Robert and Amanda’s presentation on personal freedom for teachers (and good ways to ensure you get fired from your job) was eye-opening and, at times, troubling. Liz and I spent several minutes after class discussing how ridiculous the case of the “drunken” pirate teacher seemed to be and what exactly the limits would be in a case like that. What if, for instance, I was photographed in a supermarket looking at a beer display? Would that be grounds for dismissal? The case for the pirate photograph seems wholly insubstantial, and yet, courts decided otherwise.
There are occasionally, however, very clear limits to what is permissible and what is not, and I found an article online after class that illustrates this pretty clearly. The story can be found here: http://news.aol.com/article/teacher-teen-student-found/356022.
In a nutshell, it’s another story of a teacher having an inappropriate relationship with a 15 year old student, and this time the teacher went the extra mile by kidnapping the boy and traveling to another state. This teacher had only been employed for five months, and it’s suggested that this case will result in a review of teacher education programs, which seems pretty reasonable, given the fact that several instances of teacher/student relationships have garnered media attention and I’m sure there are others out there that we never really hear about.
What I can never figure out with any of these cases is what exactly compels educators to cross this obvious moral line? I think we can all agree that having an intimate relationship with a 15 year old doesn’t exist in some murky, gray area of morality. It’s just wrong. And yet, it seems that, all too frequently, we see stories in the news about it. In this article, there’s even a photo gallery of “Teachers in Trouble,” so you can leisurely scroll through a who’s who of sexual offenders.
It seems like there would be a better method of psychiatric evaluation for prospective teachers that would help curb this sort of behavior. After all, if a woman who has been teaching for a mere five months starts a relationship with a student, this was obviously something she was particularly prone to. Even other students and the child’s parents had noticed the inappropriate nature of the relationship. The signs were obviously there!
Something else I found interesting was that, in the reader poll on the page, 34% of readers claimed to have been aware of an inappropriate relationship between a teacher and a student when they were in school. That number seems outrageously high to me, but then maybe it’s just an indicator that this is something we all need to be more consciously aware of.
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1 comment:
I'm glad you found the presentation eye-opening. It is rather sad how willing some teachers seem these days to cross moral lines. What makes it worse is that it gives teachers in general a bad name and, if things continue to get worse, could tarnish the profession altogether. That would be terrible, but I'm afraid that might be a line we should be worried about seeing crossed.
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