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Tucson Teacher Fired, You'll never guess who
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this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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They shouldn't have to be public role models though. A teacher shouldn't be held to a different moral standard from any other adult. What the teacher does in their time off is their own business.
As a teacher I disagree. I'm a public servant specialized in dealing with kids. I'm supposed to be held to very high standards. What those standards are is up to the community itself. Refusal to engage with the expectations of said community is just ceding ground to my political enemies, who most likely just want to destroy education as a public service in the first place.
Teachers will always be expected to be role models for children. There will of course be conflict on what those standards should be - which is why we need to be politically competent.
There are ghouls out there. They'll say teachers shouldn't be LGBT. They'll push for all sorts of things. But if your opening salvo is that teachers don't have to be role models for children, and in fact can do whatever they want in their free time then you'll be ceding the ground to the ghouls. There's no two ways about it.
As such, if your priority is to defend my right to have an Only Fans, all I can say is 'no thank you'. I'm not american but I suspect that the issue we have in the public school I teach - kids don't have food at home and sometimes there's no food in school either - is a marginally Bigger Deal than whatever liberation you seem to think I need.
Well they should choose a different job or if they can't, accept the consequences, because that is what that job is by its nature. Just like a parent is a role model for their children - children are very impressionable, not very wise, and one fundamental, 'innate' type of learning is observational/copying. They aren't 'any other adult' they work with children and teach them.
What they do in their time off is their own business, but what they do in public is the public's business.
The job, by its nature, is to teach. That is what they do. You are deciding it suddenly has to include to be some Avatar of public good - although a very strange avatar with a prudish cutoff for what is acceptable.
Of course parents will always be concerned with what kind of person a teacher is, and what they do, just as people are concerned about the same with politicians (also role models). It'd be negligent of them not to be. I'm not deciding that, its just is how things are, how society functions. If a person doesn't want to or isn't able to uphold the public good, they can't be a public authority figure or role model - or they can if they can get away with it, but it will always attract criticism.
You are deciding which of the concerns are valid and should result in a firing. You are deciding things. This is you once again trying to reframe the discussion. Do better.
Again, a teacher is a teacher is a teacher. You're deciding to put all sorts of other stuff on top of it in order to shield the fact that you find sex work reprehensible to your puritanical morals.
Well its not me deciding, it was the employer - the school. I'm not reframing it, as I said at the beginning, I don't believe the majority of parents would be happy with a pornographer teacher.
We aren't just our jobs - we're also how we interact and what we do outside of our jobs, and you can't really separate the two. In fact, when it comes to children, its dangerous to do so. Some jobs this is especially true for - which is why there are so many (often insufficient) regulations and checks for teachers, compared to other jobs. If a person can't accept that extra responsibility, they shouldn't be a teacher.
I'm not sure that just accepting "majority parents" opinion and instantly firing them is the way forward here. I also feel like I know many women who have done sex work who are now in teaching or care positions who I don't think deserve to be fired for it.
Multiple people in this thread have said they'd rather not have a fascist or military teaching their kids, so it's not about whether the outside life doesn't matter. Rather, I feel like it's whether this case of outside life matters and if it's a problem with that pair of vocations or whether it is a wider problem with society. If the parents are wrong, change the parents. If the highschool boys are wrong, change the highschool boys.
But obviously the people in this thread do not have the power to change parents, all highschool boys, or reverse the firing. We're talking about a hypothetical where if we had the power to do any of these things, which should we do?
This also sidesteps some of the functional stuff and some stuff specific to the OP case. The teacher in question is an unbelievably messy person that I could wholly believe administration wanted to fire anyway. How would one go about changing the opinion of all parents about what are appropriate secondary jobs for teachers? If you could change that and the highschool boys, would that be fine or should the teacher still be fired? Does it matter if the sex work is current or not?
I know that a therapeutic relationship between a psychologist and a client could be harmed if they ran into each other at, say, a local kink event. I don't care, but I'm not every patient. But then a psychologist is relatively highly paid and often more secure than teachers are. A single patient leaving a psychologist has wildly different stakes to a teacher getting fired.
Are we assuming a sex workers are more likely to abuse the kids? Or that kids will see sex work as aspirational? Or that the lack of respect for sex workers will damage the ability of the teacher to teach? Or that upon hearing "sex worker" kids will seek out porn out of curiosity?
We joke about it, but this forum is partly about critique of society and how we would change it if we could.
Idk why I'm wading into this, my notifications aren't working
This is catholic school morality clause shit
catholic, puritan, I think any denomination or any religious or philosophical or constitutional/legal framework worldwide would have a problem with it, barring niche cults and communities.
I suppose you have to ask, if most people would have an issue with it, is it that its simply that they're all wrong, or is there a reason for that kind of social teaching and practice? I think in this case there is, because of the risks involved, and because of the special status of children.
You know what else your arguments remind me of? (Also, sorry to respond to you twice in two different comment threads, I know that's kind of rude, but I already responded the other place and I have another thought from reading this comment. So, sorry.)
Your arguments remind me of people who think my sister shouldn't be teaching because she's visibly trans. She's very openly, publically trans and let me tell you, quite a few parents have an issue with that. These parents think that since my sister is a "role model" for their "very impressionable, not very wise" children whose learning style is "observational/copying", the kids will be influenced by her visible, open transness and become trans themselves.
This is, of course, nonsense, but if we simply listen to parents and remove people those parents have issues with, then we end up in a place where trans people are barred from being teachers because of their transness, and that's just bigotry, pure and simple.
I want to be very clear here, I don't have any reason to think you'd agree with the transphobic parents wanting my sister barred from teaching. But I do think your arguments for why an onlyfans model shouldn't teach are exactly the same as the arguments transphobic parents make about trans teachers. Identical.
No problem
It might well remind you of that, but being visibly trans isn't sexualised content being shown to children. I'm not surprised the arguments seem similar - its why right wingers use those lines, because it resonates with people, and if you conflate sexualised content (that people fundamentally will have an issue with for the reasons I've given elsewhere) with simply being trans, you can persuade people that being trans is an issue.
And a teacher being an onlyfans model also isn't sexualized content being shown to children. It's ok, I think we're just going to have to disagree here on whether teachers should be fired for having an onlyfans. I gotta move on with my day, I hope you have a good one!
No, but it is sexualised, actually sexual, content being advertised by somebody who works with children, and that may be accesible to those children. That isn't the case with somebody who is visibly trans and teaching, unless for some reason they decided to become a pornographer.
thanks, and likewise
being visibly trans (especially transfem) is inherently seen as sexual by wide swaths of the population. there's no conflating to be done at this stage. we've been conflated. we have to live with that, and that means not accepting the premise that teachers deserve to get fired for this shit
you keep dancing around the issue, saying "oh we need to respect parents rights and their worries," and i just fundamentally don't think that's true. it reads as cowardly reactionary garbage. just admit you think sex work is gross
9 times out of 10 "parent's rights" just means the right to abuse and control your child. fuck parents rights
i agree i shouldn't have to live with that conflation! however we play the hands we're dealt, and the hand i happen to have been dealt is that a good chunk of this country thinks i am an inherently sexual being. and being a sex worker isn't really any different. both i and the sex worker are significantly less likely to be a danger to children than the child's parent, and there's no reason to prevent either of us from being teachers. if a parent can't explain to their child what being trans is and why it isn't a big deal that's on them. it's the same with sex work
maybe most parents genuinely want what's best for children! but if we're at the point where anyone who is or ever has been a sex worker should be banned from working in education because that'll make parents feel better, we need to start analyzing what that most means, and whether parents feelings matter more than the actual real world safety of their children. and let me tell you, i do not trust that parents are reasonable people who can be persuaded that they might be wrong about how they raise their children! obviously some are, but my experience is more often exactly the opposite
i cannot see why having a sex worker employed at a school would be a risk. sex workers aren't more likely to abuse or groom children than any other group of people. and when the risk is "parents would be unhappy" then we get into the point where that exact same logic gets used against queer people, or people of color, or any other marginalized group
and i cannot stress enough: CHILDREN ARE ALREADY GOING TO HAVE ACCESS TO PORN! A TEACHER BEING A SEX WORKER DOES NOT MAKE CHILDREN MORE LIKELY TO ACCESS SEXUAL MATERIAL! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT! the healthy way to deal with this is to simply talk to children about sex like it's a part of life (which it is) and not like it's some mysterious thing they aren't allowed to know about until they turn 18! i get that we can't trust parents to talk about this with their kids, i agree. if we can't trust parents to explain this to their kids why do we trust them to decide who teaches?
you agree there isn't a safeguarding issue with a trans teacher, but where we disagree is that you do believe there's a safeguarding issue with a teacher who is a sex worker on the side. why? a teacher who is a sex worker isn't going to expose children to any more porn than they'd already see. a teacher who is a sex worker is not any more likely to be a predator. parents can deal with their feelings on their own, without firing someone who hasn't done anything wrong*
*i mean in this specific case she'd done many things wrong but having an onlyfans wasn't one of them
Yes they absolutely should. If you're going to be in close contact with children as an authority figure then you need to be held to a higher moral standard.
How about this: