Reverse Intimidation

Breaking the Silence, by Joseph and Jo Blase, vividly illustrates the force of teacher abuse and how it rebounds from the target into the the school environment, making it toxic. Just as love has energy that forces change, so does the need for power, the opposite of love. When abuse is directed at anyone in an organization, someone has to be hurt. If the recipient has a gentle, sensitive nature and the inability to hurt others, the energy attacks that teacher with a vengeance, leaving her crippled with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or another illness. The Blases pointed out that very few targeted teachers were able to maintain classrooms of high quality teaching with compassion and love for the children. They became contaminated in varying degrees. We would speculate that those few teachers who stopped abuse from rebounding to others, were gradually destroyed by its force almost as if they were holding the bomb, rather than passing it on. We do know that to be a fact for many of our members. They taught with love until the day they were eliminated from their position, and many still suffer today.

However,if the individual is more of a survivor by nature, those around him will suffer. Breaking the Silence, illustrates situations where the abuse is redirected, and sadly so. He cites teachers who admit their children are cheated by the abuse passed on to them. In the following case, a teacher describes the slow stranglehold that abuse had on her. She didn't affect her students by direct abuse, but by becoming a robot who could no longer give the students the joy of learning.

"He stripped away everything that made my room unique, that makes teachers special, sets one teacher apart from another. A package that says to children, here I am, examine me, question me, shake, rattle, and roll me and I will open up for you and reveal everything. What happens when a teacher is stripped of her style, when, year after year, her brightly colored package is picked at? Off come the ribbons, the bows, the brightly colored paper. What is left is a shell, an empty box. I was a teacher who had a special style of teaching. But everything that made me special has been done away with. Circle meeetings were stopped. The Friday workshops were ceased. I have lost so much of myself. The more bookwork, page work and blackboard work that I do, the less alive the stuents' seem; I can see a change. The light went out of their eyes. I was told I needed to control them rather than make teaching a joint venture. I became a teaching box - filling heads with information so they could pass the test. I want to work in an atmosphere of ease and acceptance, not constant anxiety. I want to work where teachers, all teachers, are appreciated, not just a few. I was Teacher of the Year, sponsored the educational fair, won first place in other competitions, and was nominated for teacher of excellence. But all that is gone now. I want out."

Individuals deal differently with abuse and some in their terror, learn to become soldiers for the principal, to maintain the security of being in the clique. If this means reporting a colleague, these people think in terms of better you than I Gradually, this deteriorates into an angry atmosphere where no one knows who to trust, and colleagues take on the same abusive behavior modeled by their superiors. Teachers can become so nasty to one another and to their students that adminsistrators can hold them up as examples of why they have to be tough and oppresive with teachers. They are able to develop a justification for the position that teachers are the problem, leaving themselves off the hook. In reality, they created teachers with anger, and then passed the blame on them rather than on themselves for being the perpetraters of an all around abusive school. Thus, the intimidation reverses, and becomes so convoluted that even the players can't figure out why there is so much cruelty. They just know that there is. The entire school takes on a negative tone, and in the end, there is a lot of hate, and a lot of bullying, but the administrators accept no blame for inciting all of this. And the picture of what a teacher is becomes that much worse to the world.

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