thebobmaster said:
Yes, I'm sure being beaten up by 20 of your peers, and getting 24 injuries as a result (meaning some kids attacked twice) wouldn't cause any mental scarring at all.
from the article:
"Twenty-four of those kids hit him and he said that most of them hit him twice," Amy Neely, the mother of 6-year-old Aiden, told KENS-TV. She did not specify what injuries her son may have received.
so no, not 24 injuries. and that's testimony from someone who wasn't there at the time and whose gotten her information from a bias source (the kid), and thats even if she is sticking strictly to what she's been told(since she herself is also a biased source liable to the same sort of exaggeration you just used). Pretty sure if i was telling mummy about getting hit at school i'd play it up a little too, especially if I was a six year old bully who got in trouble.
From her reaction you know for a fact that had the child actually received any injuries from this, she'd be parading them around as part of her efforts to 'stop the teacher from working in a classroom again'. The fact that no injuries are mentioned means that there were no marks left behind from the incident, also notice the article quotes the police report which would detail any injuries, but such quotation on the subject are absent. (they're a class of regular six year olds who were lined up to give the bully a hit, you know most of them would hardly have even touched him when they 'hit' him, unless texas 6 years olds are tougher/meaner/stronger than the six year olds I know/knew)
XD
Everyone should take the time to learn a bit about media bias, it's really a useful thing to know about... though bobmaster, maybe you don't need to seen as you already seem pretty aware of how to impart spin on details to have them misconstrued in a particular way XD
((if you're not interested in media bais then i guess you can stop reading, but i feel like brining it to the discussion for anyone else who sees my post, cause i find it interesting

))
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Even an article like this, which seems pretty straight forward at first glance(if you're unfamilar with the tricks they use) is full of media bais. I'm glad i actually learnt about this stuff cause they're doing some pretty blatant manipulation in the article (for example, look how one sided it is, look at the connotations behind the language used, and more importantly look at the selectivity [what is there and what isn't there, and how selective the quotes are. Like I mentioned above about the police report]).
You gotta be careful about that sort of stuff. Think realistically in your head how it may have reasonably played out, rather than an over-dramatised view and you'll be able to pick up on the manipulation a bit better. The teacher doesn't want to get fired more than anyone else would, so it's not like they'd purposely do something blatant enough to get to charged.
looking at the facts subjectively, my guess would be: bully got caught out, teacher decided a good way to teach them some empathy is to switch the situations around.
They got the class together and said 'now i want you to hit him like he hits you'.
kids went around, some did a sissy little brush(like some non-confrontational six year old would), so the teacher said 'no, hit him harder than that'. (at a guess thats probably where the 'kids hitting twice' bit came from, if there were indeed '24' as the mother claimed)
one of the kids decided to hit the bully on the upper back, which is when the other teacher stepped in and put an end to it.
While unprofessional and shouldn't have been done, you shouldn't get caught up in sensationalism. It's kinda scary watching how easily people are manipulated, and the escapist is relatively well educated and sensible(well, most of the time), so you can imagine how this stuff effects the general public on a daily basis.