgender any of them! Not even once! Surely that’s worth a gold star in mitigation…
I suppose she advised the little girls not to have their tits cut off as well…
Beyond salvation?
The “borderline unprofessional messages” were pretty creepy although, if accurately reported (and that’s a big if), not in themselves justification for sacking her.
Maybe a case of better safe than sorry?
All those children are now Chinese Communist agents and ned re educating.
’Ms Rogers sued the school for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination, claiming she was suffering from PTSD.’
Funnily enough, any sympathy I might have had just vanished.
Since such use was taking place at home rather than at school, should she have logged her “concern” (= covered her back) and should the school have reported the parents to the local authority? Decidedly odd.
Julia – since she lost her job and is unlikely to get another teaching post a certain amount of stress, distress (and irrationality) are understandable, I think.
Above all else, the state is a bureaucracy. Rules is rules. Doesn’t matter if you’re helping, you’re not allowed to break the rules. If you want to do things differently you have to get the rules changed, which in the case of the NHS or education means pushing it up about 15 layers. Subcommittees will meet to change the policy on showing harmless videos to kids on TikTok, and change the policy within about a year if they like it.
I know that if I work on a state computer, I should never open it up with a screwdriver. Doesn’t matter that I have a spare memory module of my own and that I can slot it in and get back to work the next day. In a small company I would be thanked for my initiative. In the state I would get a bollocking as there is a team that manage the computers.
This is also a reason why local authorities work better than central. Because getting approval for things to be changed doesn’t have to go far. If you want to run some software they’ve never heard of, it has to go up about 2-3 layers of management. You get it turned around in a few days.
East Germany wasn’t a disaster because they had worse state. They just had a lot more state than West Germany.
‘Above all else, the state is a bureaucracy.’
Yes Western Bloke. That’s why I dislike this one. It strangles all initiative in the teachers.
Of course this isn’t original. I’m remembering some words from a favourite poem of my childhood.
‘Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.’
Things haven’t changed in the slightest.
@Ottokring: “All those children are now Chinese Communist agents and need re educating.”
Au contraire. 37th advisor to Sir Kneel awaits…
Talk about “cognitive dissonance”..! Teaching nine-year-olds a “forbidden dance” is verboten, but importing raving pouffters in dresses to read them dirty stories and teaching them how to wank at the age of six is OK?
Somebody wanted rid of Georgia Rogers and found this sneaky way to do it. I wonder what the real reason was.
Bloke in Pictland has it right, I think.
Having had long experience of the safeguarding mafia, and my wife being in the thick of it now, I know of few cases where actually keeping children or vulnerable people safe is the primary motivation of official action. It’s normally used to get rid of unwanted staff, to settle scores, or to build empires. I suspect that the slightly dodgy messaging to the pupil’s mother could have raised concerns, and maybe Ms. Rogers had an uppity and insufficiently deferential response to the initial investigation.
Remember that safeguarding is mainly about women’s emotions.
This is descending into “I’ve heard about Mein Kampf, therefore books are evil”.
molesworth got there first when he came up with the maxim
“All books that boys hav to read ar wrong”