FORMER NORTH CAROLINA TEACHER BROWBEATS STUDENT FOR SUPPORTING McCAIN

Hope and change. This woman should not be teaching anywhere! No ifs, ands, or buts about it! And I won't even mention she sounds less intelligent than the student she is supposed to be teaching.

Teacher Diantha Harris browbeats McCain supporting student. The poor girl is obviously distressed over the teacher's line of questioning and belittling her choice of candidate in front of her school mates. Watch as she tells the girl, whose father is in the military, that he will be in the military for another 100 years.



Here is the story from the Citizen Times:

A former city schools teacher filmed in a Swedish documentary talking about politics in the classroom is drawing fire from bloggers for “belittling” a student who supported Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Diantha Harris of Fayetteville teaches fifth grade in Cumberland County.

She left Asheville in 2004. Bloggers on Thursday had identified her as an Asheville teacher and said she “willingly browbeat and belittle a student in class for her choice of a presidential candidate,” according to Tundra Tabloids, a blog about Islamic extemism.

Harris, in an interview today with the Asheville Citizen-Times, said that’s not true.

A crew from Sweden’s public broadcasting company STV visited her classroom in May for the documentary “From Bill to Barack.”

The film aired Monday on Finland’s Swedish language Channel Five.

The part with Harris made its way on to YouTube and quickly became fodder for bloggers on Thursday.

Harris on Thursday said she wasn’t advocating for one candidate over the other and that the footage of her lesson is heavily edited.

She said the film’s producers asked her to talk about politics that day and that she not only discussed the presidential race but all the races in North Carolina.

She said her comments of “Oh lord” and “Oh Jesus” were her way of engaging her students to spur discussion. She said the camera does not show her sticking her tongue out and throwing up her hands when one student said he supports Obama.

“I wasn’t necessarily pulling for one person or the other,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Fayetteville. “If I was pulling for just one person then I would have never said the other person’s name.”

She said her comment to the child whose father was in the military was not meant to change the child’s mind about supporting McCain.

At the end of the segment, Harris can be seen in her home wearing a Barack Obama button. She was also filmed at a May “informance” at the school, which is a cross between a performance and an information presentation, wearing an Obama button while talking to kids about voting.

“Now I can support whomever I want to support, as long as I don't browbeat another person for the candidate that they supported,” she said in the film. “Like I have some students that support John McCain, and when they told me that, I said ‘that's good' and I just moved on.”

Harris was a subject in the film because President George H.W. Bush visited her home in 1992 after an invitation from her then-husband, Roy Harris, who was serving on the Asheville city school board.

She had not seen the documentary or the blogs until she was contacted by the Citizen-Times on Thursday.