I've been watching the first season of The Fosters.
Something really annoyed me in the third episode.
Timothy, the high school English teacher, (Jay Ali) assigns his students to write about their own personal guilt in their journals.
He assures them that the assignment is private and won't be read. So this is supposed to make them feel secure enough to write down their secret, guilty confessions.
Later (maybe the next day?) he looks at their notebooks to make sure they've done the assignment.
Okay, maybe he's not sitting there carefully reading, but if I write something private, I don't want someone glancing at my page for even a millisecond.
I'm fine with teachers encouraging journaling but don't request that students write something that personal!
How about just asking the students to write about guilt in general. Then it's up to them if they want to write about their own guilty feelings.
And....
The other thing that bothered me about the assignment is it's too easy for notebooks to be found, stolen, and read by the wrong people. Why is Timothy setting the students up for that risk? Does he not think about bullying?
My fears were not unfounded.
Callie (Maia Mitchell) doesn't do the assignment and gets in trouble with Timothy. Well. maybe not trouble, but she does get a lecture. (I can't remember if she got detention or anything like that)
She ends up finishing the assignment.
Then, sure enough, her foster brother's girlfriend (Madisen Beaty) finds the notebook, reads it, and slyly alludes to what Callie has written.
Thanks, Timothy. You asshole.
By the way....
Maia Mitchell is another Australian actress.
What's crazy is I used to force myself to write only about things if it was related to Australia in some way. So I could write about my annoyance at Timothy, BECAUSE Maia Mitchell was Australian. If she was not, I'd have to skip writing the post.
Now I stopped that rule, but in the last few posts about TV shows, the characters I've felt compelled to write about have been played by Aussies.
Something really annoyed me in the third episode.
Timothy, the high school English teacher, (Jay Ali) assigns his students to write about their own personal guilt in their journals.
He assures them that the assignment is private and won't be read. So this is supposed to make them feel secure enough to write down their secret, guilty confessions.
Later (maybe the next day?) he looks at their notebooks to make sure they've done the assignment.
Okay, maybe he's not sitting there carefully reading, but if I write something private, I don't want someone glancing at my page for even a millisecond.
I'm fine with teachers encouraging journaling but don't request that students write something that personal!
How about just asking the students to write about guilt in general. Then it's up to them if they want to write about their own guilty feelings.
And....
The other thing that bothered me about the assignment is it's too easy for notebooks to be found, stolen, and read by the wrong people. Why is Timothy setting the students up for that risk? Does he not think about bullying?
My fears were not unfounded.
Callie (Maia Mitchell) doesn't do the assignment and gets in trouble with Timothy. Well. maybe not trouble, but she does get a lecture. (I can't remember if she got detention or anything like that)
She ends up finishing the assignment.
Then, sure enough, her foster brother's girlfriend (Madisen Beaty) finds the notebook, reads it, and slyly alludes to what Callie has written.
Thanks, Timothy. You asshole.
By the way....
Maia Mitchell is another Australian actress.
What's crazy is I used to force myself to write only about things if it was related to Australia in some way. So I could write about my annoyance at Timothy, BECAUSE Maia Mitchell was Australian. If she was not, I'd have to skip writing the post.
Now I stopped that rule, but in the last few posts about TV shows, the characters I've felt compelled to write about have been played by Aussies.