I’ll never forget in high school when my friend got caught drawing a penis on her less-than-favorable progress report.
“What’s that?” the teacher, jabbing a finger at the lewd image, asked. “What does it look like?” “I want to hear you say it.” “Man, it’s a d***!”
I guess art is in the eye of the beholder, because students aren’t the only ones inspired to draw the male anatomy on their classwork.
Chapin High School language arts teacher Kim Juzdowski substituted a “D” for the letter grade to show her disappointment for a student’s lackluster work effort. And the Texan mom of the student isn’t impressed with the picture, captioned, “My teacher did this,” of the penis drawn on her son’s assignment he uploaded to his personal Facebook page last week.
“I’m an educator myself, so I said, there’s no way the teacher really did this,” parent Sandra Green tells local ABC affiliate, KVIA.
Green asked her son about the assignment. He told her Juzdowski, apparently, thought he was d***ing around.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” Green says.
Green emailed Juzdowski, who admitted to drawing the lewd design.
“I’m sorry (blank) took offense,” Juzdowski writes, “and I totally understand if you would like to meet with an administrator and have him removed.”
Sounds less like an apology and more like Juzdowski’s sorry she’s not sorry.
Green took her advice and reached out to administration, but says the El Paso Independent School District told her Juzdowski would not be fired.
“Their reasoning was that she admitted it,” Green says. “Had she denied it, she would have been removed from the school immediately. But because she admitted it, they said it shows she’s willing to change.”
Juzdowski later rewrote Green to apologize and admitted she’s made a habit out of embarrassing instead of punishing students in her efforts to motivate them, Green says.
Gustavo Reveles, an EPISD representative, tells the Huffington Post that Juzdowski “understands that the drawing was in bad taste and that it was inappropriate for the type of relationship a teacher should have with a student.”
“If it was a man teacher doing it to a female student, they would have taken this totally serious,” Green says. “But because it’s the other way around, I think they’re letting the light side go on it. And I just want him out of the environment.”
Green tells KVIA she’s filed a grievance to get her son transferred, but the district told her it may be more than a month before the request is approved. Meanwhile, teacher and student must bear the brunt of the awkward aftermath.
Every grade at every school has what they consider a “cool” teacher, and many commenters on social media think Juzdowski is it – and Green is overreacting.
“As a former student of Ms. J – she is a great teacher,” Jewell Black writes on the article posted by KVIA on Facebook. “… She is an excellent educator and her students love her, honestly for reasons like this.”
But isn’t it the sprawling drawings of genitals on others’ personal property that separates the juvenile from the educated?
What do you think? Should drawing genitalia be an acceptable inspiring agent in the classroom?
