17 October 2023

Not allowed to teach kindergarten

A schoolteacher whose body, face and tongue are covered in tattoos and who has had the whites of his eyes surgically turned black said he was prevented from teaching at a French kindergarten after a parent complained he scared their child.

But the teacher, Sylvain Helaine, 35, still teaches children from the age of six up, and said that, after an initial shock when they see him for the first time, his pupils see past his appearance...

A spokesman for the local education authority said an agreement was reached with Helaine to move him away from teaching kindergarten. Pupils under six “could be frightened by his appearance”, the spokesman said.
Image cropped for size and brightened from the original at CNN.

15 comments:

  1. I kinda wonder what would make someone ineligible. Surgically implanted horns and tail? Some circuit boards in the side of the head? Another set of arms and legs? Glass eyes imitating a crocodile? Claws? I thought we were insane in the US.

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  2. Ew. I would not want him teaching my kids either.

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  3. Good. Anyone who actually has experience raising kids understands how ridiculously unprofessional this lunatic is.

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  4. The overwhelming majority of people who have harmed children have appeared "normal".
    Someone can't be judged to be a "lunatic" based on looks alone.

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  5. Do an image search on that teachers name to see more tattoo.

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  6. What if his tastes change and he wants clear kin ?
    Its not like a hair style is it, where you can alter it easily or grow it out.
    Methinks anyone without the foresight to see that fashions, and tastes, change, probably hasn't got more then 14 brain cells.
    Even simple brained me realised in my early teenage years, that permanent skin scarring with ink in a design of Tweety Bird may not be 'cool' when I turned 35.

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  7. "his pupils see past his appearance..." The double meaning there is verging on profound.

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  8. I am with the earlier Anonymous in that I would not want my kids (if they were still little) to walk into a class room and see this. Sorry, but to me he is either crazy or a freak or both. I am repulsed by him and I am certain he would terrify a lot of kids.

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  9. I'm not convinced by the naysayers. Learning to tolerate and accept someone who looks profoundly different from you is a very simple lesson in avoiding bigotry.

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    1. These people are basically saying they don't want burns victims or amputees teaching their children. I suspect they'd also not want teachers with ethnic scarring or body modification or probably even ethnic hairstyles or body markings.

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    2. If you're 16 maybe, but shoving this guy in front of toddlers is profoundly stupid.

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  10. Leaping to the conclusion that he's a threat to children, and that children should be allowed or even encouraged to be afraid of him, solely because of his appearance is profoundly stupid.
    As was already said above there are a lot of adults who've harmed children who look "normal". Learning not to judge people by their appearance is a good lesson that even some adults could learn.

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    1. Logic problem: Sometimes normal looking people harm children, ergo, no version of abnormal appearance can be harmful to children.

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    2. If you want to oversimplify it like that we should teach kids not to trust anyone. After all you can’t judge by appearances.

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  11. So what I've learned from the comments is, again, ideological outliers are extreme for a reason. My dad once rejected a management trainee applicant for having changed his name to "Led Zeppelin" - today he would be roundly cancelled for such a decision. Regardless of appearance, if he has taken the appropriate courses, secured the appropriate licensing/credentials, and passed whatever background check, then he should be granted the opportunity to pursue his chosen profession, so long as said profession has no requirements on physical description. If a child is scared, you deal with that child. If every child is scared, well, then you have a legitimate concern and possible reason to move the teacher to a different grade level. Personally, this dude would scare me the older I got, not the younger I got.

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