Look who’s got herself in trouble and got suspended from her teaching job for writing a short story about “pupils’ sex fantasies, flirting and truancy”? It’s not Natasha Gray. It’s Leonora Rustamova. What makes her short story controversial? Well, she used the real names of her students. The Daily Mail reports on why Leonora is in trouble:
The story – Stop! Don’t Read This! – appeared on a self-publishing website. Although it is claimed to be all invention, it features five genuine teenage pupils at Calder High School in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire.
It contains swearwords, has children skipping lessons, refers to a pupil flirting with a teacher and compares two youngsters to ‘gorgeous Mr Gay UK finalists’. The story names several teachers, including real headmaster Stephen Ball, and features pupils missing lessons, stealing phones and setting themselves on fire.
One pupil is described as fantasising and flirting with 39-year-old Miss Rustamova, while she says she would do anything for a smile from another. She writes: ‘It’s getting harder and harder to see them just as kids.’
Later she describes in the novel how the youngsters practise ‘orgasmic moans’, which sound like ‘the soundtrack to teenage g*y p**n’.
Yaiks. What was she thinking? We’re all for encouraging students to read and we’re all for writing fiction and that kind of stuff but did she really have to use the names of her pupils?
Hello,
I am bored of the coverage of this story, so I will keep it brief ok.
I was a student at the time of Miss Rustys Suspension and would like to firstly mention that once the school suspended Miss Rusty, the school lost all of my coursework. Therefore causing me to repeat almost half of my coursework again. The school also told us she was in Russia due to a bereavement which was fictitious.
This was a group of boys who had been predicted Fs, they were expelled nearly every week and were known to all staff on their first day, even before meeting the so called troublemakers. The boys were grouped together and put in one class, then the Headmaster asked Miss Rusty to teach them. She tried every single avenue, until the boys came up with this idea of a book about them. Each lesson they wrote a bit of the book as a team and as they went along they learnt about grammar punctuation and most of all storytelling.
The headmaster approved the book and actually was the one who thought of giving them a book each. This costs lots of money and Miss Rusty’s husband in Russia did all the publishing, both thought that the book could only be bought through password protection. The boys wouldn’t relate to other names, the story suited them. As soon as Miss Rusty found out it was there and open she got rid of it instantaneously. These boys from this book remember were predicted Fs and nearly all of them got a C, if that isn’t brilliant teaching then I don’t know what is. I thought the idea of school was to help the children reach their potential and teachers were their to do that, so why in this case has a teacher been sacked I ask?