Fired. |
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7.7% (13) |
Leave of absence. |
|
0.6% (1) |
Leave, then reassignment. |
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5.4% (9) |
Just reassignment. |
|
4.8% (8) |
Nothing -- handle it with the kids and parents. |
|
28.6% (48) |
Nothing at all -- let it die on its own. |
|
51.2% (86) |
Other |
|
1.2% (2) |
Poll: Middle School Teacher Fired Over Porn Appearance Pages PREV 1 2 3 4 NEXT | |
Fired. Teaching is a public profile profession. | |
I'd feel uncomfortable having my kid being teached by this person, which is probably what they thought the parents of the students were were thinking too. | |
Teachers are held to impeccable and impossible standards. For example, some of the teachers I know are scared to be seen shopping for alcohol or cigarettes in case they are spotted by one of their students. It is kind of ridiculous but is a symptom of an increasing child-centered society which tries to protect children from the "evils" of the world. Adults are becoming increasingly infantalized, hence asking for ID when you buy alcohol (usually by someone way younger than me). Teachers should be entitled to a private life but are not because of a group of parents who are unable to say "no". | |
This termination is a reflection of the society we live in. Sexual activity is dirty, wrong, and forbidden; therefore a person who is seen engaging in sexual activity is dirty and wrong, and should be prohibited from interacting with those who are not. Like it or not--and I don't, for one--this is not the work of some solitary bigot who managed to worm his way into power and is now exercising his prejudices on a public that doesn't support him. I am outraged at the injustice of Ms. Halas's termination, and I wish her nothing but the best in the future, but ultimately her case is only a symptom of an underlying disease. The problem is the society we live in, not the actions of the school board. | |
I think it's disgusting that someone who has not hurt anybody, or committed any crime, is losing their livelihood because some people are uncomfortable of something she did in the past. I watch porn, I'm sure the vast majority of people with access to internet watch porn too, including the parents, students, and board members involved in this incident. To punish someone for having done porn when they most likely enjoy it themselves is hypocritical. In principle, nothing should happen, this should be irrelevant to her working as a teacher now, in practice, I'm not sure, because apparently that teacher was surrounded by people with the mental maturity of an 8 year old on coke, at least towards human sexuality, and it wouldn't be fair for here to remain in such an environment. | |
Just curious, would the teacher have been fired if someone uploaded a sex tape that filmed with a loved one? | |
If she lied about it, then yeah, fire her | |
I'd have to say yes, at least by the boards reasoning. They said they fired her because it would be a distraction. A sex tape leaked by an angry ex boy friend or husband would be just as much of a distraction to the students.
Actually the point he is making is quite clear. You are ignoring the fact that they fired her because they believe it is a "distraction to the students". In the hypothetical situation, even if it was not actually the teacher herself but some else, if the students believed it was the teacher it would be every bit if not more distracting to the students. Now you mentioned that you believe there was other incidents with the teacher before because you do not believe they would fire her at just the wiff of some bad PR. You are giving way to much credit to the school board, actually the school system in general. The US school system has a bad habit of creating blind adhearance to Zero-Tolerence policies, its not hard to see them taking the same aproach to all possible PR problems. | |
What do you mean lied about it? One of the questions while interviewed for her position would have to have been; Q: Have you at any point in your life done porn? For it to be a lie. It's an omission. I wouldn't go into an interview for a job and say *OH BY THE WAY I DID PORN ONCE* or *BY THE WAY I WATCH PORN* either. Unless you mean she denied it after it was discovered. Which apparently wouldn't have made much difference if this article and the comments made by the official are anything to go by. | |
Was this in the US? Which state? Public or private? I'm assuming public, since they couldn't be fired. | |
Hi, I don't know if you've been reading the thread, or even the first post, or even have the reading comprehension skills to read this post, but here's the bit you may have missed: It was 6 years ago. She was in porn 6 years before she got fired for it; 3 years before she was even hired as a teacher. Beyond that, she did nothing that could be considered inappropriate. It's like if you do anything wrong in your life, you can't be a teacher. And THAT is ridiculous. It ignores one of the more valuable lessons that people can learn: you can improve yourself. You can go from featuring in low-end pornography to a "legitimate" teaching job, or any other profession. That's if you assume that going into porn and being sexually active is a bad thing (which I don't). If you don't make that prudish assumption, then what you have here is a case of a teacher being fired for literally no reason.
Why? Because she went into a field of work beforehand that you disagree with?
If they didn't get caught, it would not be a different situation. It would be entirely the same. | |
Heres someone who managed perfectly well to distract himself from the teachings of reading without having an ex-pornstar teacher. Mr. Judge, I rest my case. Pornstars do not distract youth, youth distracts youth. Or the internet, thats a great distraction too. | |
Yes, Baff being unable to actually read the thread (or even the first post) enough to get a clue what he's talking about is kind of a recurring trend. Add to that his utter disrespect for sources in other arguments and his irritating posting style, and you have a poster who, dare I say, acts like a powderkeg when confronted with people who have a low tolerance for trite crap. | |
I would have fired her as well. Teachers are held to a higher standard than the general population and so they should be. 1. The Redemption Argument There is no "redemption" or "it was six years ago" get-out-of-jail-free card in the UK education system like some of you are using to defend this woman. When you apply for any teaching position in the UK your entire adult background is checked to a far higher scrutiny than normal and it is a requirement that you have a relatively untarnished past to be be able to work with young people. (I assume it is a similar thing in the USA). She withheld crucial background information (she was peviously a porn actress) in order to enter the teaching profession. She lied during her application. 2. The reality of day to day teaching To teach a classroom of young people in a typical high school you have to have the professional respect of your students. You can get it in various ways: some are funny, some are strict, some are incredibly interesting, some are eccentrics in a nice way etc. The best teachers are all of these things and tailor the balance from class to class. And when you have that respect, you have to maintain it. If you don't have that respect then your ability to manage classes will be compromised. Being able to manage a classroom of thirty teenagers is the most important part of teaching btw. You could be one of the world's greatest minds on history or physics or maths, but if you cannot manage your classroom then it is all for naught and you are not fit to be a teacher. Oh, and you also need the respect of most parents. Some of you are being unrealistic in believing that an ex-porn actress will be able to earn and maintain a level of professional respect that is necessary to manage classrooms of teenagers. Now I think points one and two above are important. But if she tries to sue that school I think they will win on the grounds that she lied during her application process to get the job. If she had been a UK teacher there may have also been grounds for disqualifying her teaching license if she had similarly lied during her enrolment to teaching training and during her two year qualifying/probationary period. Regards Nightspore | |
Looks like the board ate my post.
I'd very much like to know the name and address of your school then. Because I've got a mountain of student loan debt piling up as I try to get my qualifications to teach, and six figures would easily pay it off. I'm a damn good ESL/EFL teacher and I can guarantee I've never appeared in porn. The sight of my blinding white belly has a tendency to burn out digital camera CMOS sensors. I mean, 6 figures sounds insanely good. In my last job I was earning 6 figures a month, but that was in a currency valued at approximately 1/100th of a US dollar. Even teaching English at oil companies in Saudi Arabia isn't reported to pay that much, and those positions are famous for generous tax-free compensation in exchange for living in a country where booze and regular contact with members of the opposite sex who aren't your family or spouse are not available. As for the former porn star, I don't think she should have been fired. But it doesn't surprise me that she was. While I don't think the argument that her having been a porn star will be a distraction is a valid reason to fire her, it's also quite absurd to suggest that it's a false argument. I guarantee it will be a distraction. I taught in JHS. Some of those students get distracted when a sufficiently large fly buzzes into the room. | |
Yeh, that six figures thing is mental lol. I think he must have meant 5 figures? Or is he one of those teacher haters with a warped sense of how much teachers actually make? A teacher in the UK makes about 32,000 pounds a year after six years. A wee bit more if they become a chartered teacher. I think head teachers usually make around 70,000-105,000 pounds. So yeh, some head teachers (principals) make six figures. But this is in the UK and from what I hear from American teachers I know, the pay system is state by state in the USA, and is slightly less uniform, but mostly similar to the UK. In some states, though, I hear that teachers get paid shit. Now, you can make about the same tax free in Saudi Arabia and they give you free accomodation etc. So yeah, dyre needs a reality check on his perception of teachers' salaries. Regards Nightspore | |
I think there's a degree of confusion flying around here, so to reiterate. 1) Porn is a Public Career Anyone getting involved in porn, or any kind of modelling, should know that images of them will probably be available to anyone. If they don't, then I would argue that someone has failed in their duty of care, but in the case of the porn industry that really wouldn't surprise me, because the porn industry barely acknowledges any duty of care. 2) Anti-porn stigma is not just sex-negativity. It's easy to turn this into a sex-positive crusade, but frankly, other than a few independent producers we don't have a porn industry which is worth feeling proud of. Being involved in that industry is not a good thing, it's not an expression of your natural right to do what you want with your body, it's someone paying you pittance to market your body to a mass audience because you (can be assumed to be) stupid enough to get sucked into that. It's not going to even be possible to see that as a respectable choice until it is made under respectable circumstances. Right now, working in porn, particularly as a woman since it's women who tend to receive the worse of the whole deal, just tells people you have no self respect. Perhaps that's unfair, but it's still a lot fairer than it should be. 3) Teaching is not special in this regard. See point 1 again. No legitimate business or profession wants to be associated with porn, noone wants to have an employee on the register who has been credited for porn or whose image is readily available to the public. If someone is willing to turn a blind eye, good for them, but we don't live in a world where such leniency is common. Having done porn is a liability no matter what profession you're in, and the more public-facing your job the worse it will be. A compassionate industry would make this very clear to people going in, but we don't have one of those. This is not to justify the school's decision. They could have behaved better and they should have. However, it's a complicated situation and they could have taken an awful lot of flack. It shouldn't be surprising that they chose the easier option, and it certainly shouldn't be surprising that the option they chose was easier than the alternative. | |
That makes no difference. What is done is done. Getting a FU tatoo on her forehead 6 years ago would equally have disbarred her. | |
Can't sya I'm surprised. A teacher is going to be held to a ridiculously high standard, that's one of many reasons why it's not a popular job. For that matter, doing porn is going to stigmatise you for the rest of your life, that's one of many reasons why it's not a popular job either. | |
Well, as a parent, I can say with certainty that it would bother me a bit having this information come to light, but if she was a good teacher, I wouldn't want her to lose her job. Especially possibly not being considered for future jobs, but in that case, that really falls more on her. Anything that gets out on the net is totally transparent, and these are things you have to pay attention to. I didn't read the link, but she probably has a good reason for a lawsuit. | |
Public, in NJ
Millburn High School, in NJ. Of course, at the time I graduated we were so poor we couldn't afford new textbooks, yet we were still installing new smartboards. Whoever manages our finances should be fired. I think even one of the veteran gym teachers got paid six figures (mind you, the first digit of the six figures is 1, so don't get your hopes too high. Mind you, you don't get a starting salary of six figures. They'll probably rip you off to save money to pay for the football team or something. However, you can supplement your salary with tutoring, for which people are willing to pay $100-$150/hr. | |
Mate, sounds fishy. What you "I think" and what actually was are two entirely different things. Do you have any actual evidence that ordinary classroom or gym teachers (not principal/head teachers) were being paid more than 100,000 dollars or 62000 pounds per year? Because I was a teacher in the UK and know teachers in the USA and those figures are totally fucking mental. I doubt you have your facts straight mate. I really do. But supposing you do. That is THE extreme of extreme exceptions and not normal. Regards Nightspore | |
I remember going through some website with some friends a few years ago and looking at the salaries of a few of my teachers, and a number of them were in the low to low/mid 100k range. Like, regular teachers, not department heads and vice principals. I think most of the veteran teachers got paid about 80k though, don't remember. I remember being quite surprised at the time because I assumed teachers got paid 50k or something. I guess the website could've been wrong. It wasn't a government salary site or anything, just one of those sites with lots of information but few sources. Though, I can guarantee that the tutoring for $100-150 /hr thing is true, at least for sophomore/junior level courses in the math and science departments. When my mom and I were looking for tutors for my younger brother, we tried five or six of them, all of whom charged in that range and all of whom had busy tutoring schedules. edit: anyway, my main complaint wasn't the salary part. I don't really care if teachers get paid 100k a year. The good ones certainly deserve it. But we had a load of shitty teachers who spent most of their time making fun of their students and giving them ridiculously hard tests. These guys clearly hated their jobs (or were sadistic, I guess), but they stuck around and never got fired. | |
If she never mentioned it to an employer(which is something she should have done given the job) then she should be fired. If the employer is just responding to public outcry, then no. | |
She did lie about it. She worked in paid employment as someone who fucks perfect strangers for cash to be filmed and then distributed to the public. In the UK at least, when you apply for a teaching job it is required that a full disclosure of one's adult working life be made transparent.
Aye, I sympathise with your edit though. There are some bad teachers and it has - in the past - been too difficult to either make them change or get rid of them. I am sorry you had loads of them in your experience. I think there have been changes, at least in the UK in recent years, that have made it easier to fire bad teachers and I do support this. Regards Nightspore | |
Then she should be fired, also good on the UK. | |
Oh goody. I'm SO glad to see we're still treating sex industry workers, and in this case former sex industry workers, like second-class citizens. Because they deserve it, evidently. I suppose it's easier for society to do that than to grow the fuck up. >.< | |
The teenagers in your classroom aren't grown up. Instead it is you who has to be the grown up. | |
Some jobs are just don't go off-duty. You know how doctor's can be off but still have to be sober and prepared with pager in case of emergency some nights? There are tons of people in that situation. I met a woman who was a project manager at an evironmental remediation site where there was toxic spillage and they had 24/7 pumping. Because she had to be ready to handle an emergency at any time, she was literally not allowed to drink anything or turn her phone off for 6 months straight. | |
Hmmm... this link suggest's you're exaggerating. The median and mean high school teacher salaries are in the $60K range - still quite generous IMHO, but only 60% of the 6 figures you propose. Only in the 90th percentile do teachers edge close to that 6 figure mark.
Is this an area where people are absurdly rich or something? Because while I am in a university town where a lot of students don't have a lot of money, I also teach English in a university town where there is a large population of students from Saudi Arabia getting their entire tuition funded by the Saudi government/royal family. And the best I can hope for is $30/hour. | |
A few years ago, a few friends and I found a different website that said otherwise (I remember at least a dozen regular, non department head, teachers being paid 6 figures), but it's possible my memory's off, the website was wrong, or possibly we were just looking at the top paid people at the time. I wasn't the one on the computer; I just looked over my friend's shoulder occasionally when he told me to look at "yet another overpaid teacher." Yeah, there's a fair amount of rich people in my town (look up Millburn on Urban Dictionary, lol) and especially in our sister town Short Hills (their kids go to the same high school) who are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for tutoring (and on really basic stuff like geometry). Hell, one or two of my classmates (when I was a senior) got paid $25/hr for SAT tutoring... | |
£20 an hour is top whack for that in Cambridge. If you take businessmen at the best paying school. That said, Cambridge is rather awash with teachers. Typically I get paid better the further away from it I travel. London for example not only has less competition in the marketplace for teachers, but it also has London weighting. Higher wages to reflect the higher cost of living/longer commute. | |
It is also worth noting that people with jobs when they are on-call also get paid extra for being on-call, in the case of medical doctors quite generously so. Being on-call occasionally because your work demands it is not the same thing as constantly being upheld to a rigid and high standard out of work because of your chosen line of work. Perhaps it is just me, but I find that whatever or not you've worked in the porn industry says very little about your ability to be a good teacher. As LetalisK said, it is sad to see that society still treat people who worked with porn as second rate citizens. It is a perfectly legal career and should not affect your future employments any more then being a sewage worker or model would. As a closing note, should middle school students really be watching porn in the first place? To me it seems like the responsibility of the parents to make sure children that young do not watch porn and if the children do not watch porn, they certainly won't know their teacher was once a porn actress (unless their parents tell them, but what parent would do that?). | |
I'm in this situation plenty often as a teacher. Now, that itself isn't what chaps me, though. What chaps me is that that exact child's parents aren't subject to the same scrutiny. I have a paper trail ten miles long attesting to me qualifications, capability, and character, such that I am allowed to interact with that child for just 50 minutes a day. The parent gets them infinitely more minutes, yet they don't have to provide one-thousandth of that proof. As long as the parent isn't blackening their eyes, starving them, keeping them out in the backyard, or sending them to school naked, there's not a single thing anyone can do to that parent. But let's say a teacher subscribed to Playboy, and they grabbed their mail on the way to work (and the stack happened to include that magazine), and a kid happened to see it on the passenger seat of that teacher's car and told someone? That teacher would, at the very least, receive a censure of some kind on their record -- and depending on the town, they might get fired. I honestly believe people are placing all of this scrutiny on teachers, well beyond what is necessary or reasonable, because they're unwilling to put it on parents. And the parents? They love having the scapegoat. Rant time: I'm sick to death of having to assume the parent "knows what's best for the child." I've had kids come to school in the same shirt 3 days a week, because they have maybe four shirts, no money for lunch, obviously hungry, can't concentrate... and then dear ol' Mom comes in for a conference with her hair all 'did' and her nails all 'did,' and she knows what's best? Even the worst teacher had to go through high school (and not bottom of the class, either), a four-year degree program (which, by the way, education degree programs are incredibly comprehensive and rigorous), pay for all of that, and then apply, pay, and test for teaching licensure... which they have to renew every five years (and their own expense, mostly), while under going very rigorous observations multiple times per school year. Oh, and random drug testing. All some idiot has to do is figure out "the dinkus goes in the hoo-hah," and they can be a parent. Sorry, but if folks are looking for someone to fire, that's where you go. (Rant done, returning to topic...) | |
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I think you underestimate the importance of teachers in a child's formative years. Kids spend over 6 hours a day, 5 days a week at school, generally under the custody of just one teacher acting in loco parentis. It's no exaggeration to say that many children will spend more waking hours with their teacher than with their parents - not to mention they may well feel a lot more secure and safe in school than out of it.
And no, being a pornstar (past or present) shouldn't prevent anyone from having kids. Similarly, nobody is saying that sex is bad (after all, how do you think each and every one of those kids got made). The issue is that this teacher at one time had a public image (with a lasting legacy) which is inconsistent with the image that their school wants to be associated with, and they have every right to hire and fire their staff on that basis. What happens behind closed doors is nobody else's business (meaning the comparison to gay teachers is off), but you can legitimately be judged on what you choose to say and do in the public eye.
That would be a disgusting and spiteful attack on that teacher's character and the students would probably get suspended, if not expelled. That would also be a completely different situation, so I don't see your point.
Not really. Schools - that is to say, the head teacher and board of governers - have nothing resembling an easy job. They're answerable to at least three sets of stakeholders: the parents, the children, and the staff. The welfare of the teaching staff is a hugely important priority and no school worth its salt would take that duty lightly; similarly I don't believe that this teacher was just ejected on a whim at the first whiff of bad PR.