“Almost all public school teachers have sex,” writes PZ Myers on Pharyngula. “Most of them enjoy it and do it repeatedly.”
Public school teachers may be Democrats, Republicans, perhaps Communists. They are atheists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Scientologists. Above all, they’re human.
All of your public school teachers go home at the end of the school day and have private lives, where they do things that really aren’t at all relevant to your 8 year old daughter, your 15 year old son. That you pay taxes to cover their salaries for doing their jobs during work hours does not entitle you to control the entirety of their lives.
“Local prudes” fired a teacher who’d been a sex worker years after she gave up the trade. Myers remembers his geometry teacher, who was fat, sweaty, odd — and a fantastic teacher.
Every year he rewarded the best of his students with an invitation to his house for a formal party, with snacks and Nehi soda. He was single and weird, but there was no worry about impropriety — there’d be a score of us there, who would all be treated politely as adults, which was mind-blowing right there. He’d play music for us: opera and show tunes.
. . . The people who didn’t care that he was a fantastic, enthusiastic math teacher who taught students self-respect and to love math only saw a strange man who didn’t fit in, who was odd, who fit certain stereotypes, and who obviously could not be trusted.
After a whisper campaign, he was fired. Myers is still mad about it.
