Middle School Teacher Sent Home For Wearing A Santa Shirt Deemed 'Dirty' By Other Teachers
The shirt has nothing remotely dirty on it, and other teachers said they would have just stayed home.
Roman Samborskyi / Shutterstock.com The hysteria that has ensued in certain parts of the country over discussing adult topics in schools seems like it might be reaching some absurd new heights in some places.
Like a middle school teacher in the South, for example, who got sent home because of what other teachers read into a totally innocent Christmas t-shirt she wore to school.
The teacher got dress-coded for a Santa shirt that other teachers decided was 'dirty.'
"He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake," this refrain about Santa Claus has been repeated millions of times during the holiday season. The concept of Saint Nick being all-seeing and basically surveilling children to determine whether they're worthy of Christmas presents is a central — and hilariously creepy — part of the whole Christmas thing when it comes to kids.
Heck, we even invented the Elf on a Shelf tradition as a way to enforce Santa's Big Brother-style spying with an in-home sleeper agent!
But when teacher April Barnes Deener recently wore a t-shirt referencing this well-trod trope to work in the lead-up to the holiday break at her middle school, it caused quite a stir and for the silliest reason possible.
Her fellow teachers read an adult connotation into the t-shirt that wasn't even there and she got reprimanded and sent home because of it.
"So I'm heading home during my first hour [planning period] to change my shirt," Deener said in her video, "because apparently, my shirt is dirty."
Deener then showed the shirt, which featured a picture of Santa Claus pointing at his eyes in the familiar gesture that indicates "I've got my eyes on you." Underneath the picture, the shirt read in all caps, "Watching."
The meaning is crystal clear, right? Santa, as the world's foremost intelligence officer, is watching the way Deener's students behave in school and will not hesitate to rescind their Christmas gifts if they give Ms. Deener a hard time! Right? There is no other possible interpretation of this shirt.
And yet!
"I teach middle school, and I teach with middle school teachers whose brains are like middle schoolers," Deener joked, "and they're like, 'Deener that's dirty, that is a dirty shirt.'"
It seems that her colleagues had interpreted the shirt to be using a familiar joking gesture for… how to put this delicately… eating out downtown, if you will, in which a person makes a V with their fingers, holds it up to their mouth, and sticks their tongue out.
Which would very much be a problematic shirt for a middle school teacher to be wearing if that were, in fact, what was happening on her shirt. But it's not!
And frankly, one wonders why on Earth Santa Claus would ever be depicted doing that on a shirt in the first place, but the fact a teacher got dress-coded and sent home over this is bad enough. Let's not further complicate this brain-meltingly ridiculous matter by asking such questions.
Anyway! Even when Deener explained that her colleagues were getting offended by a dirty gesture they were adding to the shirt themselves that had nothing to do with its actual meaning, they were still convinced it was "dirty" and Deener was commanded to go home and change her clothes.
Deener wasn't sure her students even saw her shirt in the first place.
Teaching is hard the whole year round, but any teacher will tell you that the weeks before the holidays and summer breaks are some of the most challenging. The kids are over it, all wound up and excited, and focusing on school is the last thing on their minds.
And who can blame them?! Be so for real — have you done any actual work the past week or so? Even grown adults can't be bothered. I've had to take three Christmas cookie breaks just to even get this paragraph written!
But for teachers, it's even worse. The education news site Education Week even took a poll of 2,400 teachers across the country about what the toughest part of the school year was. And while the pre-holiday break stretch didn't hold a candle to the Spring Fever that sets in among students anxious for the summer break, December also ranked high on many teachers lists.
Case in point: "I wish my students even paid enough attention to me to even see that I had a Santa Claus on my shirt," Deener joked in her video, "much less if he was actually doing something dirty with his fingers."
Ultimately, she laughed the whole thing off, though many of her fellow teachers on TikTok weren't feeling quite so light-hearted about it. "It would take me 7 1/2 hours to change," one wrote, while another was more direct: "If I get sent home, I’m not coming back."
Yeah, it might be time to lighten up a bit and let Santa himself do the policing of people's t-shirts. Teaching is hard enough without doing Santa's job for him!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.