What one teacher did when a student refused to give up phone

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[quote]This post by Mrs. Turner-Smith, a public school teacher, has been making the rounds on social media, and for good reason.

In her post, Turner-Smith writes about a student in her class who refused to put away his phone. The teacher could have demanded that the student leave her class. She could have called in school administrators or summoned the school resource officer to deal with the “non-compliant” teenager. She might have even attempted to manhandle the student, in an attempt to “show him who’s boss.”

But she didn’t do any of those things. Instead she took the time to talk to the student. She wrote about what she discovered in her post, which was shared by Go Left America on Facebook.

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Earlier this week we saw this same scenario play out in a completely different way. School resource officer Ben Fields chose to handle a student who refused to put away her cell phone during class with aggression and violence. Shocking cell phone video of the incident, captured by the student’s classmates, shows Fields flipping the girl’s desk over, before bodily throwing her across the room.

While we don’t know a lot about the young woman who was brutalized by Fields, there are a few things we do know. Let’s start with the fact that she’s 16-years-old. It’s an age at which society expects you to act “grown-up,” “behave responsibly,” and “make good choices,” although science confirms that your brain isn’t physically capable of thinking like an adult. (The human brain doesn’t develop fully until the age of 25.)
We also don’t know what this student may have experienced in her 16 years of life. In reality, we don’t even know what she might have been going through during the minutes and hours that led up to her encounter with “officer slam.” We don’t know why she refused to put away her cell phone, because we live in a society that would rather label students as ‘unruly,’ and ‘uncooperative’ than take the time to find out what’s going on in their lives.

We do know that the student assaulted by Fields is living with a foster family. We don’t know how long she’s been in that situation or the circumstances that led up to that.

There’s no excuse for the way Fields and other staff at Spring Valley High School approached this student. When you compare their approach to the one used by Mrs. Turner-Smith, that becomes even more obvious.

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