Childhood and children

Brava Brianna Coppage, The Sort-Of Ethical Naked Teacher

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That’s Brianna in all three photos.

As stated right above in the Ethics Alarms Glossary, The Naked Teacher Principle: states that “a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.” The NTP, as we call it for short, has been a staple of Ethics Alarms from the beginning…well, a little after the beginning, since the first installment of the series goes back to the old Ethics Scoreboard, which is still up for your edification and entertainment, here. The first Naked Teacher was Tamara Hoover, whom I discussed in 2005. On Ethics Alarms, the NTP, in addition to its classic versions, has many sundry variations, all of which can be found here. An unexpected variation just surfaced last month, with the “The Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle.”

But Brianna Coppage, the soon to be ex-English at St. Clair High School in St. Clair, Mo., is in one respect the perfect Naked Teacher by Ethics Alarms standards. After all, she understands how the NTP works and why.

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Incompetent Tweet Of The Month

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“Penny” is an LGBTQ activist who didn’t think this tweet through before posting. (This is why Twitter is dangerous to the impulsive, emotional and none-too-bright.) After someone pointed out what the tweet seemed to be saying, it was taken down.

Too late.

Depressed Ethics Observations On A Jury Nullification Verdict In NY

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Clarence Darrow would have loved the resolution of the Jennifer Nelson case in Suffolk County, New York yesterday. The U.S.’s most famous and iconic defense attorney achieved many of his most important victories by slyly arguing for jury nullification, which is now grounds for a mistrial and ethics sanctions in all states but one (New Hampshire) See Note below. Of course, Darrow never used that term, but when he told juries to “send a message” with their not-guilty verdict, that’s what he was talking about.

Jennifer Nelson, 36, a Long Island mother, faced up to 25 years in prison for driving her car—twice— into a 15-year-old boy, the leader of a pack of bullies that had plagued her teen son last October after she concluded that he had taken his Adidas Ye slides . The jury deliberated less than four hours to declare her innocent of an intentional attack, instead finding her guilty of leaving the scene of an accident when there were serious injuries. Her attorneys say they will seek a sentence of just probation, and if they get the right judge, that may be all the punishment Nelson gets….for attempted murder.

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Reactions To Being Confronted With A Racist T-Shirt [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This ticked me off.

I was leaving a rehab clinic office after dropping off my wife and got onto the elevator with an African-American mother and her son, who appeared to be 12 or 13. He was wearing the t-shirt pictured above.

That’s a racist message. If I were to wear a shirt or a cap saying “White is my happy color,” it would be viewed by any non-whites I encountered as a veiled insult, and correctly so. This is no different. Thanks to Barack Obama and George Floyd, anti-white racism is considered sufficiently justifiable, indeed deserved, that blacks can wear this shirt with impunity. Google even covers for them: “What does black is my happy color mean?” it asks. “This is the color you are most comfortable and most confident in and the one that reflects your character. I wear black a lot and experts say that wearing black means that you are confident, powerful and success driven. I’ll take that. Black is also perceived as the most attractive color,” Google says in answering it’s own question (bolding theirs).” Riiiiight. The kid was making a fashion statement.

To state the obvious, if I had worn a “White is my happy color” shirt, it would be regarded as a white supremacy boast, and properly so. (Notice of Correction: I had written “There are no ‘White is my happy color’ shirts for sale.” Commenter Steve-O helpfully informs me that there are indeed. I dare him to wear one in my neighborhood…) I came within a filament of saying something to the mother. This is how you raise a racist. This is how you guarantee racial divisions and tensions forever. This is how American blacks lose potential political and social allies who are not going to be sympathetic to complaints about “microagressions” from the same people who make me read racial insults on their shirts.

Sure, it’s another “black lives matter” rhetorical trick: “Hey, saying black (skin) makes me happy doesn’t mean that I have anything against white people!”

Now you’re insulting my intelligence too.

It Seems A Bit Late, But Perhaps It’s Time To Define “Higher Learning”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Colleges justify their outrageously inflated tuition and the absurd national tradition that their increasingly meaningless degrees are essential credentials for career success by promoting themselves as fonts of “higher learning.”

Hmmmm. Last week, “Queering Menstruation” was offered at Colgate University as part of the programming offered by the Center for Women’s Studies Brown Bag Series. “Menstruation can be exceptionally difficult for nonbinary and trans-masculine individuals because it’s a biological process that is often times associated with womanhood,” the website for the program stated. “…Queering menstruation an hopefully aid the building of more positive relationships between periods and trans and/or nonbinary people.”

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And Speaking Of Not Being Able To Trust Public Schools …KABOOM!!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In Fairfield, Maine, Eric Sack father discovered a plastic baggie containing doses of prescription anti-depressants in the possession of his daughter. His daughter told him that the pills had been provided to her by the Bulldog Health Center, a School Based Health Center (SBHC) at Lawrence High School, where she is a student.

Yeah, right. I thought she was lying too, but the daughter wasn’t wasn’t. The federally funded health clinic that operates within the school gave the pills to her without his knowledge or consent.

How could this happen?

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How Can It Be Responsible To Trust America’s Teachers When Their Leader Posts This…?

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

It is ironic that serial Ethics Villain and NEA president Randi Weingarten writes that her tweet “speaks for itself” when it is indeed a wonderful example of res ipsa loquitur, but not in the way Weingarten would have us believe.

The teacher was not fired for reading the “Diary of Anne Frank” to her class, but for using “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” without proper authorization from the school and using it to launch a class discussion of sexual molestation. The graphic version, in the style of a comic book…

…is true to Frank’s original diary but contains the sexual and other content that was taken out of the original version published by Frank’s father. The graphic novel-syle version has been critically praised, but the previously redacted material it includes are of a nature that require sensitive instruction and certainly prior approval by parents.

Weingarten misidentified the book involved due to carelessness, devotion to her political agenda, or deliberate deception, none of which are qualities any responsible parent wants in their child’s teachers. Yet Weingarten is the teacher the teachers’ union chose to represent and lead it.

Her tweet speaks for itself indeed.

2024’s Voters: This Goes Right Into The “Res Ipsa Loquitur” File…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

But I bet they know all about systemic racism and the impending climate change apocalypse….

Comment Of The Day: “That Bomb ‘Finger Gun’ Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m pretty sure EA has touched on the topic of anti-male student discrimination by teachers in grade school, but not recently and not often enough, because it is a serious cultural and societal problem. The Atlantic wrote about “The War Against Boys” in 2000 before it became a complete propaganda vehicle for radical wokism—I wonder if such an essay would get published today?

2000—let’s see, that was right around the time my wife and I started becoming aware of how normal little boys were being expected to act like good little girls in school, as our authority-resisting, intrepid and energetic son was being routinely abused by boy-hating teachers to such an extent that he was permanently alienated from formal education. The finger gun nonsense is symptomatic of the trend, and crella makes the connection in this, the Comment of the Day on the post, “That Bomb ‘Finger Gun’ Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??”

Here it is….

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That Bomb “Finger Gun” Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With “Finger Gun 4”??

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The first stunned Ethics Alarms story about a cabal of idiots with education degrees persecuting a little boy for making a crude imaginary gun out of his fingers was in 2013, just as the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck got rolling and the anti-gun hysterics were going off the rails (to which they, obviously, have never quite returned). I wrote of the first incident, which was in Montgomery County,

The NBC story concentrates on  “whether the boy understands the implications of the gesture.” What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.

I concluded that it was child abuse by the school, and that “such irrational fearfulness, bad judgment, panic, disregard for the sensibilities of the young, lack of proportion and brain dysfunction forfeits all right to trust, and such fools must not be allowed to have power over young bodies and minds.”

But the finger gun lunatics struck again the next year, as Ohio crazies punished a 10-year-old boy for wielding an imaginary gun without a license. This time I figured out what was really going on—political and cultural woke indoctrination— writing in part,

The radical gun-hating progressives who disproportionately occupy administrative positions in the schools are willing to endure some ridicule as well as to victimize some children if it helps make guns and gun-related play less attractive, thus pointing to a Nirvana where the NRA is a shadow of its former self, and the only ones who own guns are criminals, the police and the government….Is public school political indoctrination more sinister than the proliferation incompetent teachers and administrators? Yes.

I also should have realized that this was the dawning of The Great Stupid.

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