Jun 9, 2010

Last week a 31-year-old male teacher at one of Hooterville Unified's high schools was arrested for having sex with one of his students.  In the classroom.

The girls mother discovered lurid IMs on her computer and called the police.

The high school in question is located just down the road from the store and the kid who works in the store goes to the school.

On Tuesday, when the kid came into work, I asked him if he knew the arrestee?  His answer is very illuminating of the situation and sheds a light on how these things happen.

By "these things",  I mean how these predators pull this stuff off.

He said, "Yes, I know him very well.   He was not only my teacher, but a good friend, as well."

He went on to say that on the day of the arrest, the teacher had sent him a text message, something he did regularly.  The kid sees nothing wrong with having an out of school friendship with his teacher.  Kids often don't recognize boundaries.
 
During my brief teaching career, I never spoke to a student outside school hours unless it was done in the presence of a parent.

And now a story.

I worked one year as the in-house suspension teacher in a junior high.  Each morning my classroom was filled with the kids who had violated some school rule or another.  The violations were mostly things like fighting in school, swearing within the earshot ot a teacher or being distruptive above and beyond the norm for a middle schooler.

I had a lot of chronic offenders.  Kids who should have been tossed out on their behinds, but in our litigious world, the school was afraid to toss.

One kid that spent nearly every day with me was a Russian kid named, Sergei.  Sergei loved to fight because he said that he had to prove that he was the toughest 7th grader in the school.  He also enjoyes cussing...at me, mostly.

One morning the assistant principal stuck his head in the room and asked me to step into the hallway and to bring Sergei with me.

We were met by Sergei's mother, the biggest woman I have ever seen in person.  Maybe 6 foot five and probably 280 or 290.  Plus she looked really, really mad.

By way of greeting she asked, "Did you curse at Sergei?  He says you curse at him often."

I assured her that I did not, never had, wouldn't do it, but added that Sergei cursed at me pretty much nonstop.  Everyday, all day.

She turned to him and asked if he was lying?  To the kid's credit, he answered, "Well, maybe I exaggerated a little bit."

I want to tell you that she smacked him right then and there, but it has been years and I might misremember that part.  What I do know is that she assured me that Sergei's cursing would stop.  It didn't.










 

Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky.

6 comments:

Kurt said...

Been there.

Wanderer said...

been scared of a very large Russian Lady.

Reya Mellicker said...

Wow. What a story.

Barbara said...

Love the story of Sergei. I just read it to my son. Don't you wonder what ever became of that boy?

Perpetual Chocoholic said...

Oh Sergi! He probably turned out much like his mother.

Steve Reed said...

I think younger teachers, in particular, are not good at respecting boundaries with their students. One of Dave's band assistants was a young 20-something woman who routinely texted the students, occasionally even using profanity. Dave asked her to stop both sending text messages -- which he viewed as an inappropriate form of teacher/student communication -- and cursing, but she wouldn't, and eventually he fired her. She couldn't understand what she was doing wrong.