Newspaper articles on the matter provide little information:

– the student, a young lady, 16 years old was alone in the classroom
– she got to choose a movie from a ‘long’ list of movies provided by the teacher, nowhere can you find the other options she had
– it’s suggested she had no idea what she was choosing (odd, 16 year olds are picky and look up everything on their smartphones and are not going to watch a movie based on the title of a movie alone…)
– she had her smartphone with her, because she filmed some of the scenes that shocked her
– she complained to her mum, then to the school management and the teacher was immediately fired

A long time ago I was a substitute teacher at several Belgian schools. Not exactly a career move I’d recommend to anyone.

So here were my own thoughts:

1. I don t find this news worthy, that’s on me, I shouldnt be checking the news, really, that s point 1.1, I know I allow irrelevant info in by checking the news out of running from discomfort, so that’s on me, but the point stands, why is this even in the news?

2. The lack of context bothers me, several things are missing, now everything automatically falls on the teacher. Why was she so ready to film the film? If she was so shocked, why did she have the coolness of mind to film key scenes? Why didnt she ask the film to be stopped? Or did she and does the article omit this? Why did she stay? Do Belgian schools teach kids to be TOO obedient, to the point that they watch horrid movies to the end against their will? What else do we make them do that they have no need for?

3. What were the other options on the list? Was this a list of cult movies? Or a list to ensure she would pick something with shock content? That does change the picture. We don’t know.

4. Why does he immediately get fired? Sounds like someone without tenure, without connections. A young teacher gave a list with his favorite movies? Why not talk to him, school him, why fire instantly? A knee jerk reaction to protect the school’s reputation and keep parents happy?

5. How can teachers do their job without agonizing over each decision if they can so easily lose their job AND have one decision land them in the media? They are more policed than the students now. Am definitely not for giving teachers a free pass on everything, I don t want them to be dictators like they were in the past, but why instantly fire him? if the girl doesnt act, he could go on for decades, maybe he is otherwise an enthousiastic teacher who means no harm. What is the legal age threshold for this movie in Belgium? is it also 17 like in the US? An internet search comes up with vague results. It could be 16 plus, it could be 18 plus. We don’t know why the movie was on the list or what the purpose was. Given that schools will scramble to protect their reputation without giving much attention to the specifics of such a case, we don’t know.

6. Probably – knowing schools rather intimately – way worse things happen at that school that continue, because as long as nobody creates a buzz management has no incentive to check or care or risk making something known that can fly under the radar. Teachers are tolerated as long as the school’s reputation is not touched.

7. Knowing Belgium I suspect the mother or parents of the daughter have some status, or this wouldnt have had such an impact. In Belgium and many other places the weight of your voice is determined by where you stand in the social pecking order.

8. Why not have a students court rule on this? Then they’ d actually participate in decision making in a way that forces them to think about a very concrete case close to home, but of course schools do not tolerate real power of students and parents hate it if their kids are treated as anything other than dough to be kneeded into unthinking salary scoring employees

9. Surely she must have known something before she picked? Is it possible she deliberately picked something she would be able to create a scene around? We simply do not know. If she did, it’s still on the teacher for giving her the ammunition to undo him/her. It’s not entirely clear if the teacher is a man or a woman, but I see people assume it’s a guy. Shock movie? Female student? Male teacher getting something out of this!

10. Where I agree is that the movie shouldn’t have been on the list. The movie involves sexually expicit scenes, a character eats dog poop, there is an ultimately fatal castration scene, incest, etc. The educational ‘yield’ can be filmsy at best. I havent seen the movie myself and don’t intend to watch it after having read what it involves. I suppose that if this movie were part of some university level course on movies you could use it to discus what the actual artistic value is of using shock on screen. The context here is different. One 16 year old girl in a highschool picking from a list we don’t know anything about. What is the media doing here other than reporting something with feeble sensation value. A teacher was fired! But no drive to fully explain the case or to even try to provide all relevant context.

11. In 2009 I showed Flesh and Blood with Rutger Hauer with a few brutal scenes involving rape, the plague and brain dramage from a sword cut, a still birth, the pillaging of a town, etc to large groups of 15 year olds. It was my very first job as a teacher and only my second real job. I wasn’t fired. But this was 2009, not 2026. They all wrote an essay about it. At the time the only things I found bad about me showing the movie was that I was so overwhelmed at the time – months earlier my father had committed suicide, I was discovering my master’s degree was fairly useless, I had financial strain with a girlfriend who didn’t earn one cent and a small paycheck myself, and generally I was still adjusting to work life, not university life – that I only skimmed a lot of the essays, something I would not do now I suppose. It’s also not an assignment I’d give teenagers today, for reasons I won’t go into now, but essentially because it doesn’t teach them much and robs them of their time, though today they’d let AI write it for them.

It was known I showed the movie obviously. I did not receive a direct complaint about it. Was I lucky? Were the times different? One of the kids was the son of a teacher at the school, so there could easily have been a row about the movie, but there wasn’t.

I do remember seeing a few students from back then in the tram much, much later and am sure I heard them say ‘that freak’, but I doubt that was about the movie, and I felt like they were from well off families and probably were more bothered by my Aalst accent and long hair at the time and poor clothes plus for them maybe odd enthusiasm. Maybe underneath everything they sensed a sadness I couldn’t fully hide. Also, other students much later once somehow spotted me in my tent at Pukkelpop and stopped by for a friendly chat I experienced as genuine.

Anyway, in 2009 I was reeling from multiple levels of grief, naive and still energetic and full on experimenting. I admit that this gives me some reflex of sympathy for the teacher involved here, especially since we get so little info.

12. I know full well that reactions to a simple news item like this always have a very personal aspect as you can see here too

13. Other layer: this makes everything in life exhausting for me, or no, not exhausting, but time consuming, cause i have layered reactions to everything. I would never share all this with someone in a face to face conversation, cause they can’t track all that am thinking, not because it’s complicated, but because it s a lot and not important enough.

14. I shared the news article with a teacher at a Belgian school and to my big surprise she asked if I was attacking her. She thought I was warning her, like: ‘look, this is what happens to unconventional teachers like you!’

15. And the deepest layer in my reaction: the case reminds me of how incompatible I am with institutions. Not because I would show Pink Flamingos to teenagers, or even to adults, I truly wouldn’t, I have had literally thousands of opportunities to do so, and the thought never even crossed my mind, the most ‘shocking’ movie I have shown in my career post-2009 is arguably The boy in the striped pyjamas, which barely shows anything explicit, but should shock any human being with a functioning nervous system. It could be a case of projection. I imagine that teacher showing the movie to introduce her to ‘what’s out there’, something unusual, something he admires for its daring or excentric nature, not because he wants to make her uncomfortable. I don’t know that. I can also imagine that some pervert intention was also at play. We don’t know. We weren’t there. Which brings me back to the first point: why do I check newspaper articles when I already know that newspapers utterly fail to explain anything and only report surface level doings that happen to have some easy emotional hook? So my irritation is mostly with myself: I went to an online space that exists to sell advertisement space. I went there to distract myself from what I know I should be doing instead. And all I did was trigger my mind into solving a puzzle it can’t have all the pieces of.

A tiny win for the advertisement space sellers (journalists).