Based on my experience, you and I are unlikely to have a productive conversation on the topic, so I won’t try.
Probably because that is covered by the state Code of Conduct meaning that you not only get fired, the state takes your credentials away.
No, it’s about your norms and your expectations. And that you think the rest of us should share those.
The part your quoted doesn’t. I bet there’s something about breaking the law in there. In fact, i bet there’s something about sexually molesting students in there, possibly by reference to the state licensing requirements or something like that.
Did she do anything wrong? But, here is the thing (and, I assume, why she disguised her identity): it doesn’t matter what she did as much as, when it comes to accusations/lawsuits/public scandals, school administrators are going to want to cut you loose no matter how much tenure you have. I would never assume the administration will go to bat for you to the least extent. Though, if it gets political, it can break the other way; the guy who wrote the Torture Memos (“intentional professional misconduct” according to the Justice Department) is still happily teaching and publishing under academic aegis.
Fucking your students or employees (for the sake of argument assume everybody involved is otherwise a consenting adult) is unethical, so these days I would be surprised if many places did not explicitly have it written down among the other examples of things not to do. Even if it is not written down, though, you will still be just as fired.
My expectations as a parent, yes.
I do think that teachers should be responsive to parents’ concerns, yes, including with regard to how their behaviours will be perceived and whether or not it’s wise to engage in them. As I said earlier, I’m fully sympathetic to teachers who likely aren’t being paid enough and may not even be getting a decent living wage, but that’s an entirely different problem. How about making money tutoring students who need extra help, teaching night classes, or otherwise leveraging your teaching skills instead of running a sleazy sex business? How about working with your union to lobby the school board for decent salaries?
You’re right, there is. It cites the Provincial Code of Conduct which includes the requirement to abide by all laws, and lists specific prohibitions on things like drugs, alcohol, weapons, causing injury to a person, and things of that nature. It still says nothing about legal relationships with students of the age of consent, or any other legal but morally questionable activities.
Here, for instance, is a story about a teacher (same area, different school board) who was fired simply for having engaged in an altercation at Starbucks (and also fired from her second job as a travel agent). To be fair, two years later a labour arbitrator ordered her reinstated; the arbitrator didn’t exonerate her but deemed the firing too harsh and that a suspension would be more appropriate discipline. And here’s a teacher who was fired for the bad decision to wear blackface for Halloween. Again, just based on the general principle of requiring high ethical standards, rather than anything specific in the code of conduct.
Right, that was my point.
I hope you appreciate that for LGBT people who existed before the change, we didn’t really sympathize with the position that it was socially acceptable to consider us unacceptable. It was, in fact, the school board’s JOB to make a safe place for us to exist and learn as children, and they did not do this. I hope you didn’t mean to imply that my existence, or that of Trans people, is considered an “edgy new trail,” even if our ability to be out in society at large IS new.
Now, uploading pornography is a behaviour, not an immutable identity, and that’s a pretty big difference (even if sex work is associated with LGBT people and women a lot more than with straight men, who tend to be the customers). I’m all for regulating behaviours of teachers while at work: people should not be dealing with their OnlyFans accounts at work.
One’s pornography can’t be a problem if nobody sees it. If people are seeing your pornography, perhaps they should admit that they are watching pornography. If pornography is bad, why are they watching it? Why are they bringing what is, after all, fiction and fantasy into their everyday lives?
Some of us are. Some of us are not. I guess I’ll grant your point, based on what happened to this teacher, that “society” isn’t there yet. Some of us are advocating a move in that direction. (See title of the OP.)
To @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness and other teachers here:
Imagine you’re a teacher who got caught on OnlyFans like the one in the OP. How would you address it with your students to get them past it? Let’s assume middle school to high school age.
“This topic isn’t appropriate for the classroom, and my personal life is not up for discussion. Now, about Nebuchadnezzar / long division / dangling participles / frog biology…”
So in the black face example mentioned that led to disciplinary action … would it get a bye if there were no Black students in their classes? And to be topical, calling for genocide of Jews if no Jewish students? But if there were some then the standard applies?
I would not give a pass in those cases, for two reasons. First, there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t have black students in the future. Second, it seems very likely that they would pass these attitudes along towards students, which is antithetical to what we need to be doing in public schools. We have a public interest in not raising a generation of anti-Semites and racists, in a way that we do not have in not raising a generation of sex workers.
To add to this: i think a lot of people are thinking about this in terms of what it would have been lile to find put, in 1975 or 1985 or 1995 that your teacher did porn, and imagining that no one would ever, ever be able to get past that. But 2023 is not 1985. Kids have so much more access these days: by high school, they’ve seen as many naked people as they want to. Yes, it would be scandelous, but nowhere near as intense as it was back in the day when Swimsuit Issues, underwear ads, and key moments in teenage sex romps were spank material because thats all that was available to anyone who didn’t have a Dad with a Playboy collection.
I’m not sure what I think here.
In both cases the presumption is that they are keeping it out of the classroom. If the teacher was passing on the value that sex work is good in the classroom that would be a problem. I care that they are teaching math or whatever and keeping their values about sex to themselves.
I (Jewish) would have viscerally wanted a neo Nazi to not be allowed to teach my child but if they subject was chemistry and they showed no bias in the classroom and stayed on the subject of chemistry? Hating on their own time? Dunno. Any comment in the school though and they are out.
Recognize that some parents quite a few feel very strongly that we do have a vested interest in not raising sex workers. It’s not a crazy value to have.
I know you’re not intentionally equating sex workers with Nazis, but that’s the implication: that the reasonable attitude “I don’t want our schools to condone Nazis” is similar to the attitude “I don’t want our schools to condone sex work.”
The more reasonable analogy is one I’ve addressed earlier: “I don’t want sex workers in our schools, because I don’t want our schools to condone sex work” is much, much closer to, “I don’t want gay (or unmarried sexually active) teachers in our schools, because I don’t want our schools to condone gay (or unmarried) sex.”
It’s fine, I suppose, to tell your own kids they shouldn’t have sex before marriage, or that they shouldn’t do sex work, because Jesus says not to or whatever. But destroying someone’s career over it? Oh hell no.
Both are legal activities that some specific parents strongly disagree with believing that they represent abhorrent values.
Both are outside of the school. Neither impacts how they teach math … maybe literature or history?
I am not all sure that either is any parent’s or the school board’s business as long as no behavior related to it plays out in the school. But I find it hard to say that values others find abhorrent are too bad for them while values I care about should be enforced.
But being a bigot does. Like, theres significant evidence that even teachers who are unaware of their own biases have it impact their teaching. STEM teachers, for example, have been observed to ask girls fewer and less challenging questions. I’ve certainly witnessed many, many cases of implicit bias impacting how teachers interact wirh students. I’ve been inherent bias impacting how teachers interact with students.
I struggle to believe anyone who explicitly embraced a belief that some children were genetically inferior–less intelligent and more prone to criminality–could deliver instruction in a fair and equitable manner.
Beliefs about sex seem entirely irrelevant to bias against specific students.
Heck, there was a case of explicit bias in my high school. The physics teacher was a very conservative man. And when a very bright girl told him that she wanted to be a physicist, he started picking on her and her grades dropped. He told people that he didn’t want to encourage her to take a job away from a man.
Wow. How recent was that?
In the late 1970s
Well, clearly, as long as that attitude isn’t so far off from the mainstream of societal norms, functions, standards, and expectations we must allow such opinions to stand unchallenged.
/s