The following link is to a news report in the Mainichi Daily News (22 July). The headline reads “English teacher used ‘hangman’-like game at school where student hung himself“.

I find the use of such a game after that sort of incident to be in very poor professional taste. However, there is another point that I find equally, if not more so, poorly professional: the reporting.

Most of the article is about the English teacher in Chiba who plays hangman (very poorly described, in my opinion by the writer) in classes, presumably to test spelling or vocabulary. The problem is that the student who committed suicide in 2008 actually sent a report to the school declaring “I had great conversations with people on a suicide website”, yet the school did nothing about that! So why does the reporter spend so much time on a teacher (who has been at the school since before the incident and thereafter) and not on the culpability of the school in failing to report this to the parents or a counselor or to take any other action? This wasn’t even mentioned in the article until more than halfway through. (more…)