PETER Wood spent 34 years writing report cards and dishing out feedback to his students while working as a high school teacher.
It wasn’t until he was close to retirement the former Melbourne maths teacher found out students had been having their say as well, only their comments were made anonymously and published online, and featured far more four-letter words.
“A vindictive homophobic racist bully who should never have been allowed to teach at such a prestigious college,” one of his (inaccurate) appraisals read.
“Scary! But I think he likes it that way,” said another.
“Funny guy, not sure about his teaching though.”
The comments were made on a US-based website where students and parents are encouraged to rate teachers and remark on their performance.
The nasty criticisms didn’t bother Mr Wood, although he could see they were clearly intended to offend. For other teachers featured on the Rate My Teacher website, he says they’ve been incredibly damaging.
“A teacher I spoke to recently has been feeling suicidal. Another feels that her career has been affected by people in middle management reading this site and talking about what’s said,” he told news.com.au.
“Others have come out in support since I started speaking out about this, but unfortunately they’ve had to do so anonymously because they’ve felt they’ve been disenfranchised at their schools. Apparently some schools look at what’s written on this site and take it quite seriously.”
After noticing comments about colleagues that were disparaging and defamatory, and more than likely posted by disgruntled parents or students having a laugh, Mr Wood decided something had to be done about it.
“What disgusted me the most about this site is that people are able to make these comments anonymously, and what’s published can be completely defamatory,” he said.
“So I signed up and eventually became a moderator so I could approve other comments, and remove anything that’s unfair. I basically wanted to remove nasty comments which is why a lot of people go on the site, so I wanted to undermine them from within.”
Mr Wood began trawling through the site’s comments, seeing fellow teachers very publicly labelled “perverts”, “sluts”, and far worse.
He says young female teachers were a favoured target of male students, with comments about their looks and speculation over promiscuity featuring heavily.
A selection of removed comments captured over a 24-hour period seen by news.com.au included accusations a deputy principal had “defecated in the school canteen”, a female teacher “resembled a horse”, and another “used to be nice and fat and jolly, but now she’s lost weight and is a skinny pretentious b****”.
Others we even less articulate, labelling one teacher a “wrinkly sack of poo”, and another a f***ing toss pot c***”.
Mr Wood said it was clear many of the comments could be disregarded as obvious trolling, but if a teacher’s name was Googled when going for a job at a school, and accusations of paedophilia came up, that might be more problematic.
Mr Wood has been moderating comments and encouraging his colleagues in the education system to do so as well for six months now, but since going public with his crusade in an interview with the Herald Sun this week, he’s found his privileges have been revoked.
Mr Wood told news.com.au he had this week been banned from the site, but he said he would continue to encourage others to “destroy it from the inside”, and let teachers know not to take it seriously.
He says if one teacher in every school took three minutes a day to take down nasty comments about their colleagues, the site would soon collapse.
“These trolls basically want an audience. If I see something bad and I take it down, then it doesn’t get an audience. They can’t show their mates, ‘look what I wrote about Mr so-and-so’. So if that kept happening and all of this stuff was deleted, they’d give up. They’d go somewhere else to get their jollies,” he said.
“I’m not normally a crusader, but this to me is just disgusting and it has to go.”
The website, started in the US in 2006, claims to help students, parents and teachers “make informed decisions within education”.
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