‘I’m tired of being beat up’ by students

Get out of the government schools! 

In his years of teaching special-education students, Brett Bigham was assaulted more than 20 times, he writes on Education Post.

I’m tired of being beat up. I’m tired of being threatened. I don’t want people to say, “You’re a saint for putting up with that.” I want them to say, “How can we change the system so you are safer?”

A few days before Bigham was named Oregon’s Teacher of the Year, he was beaten, whipped with a TV cord and bitten so badly by a student that he ended up in the hospital. “I’m not sitting up straight in this picture because my abdomen is wrapped with bandages and gauze,” he writes.

He sat at a surprise assembly “worrying my wound is weeping through my shirt” and “debating if I should make a statement about violence against teachers and take off my shirt.”

“Four times I have been sent to the hospital by a student,” Bigham writes. He’s been slapped, punched, bitten, hit with a chair, twice, and with a stick, twice.

I’ve had enough books thrown at me to start a small library. Besides books I’ve been hit by a stapler, a tape dispenser, rocks, dirt clods, shoes, scissors, several lunches, a broom, balls and had a live mole trap thrown at my head . . . I’ve replaced four sets of glasses from students hitting me in the face.

. . . I’ve been kicked in the face, kicked in the groin, kicked in the stomach, kicked in the groin again and again and punched there once so violently I had to go to the doctor and was bruised for over two weeks.

https://www.joannejacobs.com/2018/12/im-tired-of-getting-beat-up-by-students/