Music teacher Hsiao Hsia-ling (蕭曉玲) said she did not remember humiliating students, but even if she had, it would not have justified her dismissal from Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Junior High School.
Hsiao took the Taipei City Government to court in 2008, saying she had been wrongfully fired after a performance evaluation as an act of political retaliation by then-Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) administration, which she said was motivated by her opposition to the administration’s “one guideline, one curriculum” education policy.
Although the Supreme Administrative Court ruled in favor of the city in 2011, the Control Yuan issued a corrective measure against it in 2013, citing irregularities and procedural improprieties in the conduct of the city’s review board.
The Ministry of Education in January 2014 sent a letter to the Control Yuan to say that Hsiao had frequently referred to her students with “vulgar” expressions, such “tone deaf,” “lowlifes” and “jerks.”
Hsiao was back in the headlines last week, after Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Wednesday hired her to work at another city school, with compensation for nine years of back salary.
During a radio interview on Monday, Hsiao was asked whether she had ever called her former students “tone deaf” or “lowlifes.”
She said that she could not remember, adding that the matter was unrelated to her firing.
Raising her voice, she accused the show’s host of attacking her by asking if she had called a student “a piece of trash,” as her critics had alleged following her reinstatement.
She said she might have made the comment, but that even if she had, that did not mean she had displayed “immoral behavior that failed her position as a teacher,” which was the reason the school gave for dismissing her.
Hsiao said that she had consistently received an “A” in teacher evaluations before she filed a lawsuit in November 2007 against Hau over his “one guideline, one curriculum” policy. In the three months after her filing, she received a major demerit and then was fired, she said.
“No teachers have ever been treated the way I was treated,” she said, adding that between 2002 and 2010, Taipei fired just seven teachers, all of whom had been charged with sexual harassment or assault.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Chung Hsiao-ping (鍾小平) on Monday said that the Taipei Department of Education has withheld documents authorizing Hsiao’s reinstatement
Chung, who filed a charge of dereliction of duty against Ko over rehiring Hsiao, said that if Taipei Department of Education Deputy Commissioner Tseng Tsan-chin (曾燦金) issues the documents, he would sue Tseng as well.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods