A ruckus, an “awkward gesture” and a teacher on the picket line. The schools of Graulhet, a Tarn town of 13,000 inhabitants, were disrupted this Tuesday by a strike by teachers who intend to support their colleague who has been worried since the beginning of October, she chose too demonstrative a method to reprimand a student. It all started when his students started throwing erasers at each other across the classroom. She raised her voice and all the children calmed down. “Except one,” says Thomas Verdier, the departmental co-secretary of the FSU union. “He retorted: “I didn’t throw away, I gave.” She then showed him, with a supporting gesture: “Giving is like that, throwing away is like that,” and the pen bounced off the table and landed on the child’s glasses”, according to the account of the trade unionist, who deplores that the event had “taken too great proportions”.
“A gesture without any aggression”
Because if the child was not injured, his parents filed a complaint against the teacher at the Victor-Hugo school. “She was summoned to the gendarmerie, with fingerprints and DNA taken, then by the academic inspector with an incriminating interview. She was shocked, she broke down and felt unwell when leaving the interview,” relates Thomas Verdier, who accompanied her during the interview last week.
For the professor, it was “an awkward gesture, without any aggressiveness”, “finding yourself in such a situation for a trivial event, it went too far”, believes the union representative. He recalls that this mobilization takes place in a context of “fed up” teachers, with its share of resignations and the insufficient number of candidates for the competition. “It’s an increasingly difficult job to do,” he said, “and we expect our hierarchy not to put our heads further under water,” he added.