Rafael Tages Melo said

What do u mean Frank?
What does it have to do with the article?

Just a response to the article… It is a little surprising, that all…

While nothing I’m about to say is intended to defend or minimize this nut, I suspect the issue may not entirely be tenure. School districts are mirrors of the individual communities whose taxes support them. It looks like the area is heavily Fundamentalist/Evangelical, and it’s unfortunate but entirely possible this nut has been acting this nutty for years WITHOUT CHALLENGE simply because he’s a member of a Fundamentalist Christian majority. I feel deeply sorry for any gay kid or any kid from another faith (or avowed lack of faith) in that community–I imagine any such kids know a hell of a lot more about persecution than this nut and his nutty friends do. School administrators do not have to be located in nutty districts, to look the other way when students and teachers behave inappropriately, sometimes even criminally.

I get so sick and tired of reading stories like this about nuts, like this guy, who are an embarrassment to my faith.

Luke said,
June 21, 2008 at 2:48 am
You don’t really strike me as a friendly athiest.

Are you speaking in the context of this particular posting? What, in your opinion would be the friendly way for an atheist to respond to this story? Approve of it? Accept it as the teacher’s right to express himself? Say, “Oh ha ha, those fundamentalist-creationist Christians sure can come up with some clever ways to teach science, like burning crosses into kids’ arms with high voltage. I wish my science teacher had been so innovative. While I might be confused about biology I sure would understand electricity better.”

Luke, don’t just toss in your one-sentence opinion like a hand grenade and take off. Come back and we will have a friendly (read respectful while not necessarily approving) discussion about the issue.

I will be the first to agree that the way in which we treat teachers in this country is an abomination (yet again, we’re the laughing stock of the industrialized nations), and, if we were willing to pay them more, we’d attract people of a higher caliber. However, you won’t get me to agree that tenure is a good thing. No one other than teachers and judges has that kind of embedded job security.

For Cipher–please don’t jump on the “tenure” bandwagon–yes, there is tenure for teachers, but it allows for discipline for “just cause,” not just arbitrary reasons. My experience has always been that teachers are not disciplined due to either incompetence or laziness of administration. They have to spend some time documenting deficiencies in a teacher and won’t.

Steve, my experience has been that when an administrator doesn’t act in a case of incompetence, it’s because the school district is afraid of a lawful termination suit. When I was a boy (admittedly, some three to four decades ago), I had a few teachers who weren’t as disturbed as this fellow obviously is, but who still had problems and were poor teachers, in any case, and the school didn’t do a thing about them, because of tenure.

In fact, you’ve put me in mind of something I hadn’t thought of in years- when my younger sister was in middle school, she had a teacher who had always been highly unstable, and who had some sort of breakdown during the year my sister was in her class. She was “teaching” during the day, then spending the night in the psychiatric ward of our local community hospital. She terrorized the kids, but the school either couldn’t or wouldn’t remove her, because of tenure. It might have been due somewhat to sympathy on the part of the superintendent, but it certainly wasn’t due to lack of documentation.

And I didn’t grow up in the rural South or Midwest; I come from the suburbs of godless liberal Boston.