Buckle up for this one.
The “Are jeans considered professional dress?” conversation is nothing new. While some schools allow teachers to wear jeans on Fridays, others allow them at all times. Some schools offer jeans passes to teachers as incentives, and many schools allow teachers to wear jeans if they pay a fee. It’s infantilizing and insulting if you ask me, but this article isn’t about what I think. It’s about the white-hot rage teacher Twitter is feeling right now in response to a tweet from yesterday.
Last night, Twitter user and English/Language Arts teacher @ObsessedTeach posted this update:
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Naturally, her post had teachers scanning the photo for what could possibly be deemed offensive in her outfit.
That’s right: @ObsessedTeach was doing a unit on the ’70s and wore bell bottoms along with her students. She was sent home for looking “unprofessional.”
Other responders took a more humorous approach:
Other Twitter users replied with great points highlighting the unfairness of her administrator’s decision to send her home.
Two things were clear in the Twitter responses: Teachers are mad, and they’re still having trouble wrapping their heads around this incident. There are so many layers to the absurdity here including sexist dress codes, double standards in the workplace, and a valid question of whether this school’s dress code would pass the diversity test.
But what I keep returning to is how this teacher’s students must have felt on a day that should have been celebratory. At the end of the day, a teacher who wore bell bottoms with her students to support her engaging curriculum wasn’t applauded—she wasn’t even gently reminded of her school’s dress code policy—she was essentially told, “It would be better for your students to miss instruction today than to have you remain in the classroom.”
Guess kids don’t come first at that school.
