I got fired for inspiring pupils to read

Dedicated teacher Leonora Rustamova wrote a book to engage five teenage rebels in her class. But after it went up on a website she was dismissed, a decision that was upheld at a tribunal For the five teenage “unteachables” in the class, sitting still was a challenge, never mind reading. But when their teacher, Leonora Rustamova , began to write her own stories, based on them and a fictional account of their lives, they were gripped. She wrote what quickly became a book in her own time, at weekends and on holidays, and promised to read them a chapter every Friday afternoon if they got through a week without any of them being excluded. The work “Miss Rusty” was doing to engage troubled and school-phobic 16-year-olds first gained her a promotion. Then dismissal. After 11 years as a teacher at Calder high school in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, Rustamova was sacked when the book was made available on the internet, a decision upheld by an industrial tribunal in Leeds that threw out her claim for unfair dismissal by a majority decision of two to one. “It was baffling, utterly baffling. I still feel as though I am in some kind of dual reality,” she told the Observer . As a leaving present for her pupils, and with the approval of the headteacher, Rustamova, 40, had several copies of the book, Stop! Don’t Read This! , printed, using an online publishing website. The boys and their families were delighted; one parent told her it was the first book her son had read to the end. “It boosted their self-esteem; it engaged them. We were having conversations and discussions,” said Rustamova. “For a group of boys like this, that was incredible. I thought it would be a lovely gesture to have it printed for when they left school.” The school’s headteacher, Stephen Ball, who had at first described the project as a “triumph”, wrote her a note after reading the first four chapters that stated: “You’ve done a superb job with this. Let me know if I can help.” He told her he was extremely pleased with the work she had done in interesting alienated and difficult teenagers in literacy. Rustamova’s husband, Denis, had used a publishing website to have the book electronically formatted and for several months Stop! Don’t Read This was freely available as a download. It was that availability that led Ball to call an unsuspecting Rustamova into his office in January 2008, formally suspend her and have her escorted from the building. “I had no idea about the internet website so I rang my husband to get him to get it taken down and I just sat in the car park staring at the school. In all the time I had been at the school no teacher had been suspended. I was just dazed,” she said. “I thought the headteacher would smooth it all over with whoever had made the complaint and things would be back to

Posted by on March 26, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.