"Hello class! I'm your teacher, Miss Munroe, and as you know, you all disgust me. Now, I expect your full trust and respect this year. I am a professional, and my superiors and I agree that the fact that I hate you with all my soul won't change how I treat you, because hate doesn't affect how people treat each other in life. Wait...why are you all looking at me like that?"

Administrators at Central Bucks East High School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, have decided to reinstate suspended teacher Natalie Munroe, who had made it very clear in several blog posts discovered by the school and her students last February that she detested her job and a great many of her students and their parents, spewing  diatribes that ridiculed specific students for their appearance, habits, speech and character.

There is no conceivable  justification for this. Munroe both deserved to be fired, and had to be fired, because she cannot be trusted to be fair, unbiased or diligent in educating students when she is so disgusted, annoyed and infuriated by them. “I hate your kid,” she wrote to the generic parents of her charges on her now discontinued blog.

“I hate your kid.” This is a smoking gun, but the school has chosen to ignore it.

How responsible is it for a school to entrust schoolchildren to the instruction of a teacher who admits that she hates them?  It is as responsible as letting a caregiver at a nursing home continue employment after writing, “I dislike old people.” As responsible as hiring a nurse who tells the hospital that  she is  nauseated by sick people. As responsible as entrusting an orphaned  child with an adoptive couple who announces that they can’t stand him.

Amazingly, Munroe has never denied that she meant what she wrote. Instead, her defense was this:

“I am a professional and take pride in my work. I am perfectly capable of separating my personal feelings about some of the people I have to work with from the work I accomplish. In that way, I’m also like millions of people around the world; at some point, we all have to work with someone we don’t like. But we do it anyway, get the job done, and move along. That’s how life works. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous.”

No, to suggest that it is professional conduct to publicly proclaim how much  she hates those she must deal with in her job and how hostile she is toward those she has an obligation to serve is ridiculous. As I wrote when this story first surfaced,

A teacher who writes, with or without using names, that her students are assholes and fucks, and that she hates some of them, is not going to be trusted by any parent, or any student. She is theoretically a professional, but she is an untrustworthy professional, which means that she is a lousy professional. She is useless, because such strong personal dislikes and biases are difficult to overcome, and everyone knows it. Do some of the other teachers feel similarly? I’m sure they do, but I will entrust my son to someone who might harbor secret hatred for her students before trusting a teacher whom I know harbors such feelings, and whom, moreover, has shown the common sense and judgment of a fourth-grader by sending such sentiments into cyberspace.

None of this apparently matters to Central Bucks East High School. Whether the school leaders are afraid of a lawsuit or the union, or whether the administrators are behaving stupidly because they are just as incompetent and unsuited for their jobs as Miss Munroe is for hers, has yet to be revealed. Regardless, the school’s decision is unforgivable, and if the parents of Munroe’s teachers are more responsible than she is, they will not allow this decision to stand. They will pull their children out of class; or direct them to refuse to respond to the teacher who openly hates them. They will boycott, and petition, and picket, and they will hold out for the minimum requirement of a teacher who doesn’t regard  her students as “rat-like…lazy asshole…sneaky… jerkoff…dim… like a street walker…whiny…annoying…and, of course, assholes and fucks.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask. In fact, I don’t think it’s too much to demand.