Back when I was in middle school, there were four days of the year that we considered to be better than Christmas – the four half-days when teachers had their super-secret staff meetings. Thanks to The Simpsons and my own friends who are now grown up teachers, I know that those days were just an excuse for them to slack off and get hammered, but it’s nice to know that this is a global thing, and not just another staple of my Florida education.
A math teacher in France was suspended for one day and is still facing additional punishment after he decided to replace the curriculum on a staff meeting day with a viewing of Saw. You can imagine that the parents of his 11-year old students were none too pleased when little Jacques and Jacqui came home to ask why that horrible actor chopped his own foot off.
Jean-Baptiste Clément, a maths teacher at a college in Colombes, near Paris, is alleged to have shown a class full of 11-year-old pupils the infamously gruesome horror movie ‘Saw,’ on Monday.
Clément told the children: “This will be your first horror film,” according to French radio Europe 1.
According to a father of one of the pupils at the school in Hautes-de-Seine, in the north-western suburbs of Paris, he first discovered the extraordinary screening when his young son came home from school.
“He returned from school on Monday evening, visibly in some discomfort, not well. I asked him and he told me his maths teacher had shown them a horror film during class,” he told Europe 1. (The Local)
Of course some of the parents might be suing, because God forbid someone settle for a simple apology these days when those cash cow schools are just hemorrhaging francs and Euros. But then, morbidity isn’t exactly a rare occurrence in French classrooms, as the Local also points out that a teacher recently had a class of 12-year olds write their own suicide letters.
So I guess maybe what they’re trying to tell us is that we should stop picking on France so much. We’re sorry, France.
