Oh my goodness. A teacher appeared on the Howard Stern Show and won a "hottest wife and ugliest husband" competition. Pictures show her in a bikini--and she was fired for it.
Perhaps she should have worn a burkhini.
She could appear at the local swimming pool--or heck, walk down the street--wearing that attire and it's not immoral. So, how, exactly, is this immoral?
If the school wanted to push the issue of "taking a sick day", that would be fine, but they didn't. They said that the pictures themselves, which are not racy at all, violate the morality clause.
It's foolishness like this that causes me to state yet again: barring something that directly impacts the safety of kids, what teachers do on their own time is no one's business but their own.
3 comments:
You have got to be freakin' kidding!
I would agree with you that what a teacher does on his or her own time is that teachers business with this added caveat. A teacher needs to make sure that his or her actions are such that they don't undermine that teachers ability to teach. If a teacher does something which causes most of the students to lose respect for that teacher, even though it may not present a hazard to the students, there is a problem.
Having said that, the problem then becomes how to judge what might cause the students to lose respect for a given teacher. When I was in school we had a teacher whose strange actions outside of class caused the class to lose all respect for him and that class turned out to be wasted time. Looking back, that teacher needed psychiatric help, but a bunch of freshmen biology students didn't recognize that the teacher had mental problems. We laughed and said he was crazy, but we didn't understand that he actually was mentally impaired. Anyhow, his actions outside of class became something that would be brought up in class and the result was that he lost the respect of the students and was therefore unable to properly perform his job. Now I regret the way we students treated him, but we were young and didn't really know better.
In the case you bring up, I can see no reason for the school board to fire the teacher on the basis of those pictures and am left wondering what the board was thinking, or if they were thinking at all. Unless there is more to the story than presented, I think the school board made a big error in judgment.
By the way, the link you provided did not work for me and I had to hunt the story up through Google.
The link was to a FoxNews video of the story. That you can't see it might have something to do with how you've set security features on your computer. I've done everything I can with cookies, etc, and still can't watch CNN videos in Firefox (I can in IE) but I can see FoxNews and YahooNews videos.
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