For what reason should anyone take the teacher at her word? She’s become a center of media attention while the principal prefers to simply state that it’s a personal matter. Which side has more to gain by lying here?
Scroll up a bit. The teachers’ union has no knowledge of anyone being fired.
Perhaps not. But she isn’t in the union, as cited by O’Reilly, apparently in an onair interview.
http://www.command-post.org/oped/
That may make a difference, especially when teacher unions lean left:
As much as one-third of the tax-exempt National Education Association’s yearly $271 million income goes toward politically related activities, according to union documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
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Politically, the NEA leans heavily toward Democrats. A 2002 study by the Center for Responsive Politics found that since 1988 the NEA had given $21 million in campaign contributions, 95 percent of that to Democrats.
The union actively participated in the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election effort. In 1995-96, NEA political division director Mary Elizabeth Teasley and manager John Pacheco in Washington served as NEA representatives on the Democratic National Committee’s National Coordinated Campaign Steering Committee, known as “the national table.”
That committee held regular meetings to devise strategy to help Democratic congressional campaigns and the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign, according to an April 17, 1998, letter from DNC general counsel Joseph E. Sandler to the Federal Election Commission, which at the time was investigating coordinated political activities between unions and party campaign committees.
Miss Teasley was then being paid $113,264 annually from NEA’s general operating funds, and Mr. Pacheco was paid $96,375 annually.
http://www.childrenfirstamerica.org/DailyNews/03Apr/0407032.htm
I don’t know if she is just a troublemaker, or the administration made trouble. But the only supposed witness who is named said parents asked for Kerry’s picture to be placed up with Bush. And as for the student email?
>Regarding the reasons behind why middle school teacher Shiba Pillai-Diaz was dismissed from the Crossroads Middle School. Every day the administration of my school faces the staggering logistics of preparing a total of 2100 students for a high school which recently moved up to the rank of 49th statewide.
If that’s the way the kids in her middle school class typically write, there is no way they should fire her.
I would not say it is unilluminated of facts. I would say it is all inclusive of the facts. No particular story would appeal to me more than any other. I have no agenda hear.
I have experience with the behavior of middle school students, and their (often insane) parents. I’ve known and worked under several principals. Some a strong, effective and admired leader; others a self-involved, blind-to-everthing prude.
I also have experience interviewing suspects and crime scene witnesses during my internships after the police academy.
The facts as I believe them incorporate all the stories and spin and put them together to create a logical truth. The teacher did make comments. The parents did approach her and ask her to put up a picture of Kerry. And the principal did “fire” her. My story attempts to answer the “why” to all of those facts.
That’s because the principal CAN’T fire her. This does not mean she fully understood this fact. She is, after all, a new teacher. This also doesn’t mean it was not his intent to make her take her stuff and leave. Either he forgot and over-stepped his authority (some principals do think they are all powerful), or he lost control in the heat of the argument and told her to grab her stuff and leave.
After calming down, or after realizing he has no authority to fire her, he has to work fast to fix the problem. So he calls a union guy and makes doubly extra sure that it’s documented: He never said “fired”.
Ah, you mean the fundamentalist Republicans?
Ban evolution - it’s only a theory!
Didn’t ‘help the situation’, huh?
Perhaps she shouldn’t have used a megaphone every morning as students arrived: “Vote Bush, or terrorists will overrun the country!”
Of course. It’s the sole topic of conversation amongst students. Why they even know where you live, what you did last summer and your deepest desires.
Perhaps I can help you, because I’m a teacher (and a mind reader!). I’ll pop my comments in brackets…
-Ms. Pillai-Diaz is an opinionated Republican
(yes indeed)
-Her students never liked her to begin with.
(sounds right)
-Her students know she likes Bush. They know she was at the Convention.
(if only she hadn’t put up the picture. Or told them she was going to watch the only man who could keep America free)
-They ask her all the time about Bush. Why are you voting for him. My mom says she’s a murderer. He uses the Army to kill babies. He’s trying to make all black people slaves. . . yada y pues yada.
(ah, no. They actually asked if Bush had ducked military service. And what reason he had for invading Iraq. And why Rumsfeld had shaken hands with Saddam. And why so many jobs had been lost under Bush.)
-She does her best to tell the students to stay off the subject.
(at every opportunity, she peddles political propaganda)
-She even removes the elephant to try to prevent further uprising. Probably after a student commented on it and got loud and obnoxious.
(only after she realises that her political prejudices are showing, does she do something.)
-When the parents hear she won’t let their students talk about politics in class, that she is violating and suppressing their freedom of speech. This makes them even madder than the few times she let slip some politically biased statements.
(when the parents hear she is totally biased, they worry about her professionalism. Meanwhile she continues to act like a fool)
-She does her best to not stir up political debate in class, but when one can only take so much. At one point a student says something like “If I could vote, I would vote for Kerry because he isn’t trying to be Hitler”. She tries to brush it off, but she mumbles, “Well, I’m glad you’re not able to vote”. The student hears that and makes a huge deal out of it. The student tells his parents who make an even bigger deal about it.
(she does her best to indoctrinate the students, but is pretty useless at it. At one point a student asks if there is anything to be said for the Democrats. She bellows “Those child murdering, godless, communists are all in league with terrorists! They want to make you all homosexuals and they tell lies about God, who created the World 6,000 years ago!”
Alarmed, a student mentions this to their parents)
-Weeks go by. She is still being pestered by some students. Eventually, a similar comment is made. Again, it is blown into something huge and complaints are made.
(Having failed to introduce School Prayer and the Ten Commandments into School, she spends all lesson foaming at the mouth about Hell)
-The parents are really starting to hate her.
(the parents are really concerned about their children’s education)
-The parents (probably know each other), approach her at a parent’s night event and start yelling at her. Yelling, not discussing. They get in her face and demand that she put a Kerry poster on the bulletin board. She declines, so they tell the principal.
(the parents approach her nervously at a parent’s evening. She starts yelling abuse at them.)
-The Principal doesn’t really know Ms. Diaz. She’s a new teacher. All he knows is he’s been getting some complaints from these three parents. He calls her in and an argument insues. In the heat of it all, he tells her to grab her stuff and leave.
(having witnessed her behaviour at parent’s evening, the Principal calls her in. She walks out of the job before he can take any action.)
-Realizing that he doesn’t have the authority to fire a teacher, the principal gets a union guy involved. He doesn’t want to get in trouble for telling her to grab her stuff and leave. He needs to cover his ass and make sure the union knows he never tried to “fire” anyone. He’s very lucky, and very happy that he never used the word “fired”, so he makes sure to mention that. And he mentions it several times in front of the officer and the union guy to make it extra clear that he never used that specific term. That was a close one. He almost got in trouble for trying to fire a teacher.
(gosh, don’t you know anything about US employment law? :wally )
Well now you know the truth!
Do you know something the rest of us don’t? All we have is her saying, “[W]hat does it mean then when your boss asks you to hand over the keys and kicks you out of the building?”
Brutus, you are, without a doubt, the worst human being who posts on the SDMB. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are not fighting ignorance, you are inciting anger and division. I don’t know what motivates you, but I strongly suggest that you take a long, hard, look at yourself in the mirror, and consider whether your actions on the SDMB make the world a better place or not. I hesitate to speculate about what moral code guides you, but if it includes anything comparable to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, do you truly believe that you are living up to it?
(PS: it hardly seems worth responding to your putrescent little abortion of a snide remark, but I will do so anyhow, as hope springs eternal that at some point in your life, you will actually engage in a meaningful dialogue about something. If the situation was precisely as initially described, and three parents complained because Kerry’s picture had not been added to an apolitical montage of presidents, then, yes, that would be an idiotic thing to complain about. IF. And you know what could be deduced from that? That those three parents were idiots. Expanding that to cover all Kerry supporters (and surely you can come up with a nice insulting name for them… maybe something involving carrion?) is unsupporetd, dishonest and vile. And the sad thing is, I’m pretty sure that at some level you know that, which is why I questioned your motives in posting in the first place.)
Ditto.
glee,
All of your comments are equally as possible. Except this one:
No way. I don’t buy it for a second. If the students were that well informed, they wouldn’t be pestering her. She could even invite them to debate these issues after class or something. I think the students’ comments to her were both malicious and annoyingly without content. It’s a lot more frustrating when someone says “Bush likes Hitler” than when someone says, “Bush should never have invaded Iraq”.
I think the students did pester her. And I think it was the very nature and purpose of the pestering that drove her nuts. She probably could have handled questions about job loss.
I’m not trying to jump on her campaign or anything. I hope that, at least, that’s clear. I am not on any side. I couldn’t care less about the outcome of this situation. I’m not stuck to my opinion about how this all unfolded. I was just sharing a possibility. I don’t know how anyone could really have a definite side with all the conflicting testimony.
I can’t “debate” your comments, because that’s just how the story feels to you. But it does seem to paint the teacher in an extremely evil light. Almost storybook.
My scenario spreads the blame across all parties involved. Which is actually closer to reality.
But I WILL stick by what I said about the principal. He absolutely had a chance to end this before it started. He could have done a better job of alleviating the probelm.
It’s pretty telling when her own union backs away from here.
And the award for ‘Poster With the Most Skewed Sense of Perspective’ goes to…
Not at all. It’s not ‘her union’, it’s the ‘NEA’. About as solidly left as a union can be, and given the subject matter, I wouldn’t trust them to act as honest advocates on her behalf.
Ahh, typical Brutus. Respond snidely to the (probably hyperbolic) first sentence of a post, and ignore the substance (and, while that post may not have been a shining example of substantive communication, there was some) that follows.
I challenge you, in the sight of God and Cecil, to respond to that substance.
It depends. In some cases (my workplace for example), a non-member can request union help. The union can then step in as “the sole bargaining unit” and represents the person. However, that help has to be requested.
I don’t think so. People talk. As soon as word got out that this union was not acting honestly, members would leave in droves. The union, or at least the local, would die out. There is also the “other thing” about union people - being all too human, if there was a case, they would want to tweak “management’s nose” at least a little.
Substance? I was unaware of any substance in your post. If ‘Kerryites are stupid’ are whatever bothers you, you’ll need to get over that, right-quick. There are way too many incidents of ‘Bushies are x’ or 'Bushiviks are x at the SDMB for me to give a shit about your impassioned plea.
Nah. It’s already known that the NEA is solidly in the Democrat column, and the members, be they Republicans or whatever, are forced to support NEA pro-Dem campaigning efforts. The NEA does not care about appearing impartial, and I don’t doubt that sacrificing one little teacher is an ‘acceptable loss’ to them, to keep the party line going strong.
And yet, oddly, you were aware of it, as you “respond” to it immediately thereafter…
(a) so if they did it first, it’s OK for you to do it?
(b) cite? (And remember, for an example to be comparable, we need a situation in which there was a he-said she-said dispute about what actually happened, and in one version of the tale, a small number of pro-Bush private individuals did something stupid, and then a Kerry supporter dropped by the thread, and posted a post consisting of “Bushies are stupid” and nothing else.)
No, I responded to another one of your sadly ignorant blurbs. (Remember the ‘Moore-on’ bit you cried about a while back?) And there is a sunless place you can shove your convoluted ‘cite’ request.