My brother is currently doing an apprenticeship which requires him to work at a company and go to a vocational school for two days a week. He’s still got a year and a half to go. It’s going well for him so far.
But the other day, some teacher that he didn’t know approached him while he went for a smoke in the dedicated smoking area outside of school bounds and started to talk down on him. The teacher complained about the ashes that fell on the ground, a situation most bizarre, especially given that all the other students in the group also were smoking and most likely ashed onto the street.
The teacher got more and more agitated over the course of the discussion, especially when faced with my calm brother who was perplexed at the situation at hand. My brother and some other student said that this teacher’s aggressive tone was not okay, to which the teacher explained that this isn’t aggression but rather “temper” which my brother should know about from “our women” (probably alluding to a temper that Southern women are said to be). My brother didn’t understand this remark.
The discussion ended with my brother being asked what class he is in, to which he replied with his class and his class teacher’s name. End of story. Not really.
Later, his class teacher entered the room, incredibly agitated, and shouted at my brother. I’m not saying “allegedly” here since my brother recorded the encounter on his phone and I heard how agitated and frankly aggressive that teacher was. My brother got insulted, belittled, shouted at. My brother was asked outside where he was told that he knows where he’s supposed to smoke and that he has to give his name when asked about it.
So, this first teacher apparently told his colleague that my brother smoked in a spot where smoking isn’t allowed and that my brother refused to state his name when prompted to do so. The sexist if not even racist remark, his aggressive tone, the unprompted and unprofessional discussion, and the fact that there were other students (who didn’t get punished) were omitted of course.
As a result, my brother was told to go home and that it count as unexcused absence from school – something that would get noted down on the certificate for that school year – even though he was scheduled to be absent (but excused) anyway due to a doctor’s appointment.
My brother was also being suspended from school for the week after. Two weeks later, they wrote a test on that specific week’s subjects that my brother was missing out on.
In the end, my brother was punished for “disrespectful conduct” and even got admonished (for the lack of the correct term) at his work place where his boss didn’t even listen to his side of the story.
The “social worker” at his school that he went to for help had a discussion with him and that first teacher and, of course, the teacher showed himself to not listen to others, to be commanding, to be aggressive, while also backtracking on the statement he allegedly made that others also witnessed. Meanwhile, my brother was calm and collected and didn’t want to insinuate that this teacher was racist or sexist or anything. He knew how to defend himself which the social worker commended but in the end, it was for naught. They sent another admonishment (again, lacking the correct term here) to him now for something he had to submit by the end of the week but they sent the thing before the deadline was over.
Shitty situation.
(In)Justice doesn’t matter
I told my brother that it’s a terrible situation to be in and that it truly sucks, to be frank, but that he most likely won’t be able to do anything.
There are a ton of shitty teachers like that out there and with the lack in manpower that currently exists in Germany, they cannot really afford to let go of the few teachers they have. As it stands, we don’t have enough teachers, so especially in vocational schools, teachers like that exist.
In fact, I’m aiming to become a teacher, and within our educational sciences lectures, all the “bad examples” of how not to be have are from vocational schools. One of those videos we saw was even from the very school that my brother attends, funnily enough.
What I’m trying to get at with this post, though, is that my brother has to attend that school in order to practice his job. He’s an apprentice and in order to complete the apprenticeship, he’s required to complete just another year and a half of that school. The fact that those two teachers obviously hate his guts makes this hard to do but he has to literally just endure it, lick their boots and be done with the school years.
But if you hear about this, you’d probably think “That’s such an odd thing to say! How preposterous! Those assholes shouldn’t get away with this, so how could you say something like that to your brother? Aren’t you on his side?” – but I am on his side and it’s precisely because of that, that I urged him to not discuss matters further with them since they obviously don’t listen to him.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re being treated unjustly or not. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the right or not. What matters is that you complete your apprenticeship and get that job. It’s just a year of enduring whatever they throw at you and you’ll be free. You can pursue whatever problem you have with them afterwards but persecution of these matters while he’s dependent on them is not impossible.
Injustice doesn’t matter when the system is crooked. Colleagues will cover for each other and in the end, it’s their point of view versus yours. If you were to persecute such matters while you’re attending that very same school, you’d at most get an apology… and even that is too much to ask. Nothing will come of it aside from them making your school life a hellscape. If things go awry, you’ll lose your place in said school and hence you won’t be able to complete your apprenticeship. The past few years of your life? Gone. Finding a new apprenticeship? Won’t be possible.
Corruption
This stance or point of view I have isn’t just based on some pessimistic world view but on experience. I’ve seen it countless times that our world, and these systems in particular, are incredibly corrupt.
During my school years, I got bullied, beaten up, and harassed daily. Teachers would make fun of me or look away when I was at the brunt of some bizarre joke. When I got held by two guys and beaten up by another, I was the one that got into trouble for “getting into a fight” even if that right there wasn’t much of a fight to begin with. When I defended myself against people that would physically assault me, I was the one that got suspended.
And the reason for that injustice wasn’t something as lofty and beautiful as racism or whatever… but money. It’s not that the system was unkind to me because my parents were from a different country but rather because the bullies’ parents donated money to the school and if their sons got punished in some way, they’d stop donating money to the school.
In rural areas, schools require donations from wealthy families to be able to get better utensils and the like. Schools don’t typically get funded enough, after all, to make meaningful changes. It was only due to such donations that our school was made more accessible for disabled people. Afterwards, the school would get a grant which didn’t even cover the costs of such expenditures.
It’s not that we were discriminated against because of our class, so it’s not classism. It’s just that because the system doesn’t work, my bullies could get away with stuff like that since their parents practically fund the school.
Similarly, my brothers once got beaten up by a bunch of upperclassmen and they simply kicked his hand. His hand was injured afterwards, not as much as my brothers, though. We had to pay the surgery though because that guy was a tennis player on a national level and his parents also donated a lot of money to the school. Again, money and fame dictate whether or not you’re the perpetrator or the victim. We couldn’t visit our distant relatives that year for summer due to said hospital bills we had to cover. Some teachers that wanted to say something about it that were witnesses apologized to us for not being able to speak up.
But it’s not just schools but also other institutions and places in society.
I struggled to find a new apartment for 18 months. I had more than a hundred applications sent in that time and went to over 80 appointments to look at the apartment. I got ignored completely during over thirty of those. My last-name is pretty Muslim-sounding, so I assume that’s part of it. A friend of mine found a new apartment within a month of looking. His last-name is very German-sounding. But of course, that’s just a coincidence. Clearly.
I’ve also heard of and seen cops covering for each other and treating others unjustly, making unlawful arrests or even destroying evidence. A friend of mine got detained at the police station for a whole night for no reason and wasn’t allowed to make any calls. Someone pissed in his shoes. When he made a formal complaint about that instance, there was apparently no evidence that he was ever detained at all. Fun.
One time, some cops stopped me and a friend and only demanded him to show his identification. In Germany, you have to have your ID with you at all times. My friend is black. I’m white, pale as a ghost in fact, and even with my full beard and dark hair, I didn’t get asked at all. So, I asked them why it is that he “randomly” go asked to show his identification and why I wasn’t required at all even though we clearly are part of the same group. They had no reason at all, so I got checked for my ID, too. Afterwards I was asked a lot of questions about that by them but I literally have a clean slate, so there’s nothing they could find. We got let go. My friend told me that that’s normal and that I shouldn’t get involved with the cops. I told him that when I see it, I don’t want to let it stand.
Standing up for one’s rights
Now, obviously, you cannot just endure every instance of abuse and terrible behaviour like that. You cannot just let them get away with it, I wanna say. There are places where you can issue formal complaints here in Germany, after all, but in the end, it often ends up going nowhere.
In my opinion, however, it’s not always possible to stand up for your rights, especially when you’re dependent on the person who is treating you unjustly. In my brother’s case, it’s probably a bad idea to issue a complaint about this situation and these teachers’ conduct since these teachers are the ones who grade his school work. If they wanted to, they could easily hand out suspensions until he’s unable to complete the school year due to him missing too often in his classes. Even if he’s able to complete the apprenticeship, he’ll have a certificate from his school that shows various remarks and suspensions in that case that will make it incredibly difficult for him to find a job.
At our school, we had teachers who were incredibly creepy… by which I mean “sexually harassing underage students” creepy. We issued a complaint about this behaviour to teachers and nothing came up about it since that specific teacher we complained about was essentially the employer of the teacher we complained to. So, we went a level higher to the folks that oversee and train all teachers. In the end, he was not allowed to be “friends” on Facebook with all these female students and they sent in an overseer of sorts into his classes where they didn’t see anything wrong.
Well, obviously, a teacher won’t comment on female students’ cleavage or make other sexual remarks about them while a higher-up is present. Duh.
Nothing comes of any of this stuff. He eventually got married to a former student of his who just graduated “when” they got together. Sure. It’s creepy as heck, especially when you consider the 45-year-old man dating the barely 18-year-old who he used to teach at school.
Nothing ever comes of persecuting it.
A guilty pleasure of mine is watching these police interaction videos on YouTube, like the ones on Audit the Audit’s channel. It’s a guilty pleasure because I just wanna see a dumb pig do something stupid and then get punished afterwards or something, essentially. But I’m also really interested in seeing how stupid American laws are. Anyway. There are countless examples of lawsuits just after violent and unjust police interactions being filed and a lot of them end up going somewhere, too, which is good. I think standing up to the pigs is important, obviously. It’s your rights, after all.
But it’s just not smart to complain and try to resist stupid situations like the one with my brother’s teachers if they’re the ones that will grade all of my brother’s papers. They’re the one that literally decide his future right now. It’s a ton of power that those teachers have in their hands, and those two just cover for each other so that they can feel even more powerful.
It’s the same as people anonymously sending dick pics to female-presenting people. It’s not that they want to hear “nice cock” or something along those lines. They just want to have that feeling of power of having violated someone’s boundaries and having executed some type of threat to them. They couldn’t do anything about this dick pic.
Power-move. Wow. Also illegal.
It’s “the same” as in those teachers are just power-hungry and the fact that they’re not grammar school or university lecturers but vocational school teachers must get to them. It’s not as prestigious as teaching at those other school types, and it doesn’t earn as much. On top of that, they have tons of disrespectful and frankly shitty students that don’t care at all about their school days… so when they see a student do his best and get good grades, they wanna crush him.
I’d be careful with insinuating that it’s some racism-thing… but it could play into that, too. After all, they didn’t go after the German students. They went specifically for my brother. And that one teacher said something iffy. When he corrected himself and said that he didn’t say anything about “our women” (as in my brother’s and mine and other people’s from the Balkans) having that sorta temper, he claimed that he instead said that “it’s not aggression but a temper that people attribute to women”… which is just sexist. Women had nothing to do with that situation. But again… irrelevant.
He probably just wanted to get a rise out of my brother which failed. It was not effective…
What I’m getting at here is that when you’re in a situation were you need something from someone, you often cannot find yourself able to stand up for what’s right or wrong. Justice becomes irrelevant in the wake of needing a job, needing money, having mouths to feed, not wanting to starve, worrying about your future, etc.
There are a ton of people out there who will ask why victims of alleged sexual abuse, assault and harassment didn’t come forward sooner… and to those people I say: “Sure, complain to your boss about your boss.”
Amidst the whole Blizzard thing a while ago, it came out that the HR guy was also problematic. Where do you complain to when the HR guy is the one that is harassing you or stealing your breast milk or whatever? Like, “why didn’t you come out with this sooner” is such a stupid statement to make.
When I was young, I got sexually harassed by my female drunkard of a boss frequently. She was in her 60s. Did I complain? Yeah… not at work, though, no. I’d vent in private but I wouldn’t do that at work. I needed the job, after all, and I was young. I was also constantly told by my coworkers that I’m terrible at my job and that nobody else would hire me with that lack of skill. Doesn’t help that I was new to that job and others worked there for a decade, so… yeah.
As such, I was in a situation where I couldn’t practically do anything about the misconduct at work. My brother also practically can’t do anything. He shouldn’t argue against it and he should just endure whatever happens now because it’s his future that is at stake. If it goes well, he’ll get an apology at most. They won’t retract any punishments. If it goes awry, he’ll have no future. I don’t know but in my head, it makes sense to not do anything at this moment when you’re depending on those teachers that give you your grades.
The power balance sucks. Pls nerf the system. Thanks k bye.
On a more serious note, ideally, our systems will get better over time and these harmful structures that enable power-hungry assholes to stomp all over us will be removed… but it will take ages, and especially in more rural areas, schools will take ages to adapt. Soon enough these teachers will retire and new generations will hopefully do it better. Similarly, more and more places are implementing elements that allow for such instances of harassment and power abuse to be reported… which also comes with its own challenges, of course, but I’ll talk about that another time.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
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