“Get your ugly Indian face out of my face," a teacher is facing allegations of serious misconduct before the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal , The New Zealand Herald reported.
According to the charges presented to the tribunal, the teacher allegedly spoke about gangs, a family member being murdered, and made inappropriate comments about a student’s ethnicity and culture. She was also accused of threatening to give students a “hiding.”
One student from that school testified that the teacher was his relief teacher one morning in 2022. The boy, 11 years old at the time, said he had completed a maths worksheet and asked the teacher what he should do next. When told it was free time, he responded that normally, the class would do more work before being allowed free time.
In response, the teacher allegedly swore at him, saying, “Get your ugly Indian face out of my face.”
“I did not know what I did wrong,” Herald quoted.
“I was only telling her I was supposed to do more work.
The student further alleged that the teacher told another student she would shoot him with a gun if he didn’t stop misbehaving. He also claimed that she gave students soft drink cans from her car during class.
Additionally, the student stated that the teacher left the classroom multiple times, telling them to say she was in the bathroom if anyone asked about her whereabouts.
At the end of the school day, the student said he and several classmates decided to inform their parents about what had occurred.
In another school, the teacher is also alleged to have threatened students with violence, including chasing them with a gun, and discussed inappropriate topics like rape and violence in front of her class. Additionally, she is said to have made derogatory remarks about her students and colleagues.
The teacher, whose identity remains suppressed, is currently before the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal, facing these accusations for incidents at two separate schools.
A student testified before the tribunal in Palmerston North, describing how the teacher would often pace at the front of the classroom and rant for up to an hour.
In one instance, the student claimed she told them that if they didn’t behave or succeed at school, they would end up in "n***er gangs."
“There wasn’t really an inciting reason for the topic to arise, she would just talk and talk and talk, and eventually her talking would lead almost into her like talking points I guess,” said the student, who was 12 at the time when she taught at his school in 2021. “What she was saying felt like it was an assumption she was making that felt kind of crazy. It was strange to make such a blanket statement,” Herald quoted.
The student mentioned that while some classmates found the teacher’s remarks amusing and viewed her as friendly, opinions about her teaching style were sharply divided.
“To some, she was laid back and relaxed, allowing them to do as they pleased, but those students were usually the ones who didn’t take education seriously,” he explained.
“Others, however, felt that her approach was too unstructured,” the student added.
He also claimed the teacher told the class that their former teachers had left because they didn’t care about the students.
Although the woman wasn’t his regular teacher, the student felt he wasn’t learning anything from her and reported her behaviour to his parents, who subsequently filed a complaint with the principal.
A mother of another student at the school recalled her daughter returning home visibly upset in 2021, saying her teacher had been discussing topics like sexual abuse and rape in class.
“She was using words she shouldn’t be familiar with, she used the term incest and I was quite disturbed by that,” the woman said.
“She used words like rape and incest.”
In defence, the teacher’s lawyer, Daniel Vincent, stated that his client had mentioned rape in the context of the Māori land wars and colonisation during a lesson with Year 5 students.
The girl’s mother, however, said her daughter never mentioned anything about colonisation or the land wars as context for learning those words. Concerned, she emailed the school’s principal to raise the issue.
Another charge against the teacher involved her failure to disclose to one of the schools that she had conditions on her teaching registration and had previously voluntarily agreed not to teach.
The hearing is set to continue tomorrow.
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