I’m intrigued, disturbed, puzzled, and curious about this. Technically, the school district is being sued, but it’s over his alleged behavior. Of course, in the newspaper article, it doesn’t actually say what he’s supposed to have done, it just quotes the plaintiff saying she was victimized and wants to prevent it from happening to others.
I don’t know what to think. I took Latin with him for three years, and had no problems (and I was pretty cute way back then!), though the article mentions previous problems with him that go back to when I was in his class. He was certainly a character, and a little odd, but I never saw anything really inappropriate. The worst thing I can think of is when we learned the word “mensis,” and he said something like “and the girls know that means ‘month.’” At which I was just kind of :rolleyes: - it was very typical of his smart-assedness, not a sexual jibe per se. I worry this is a case of hypersensitive people blowing such things out of proportion.
At one Latin Day competition, I was playing Cleopatra, and we decided I would wrap a heavy blanket around me and he’d carry me into the judging room over his shoulder - it was a huge hit, and I won the competition. And nothing remotely untoward happened.
Mostly I remember a teacher who was unbelievably devoted to his job and the students, and was very entertaining and good at motivating people. Our Latin club dominated state competitions for years if not decades, due to his influence. I really hope there’s no basis for these allegations. The whole situation is surprisingly upsetting to me.
Back in high school (graduated in 94), my science teacher was a real favorite. Knew a ton about biology, both in general and specific to the locale. Had his own bus for field trips, ran several clubs, and filled his classroom with cool specimens and touch tanks. None of the girls that I was in the clubs with said anything at the time about any problems. It came out a few years later that he’d been having sex with certain of his students for years. He’d follow the same pattern: a girl with a bad family life would come to him with problems. He’s become her buddy, and in the end things would turn sexual. When it came out, everybody was pretty shocked - he was a joker, so there was a lot of “oh, it was probably just a joke that went bad,” but no, it wasn’t, unfortunatly.
This:
<i>Mostly I remember a teacher who was unbelievably devoted to his job and the students, and was very entertaining and good at motivating people. </i>
is exactly how I would have described him, until several other girls came forward and the whole thing blew open. Which is a long-winded way of saying, you just can’t ever tell.
My high school physics teacher was arrested for indecent exposure. The thing is, it wasn’t a surprise at all. When we were in high school, we caught him a few times coming out of an adult bookstore (the kind with booths). We teased him about it once or twice. Obviously, he can’t teach high school any more, which is a shame, because he was really intelligent and a very good teacher, and had a lot of non-masturbatory experince in the world. He’d attended Princeton in the 50s (pretty good place for physics, then) and had a doctorate, and had been mayor of Oswego at one time.
My old science teacher was once accused of inappropriate conduct by a female student. No one believed her: she was probably the only person in school who didn’t know he was tres gay!
One of the math teachers at my high school was arrested in Vermont for trying to kidnap and rape some unlucky kid. I always thought he was sketchy, although there were teachers that seemed far sketchier. He simply disappeared. No one ever heard what happened it him. He just went poof. Ah, Catholic high schools. Although the administration was ever so busy circling the wagons that year. It was the year the hugh sex scandle in Boston hit the fan and Cardinal Law resigned. My school was in the Archdiocese of Boston and an accused priest had taught there in the 1970s, I think. It was a bad time, image wise. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at the teachers meetings to hear the lectures that must have been doled out by the jerk of a headmaster to the mostly decent teachers. And the hear their remarks.
Man, I wish my Latin teacher had sexually harassed me. She was hot. I even fantasized about her saying really dirty things during sex in Latin. Veni, vedi, vici indeed!
A local high school principal went to prison for sexual contact with minors (copping feels while hugging female students basically). He was my grandmother’s Baptist preacher when I was a little kid. :eek:
One of the teachers at my high school got fired for having a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old female student, some years after I had graduated. Of all the possible teachers I could imagine a teenage girl going for - apparently, to the extent that a 16-year-old can consent emotionally if not legally, it was a consensual dating type situation - this was the last guy in the world I would have thought of.
A year or two later I saw him working at the mall.
I, and everybody else in my class, can only be thankful that my Latin teacher never did anything of this sort. She was a sweet little old lady, who was very very old – one class period (would have been in '99 or '00) she was fed up with my class’s behavior and was bawling us out, and said “When I was teaching Latin in the '50s, students didn’t act like this. It was around 1962 that they started to lose respect for their elders”.
OTOH, it seems at my high school we had a serious dearth of good-looking teachers, with most of them being middle-aged or older matrons, so to my knowledge we never had any instances of student-teacher fraternization.
Was this in the San Jose area, in California? Cause the exact same thing happened at my high school around that time. I graduated in 99 and this happened when I was a sophomore, right before winter break, so that would have been 1996.
I’m sure a few of you have heard about the girl in Florida being accused of sleeping with her 14 year old student? Debbie Lafave. I went to high school with her. Yeesh! She was always really popular (and a damn yuppie at that) nominated for prom queen and stuff. I bet she’d get some looks at a reunion now!
Another story involves my high school philosophy teacher. A few years ago I would run into him in this particular bar I frequented (to see a particular band, not for the meat-market factor). Anyway, he would offer to buy me drinks, attempt to flirt, advertised his recent divorce, etc… It was a little weird and creepy, cos in high school I really admired this guy. This guy had serious charisma as a public speaker and his classes were always my favorite. He was the most popular teacher at our high school. So to have him hitting on me was a little strange, and I didn’t quite know how to react.
I had a teacher who was fired for sexual harrassing a friend of mine. He had a long history of it which, by reputation, preceeded me by a very long time. Apparently the district never saw fit to act on it.
After he lost his job, he threatened to do much worse to my friend than just harrassment, and he also sued the school district and won a good deal of money. He is still out there (I spoke to him last week) and still probably dangerous.
Suffice to say, AerynSun, that while I hope the teacher you like didn’t do anything wrong, I’m not so quick to chalk up that sort of thing to a misunderstanding.
In one of my former lives (jobs) we were all surprised one morning to find that a co-worker had gotten arrested for child molestation. It’s always a shock when it’s someone you know, especially if there was no indication beforehand.
And he’d done volunteer work with kids, too. Scary.
