I Wish my math teachers were this cool. Can’t imagine why this guy did this. He must of known it would get him canned.
Its is a really funny poem. If Yahoo News is willing to print it. Then is it really that smutty? Bawdy yes. dirty nah… Every one of those students has already seen and read far, far worse on the Internet. Guaranteed.
Not exactly the same thing but a similar anecdote:
As a senior in high school, the Nun that taught english wanted to teach from a contemporary novel for the first semester. She chose The Godfather, by Mario Puzo. Obviously she did not read the novel before class started.
The first day, she started with the person in the left front seat to read aloud from the book. As you know, about page 15, we find that Santino Corleone has an enormous penis and a page or so later he his having wild sex with Lucy Mancini up against the door of a bedroom.
The student copies of the book had been paid or, but that was the last page that was read aloud in class.
I wonder what would happen today to my high school biology teacher who taught us “the four f’s of life” (feeding, fighting, filling out, and reproduction).
I looked at that snippet and thought “meh, what’s the fuss about?”
Then I looked at the whole thing in the article. Holy CRAP, WFT?
I can’t imagine what I would have thought if any teacher of mine had thought that sort of thing appropriate - probably ‘where’s the nearest cave I can crawl into?’
I wonder if he was leering at any student in particular when he recited it. Because, frankly, guy sounds like a complete perv.
We give our own kids exposure to a ton of stuff - yes they’ve heard worse. But we are also trying very hard to teach them to judge the appropriateness of the audience. Fart jokes are funny around your friends, they are not around your grandmother. This is completely inappropriate for a teacher in a classroom with a student audience.
There isn’t any way this is at all related to math class. You cannot make the case that in English class Puzo is appropriate even if it has sex in it. Or that Vonnegut makes appropriate social commentary reading for a Social Studies class.
And yeah, the whole piece - from a teacher to minors? That isn’t innuendo. It certainly doesn’t align with the abstinence only education Texas tends to favor (or even the “abstinence is best, but being human, here are ways to keep pregnancy and disease at bay” favored by liberals when teaching teens).
I’d be asking for his head as well, and I’m a liberal in Minnesota.
My HS English teacher (for several years) in the 90s would point out and explain the more subtle bawdy remarks in Shakespeare, etc. I heard she retired with honors recently.
The quoted portion isn’t bad, but the rest of the poem… yeah, probably not appropriate unless it’s somehow connected to the curriculum. I could give it a pass in a sex ed class or literature or something. But in math? It just seems like the teacher was trying too hard to get the attention of the students.
I wouldn’t fire a teacher over that, but there’d be some kind of disciplinary action. Even in Texas, this doesn’t seem bad enough to fire over.
Technically, the teacher is just resigning, but my guess is that he wasn’t exactly given a choice.
There is something seriously wrong in the head with a math teacher who decides to read:
to a class of 14 year old boys and girls as part of math class. Who thought that that was a good idea.
I would not feel comfortable as a parent having my son or daughter alone with him to ask for help during lunch period or after school, or in any position of power over my child. I’d be surprised if many parents felt otherwise.
No problem with real literature that includes some explicit sex seriously handled in English, even at 14. Even pointing out the dirty jokes in Shakespeare. Love me some Vonnegut and no issue with it being taught even with the pictures of an anus. This OTOH was inappropriate behavior that identifies the teacher as risk for other worse inappropriate actions and leaving him in position that such might happen would be a bad idea.
Can’t imagine why this guy did this. He must of known it would get him canned.