Yet Another Teacher in Trouble Over Anti-Gay Remarks

[metta]

Teacher Jim Whitney Posts On Facebook: More Gay Kids Need To Kill Themselves

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mroCMjddhcc[/ame]

 

[pat grimshaw]

… More Gay Kids Need To Kill Themselves…

Is this a quote or just a journalist wanting to sell a story?

 

[SLOPPYSECONDS]

since parents< they adults< it wot hear
is in school wot a call countrys

mind speed up their graduation?
any over stuffed educate farts any country read this

if race tortise way ahead 50000 years ago
so call countrys male soaked cultures not even figure da start line

thankyou

 

[AlmondMilk]

Why was a student on his Facebook friend list? *scratches head*

It happens. My former high school guidance counselor is on Facebook and is friends with a lot of my classmates.

It's sad when children make these kind of comments on the internet. It's pathetic when an adult does that.

 

[blackbeltninja]

If a teacher posted homophobic comments insensitive to teen suicide on my Facebook page, I wouldn't have to trawl through anything, nor would I need any reason to discredit him other than that, would I? He should know better to post crap like that on the Internet for everyone to see.

Taxpayers pay him to help kids, not make them feel like shit.

Hopefully taxpayers are paying him to TEACH kids. That is all. When did Having a Job start meaning you were no longer allowed to express an opinion, even if that opinion showed you to be stupid and ignorant? As long as it's not impacting on his subject, I don't think it should be allowed to be an issue.

I had a brilliant teacher in high school who was amazing at teaching complex things like high-level mathematics and abstract technical drawing. He was also a horrible racist from the old skool .za when racism was not only allowed, but encouraged. We knew he was a racist, and occasionally some of his remarks made out of context (as in made in class, but during a random discussion we were having while working on an assignment, not while he was teaching), were pretty shocking to hear.

But it didn't impact on his ability to get us through the syllabus material and help us where we were going wrong and make sure we were not going to fail the class, and I'm glad I had him to teach me that stuff where someone else who was a non-racist might have done a shit job of getting us through the course. In his own way, just by being himself, he helped us see exactly why racism was so wrong - a silver lining to a very nasty cloud, that.

-d-

 

[pat grimshaw]

I'm assuming this situation would be similar for other teachers.

I know atheists who have to suppress their beliefs to teach in Catholic schools.

And I'm guessing your country would have staff who believe in Darwinism suppressing themselves in order to get employment in schools who believe in Creationism.

 

[pat grimshaw]

Why would an Atheist even look to have a job in a Catholic school? …

Um …to get money to pay the rent and/or mortgage and to buy food to feed themselves

 

[Ram]

You must understand. He is a Mathematics teacher. He is naturally evil.

 

[Asenath]

Posting on Facebook is not like writing a letter to your Great Aunt Emily. It's like standing up in a town hall meeting and telling everyone in your local area (and their out of town friends) exactly what kind of an idiot you are.

 

[Ninja108]

Anyone who puts their thoughts on facebook or myspace might as well as stand up aloud at their place of work and say them out loud.

 

[pat grimshaw]

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_...aims_He_Was_Hacked_Facebook_Comments_Not_His/

"...Josh Gonzalez, said the comments did seem out of character. Gonzalez says his former teacher also told him that his Facebook account had been hacked..."

 

[Asenath]

"I was hacked," is the oldest excuse in the book for someone who has just shown his ass (literally or metaphorically) on the internet.

 

[DigitalFudge]

Oh, so I can say whatever I want online and when I have to take responsibility for it all I have to say is "I was hacked"?


I am going to have some fun......

 

[pat grimshaw]

Josh Gonzalez, the accuser, said the comments seemed out of character.

 

[leomendez93]

No one's opinion has ever affected my self respect and happiness for my sexual orientation. I am glad for freedom. I wonder if the teacher made that comment as a teacher or as a citizen. Should he be punished for a citizen's freedom of expression?

 

[Asenath]

No one's opinion has ever affected my self respect and happiness for my sexual orientation. I am glad for freedom. I wonder if the teacher made that comment as a teacher or as a citizen. Should he be punished for a citizen's freedom of expression?

Teachers are, for better or worse, public figures. They are held to a higher standard of behavior in public and community spaces. Facebook is, by its nature, a public & community space.

 

[blackbeltninja]

You're missing my point. Said Atheist could get a job at a public school. So why would this Atheist choose a job at a Catholic School where they would teach things they don't believe in?

What if the pay was significantly better and the school was within walking distance, so the job in it's entirety was better?

Should a maths teacher need to believe in God to teach maths to students?

-d-

 

[Kulindahr]

^ Now that rang a bell.

When I was in the education program at OSU, we looked at a whole string of court cases concerning the whole in loco parentis deal. There was a really important one where the judge ruled -- and it was later upheld -- that teachers, as representatives of the school directly dealing with the students, must provide the minimum level of safety any parent might expect, or something like that. It was a beautiful distinction, on the one hand forbidding teachers to try to impose the values they might want to impart to their own kids, while at the same time acting to ensure that every student was as safe as the minimum the teacher would want for his own kids, since that was the standard it came down to on appeal, that the measure by which a teacher should judge that "minimum level of safety" would be by how safe she would want her kids to be. In other words, the court set a standard which was almost guaranteed to be above that minimum level of safety -- but never below it.


IIRC, the decision applied to the west end of the U.S., but effectively became the standard nationwide.


It's interesting, though, how the result of that standard has changed -- when I was in middle school, two guys caught fighting were hauled to the gym during lunch and given boxing gloves. The gym coach was good at keeping guys fighting until they got sick of fighting -- though a big piece of the punishment was missing lunch, which they won't let happen any more. Now, boxing without being trained isn't considered justifiable by the minimum level of safety.