Schools are supposed to be safe environments — a place students go to learn, grow, and evolve outside of their nuclear families. There, they’ll presumably receive endless real-world integrations with people who look, think, and feel differently from them, and that is truly a blessing. It needs to be universally true across the board, however, that parents can trust teachers to treat their children respectfully, which in my opinion means not laying hands on kids at all. And that’s evidently not the case.
Some mothers in Russia got the shock of their lives when they received footage of their children being treated in a disturbing way by their own teacher. In the footage obtained by CCTV, a math teacher is shown taping students’ mouths shut and “lightly” hitting students over the head with a chair, We Got This Covered reported.
CCTV footage shows the moment a math teacher at the school in Artyom, Russia, was caught on camera taping the mouth of her students and then using a chair leg to hit a student — sparking outrage from parents
— Open News© (@OpenNewNews) November 18, 2025
Teacher claims she was “jokingly” punishing “tearaways” in her class pic.twitter.com/XVG3AG3Erc
According to the U.S. Sun, the teacher and headmaster at the unidentified school are downplaying the incident, saying it was a “joke” and she was just punishing the “tearaways” in her class. Parents however, were definitely not laughing.
Yekaterina Mizulina, head of Russia’s Safe Internet League and a member of the Kremlin’s Civic Chamber, reportedly posted the video, stating, “It is clear the schoolchildren may have been misbehaving and winding the teacher up. But such a reaction is beyond the pale.”
But Olga Romanova, a supposed “child advocate,” said the mother who posted the video is actually in the wrong too for exposing children online and violating the law on children’s personal data, and she wants to sue the mother who shared the video.
Authorities claim the “respected” math teacher is under investigation, although no charges have been officially made on record to date.
Even if she is “just joking,” if I were a parent of a student in that classroom, I would not feel safe with that person at the helm of my child’s education. Even on a base level, to young developing minds, roughhouse play in a professional environment sends a weird mixed signal. Even though Russia is certainly different than the US, I’d think acting this way in an office setting, for example, would be frowned on. And if you wouldn’t do it to adults, why would you do it to childen?
