fairness

Man Bites Dog! Students Trick Teacher Into No-Tolerance Violation On Facebook!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

How stupid can schools get?

duct tapeWell, let’s see: lets mix several themes that have surfaced on Ethics Alarms lately for a potent recipe:

  • Careless Social media posts
  • Overly protective parents
  • Misfired humor
  • Kids being kids
  • Brain dead school administrators
  • No-tolerance mindset

Melissa Cairns, a middle school math teacher at Akron, Ohio’s Buchtel Community Learning Center, is on unpaid administrative leave and facing terminationafter she  posted a photo on Facebook of some of her  students with duct tape covering their mouths. “Finally found a way to get them to be quiet!!!”she wrote. Nobody disputes what happened: a student who had been given duct tape by Cairns to repair a damaged book placed a piece of tape over her own mouth as a joke. Several other students did the same, and Cairns was urged to take a photo of the silly result. Then she posted it.

Harm: none.  Possible benefits: quite a few, if it helped Cairns connect with her class in a notoriously dry subject. Reaction of the school board: ridiculous. Continue reading →

Fair and Unfair Facebook Post Firings

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

frustrated-at-workWhen is it fair for an employer to fire an employee for the contents of a personal Facebook post?

  • When the post harms the business, impugns the integrity of its staff or business practices, or otherwise affects the reputation of the company in the community.
  • When the post indicates that the poster lied to a superior.
  • When the post raises legitimate doubts about the poster’s fitness for a job, either in the minds of potential client and customers, or in the judgment of employers.
  • When the post is sufficiently  disreputable and offensive to the community at large that it raises the question of whether any company that hires or has such an individual in a position of authority can or should be trusted.
  • When the post shows poor judgement of such a degree that it reaches signature significance, and legitimately causes an employer to doubt the stability, sanity, or trustworthiness of the poster. Continue reading →

You’re A Marked Man, Charlie Brown!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

And you thought Elmo was in trouble…

Charlie, in happier days...

Charlie, in happier days…

Peter Robbins, now 56, who was the voice of Charlie Brown on the TV special “A Charlie Brown Christmas” as well as other “Peanuts” television shows, has been arrested and charged Wednesday with stalking and threatening his ex-girlfriend and the plastic surgeon who gave her breast implants—no, this was not the little red-headed girl. I don’t think…

He’s accused of terrorizing her, calling her as many as 37 times in a 24-hour period on her cellphone and threatening to  kill her and her son if she did not give back his dog and car. In the most recent and ugliest incident, Robbins allegedly confronted his former girlfriend in a hotel room and began beating his dog—no, not Snoopy!…at least, gee, I hope not… and threatened to continue hurting the dog, not to mention killing her, if she did not promise to get a refund for the breast enhancement.

I have two observations.

1. This sad story illustrates one of the ways in which children are harmed by premature exposure to pop culture fame before they can understand the ramifications to their future. Robbins’ meltdown and shame, as well as his face and name, are all over the national media today, as the idea of Charlie Brown turning into a stalker is too strange and juicy to ignore. Without the link to the lovable “Peanuts” gang, such an item would barely be local news, much less national water-cooler fodder, but thanks to Robbins’ parents’ decision, made for him, not by him, although his life was the one most affected, his reputation is branded far and wide. Parents have an obligation to consider these things with their children’s best interests in mind. Today’s momentary stardom mat be tomorrow’s shame and permanent handicap. Continue reading →

Are Gentlemen Sexist?

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments
"Oh, Tommy---you're such a pig!"

“Oh, Tommy—you’re such a pig!”

On the flip side of the hit post about Emily Heist Moss’s open letter to her harassers, we have the B-side (I know this metaphor marks me as a fogy ): my objections to a New York Times essay by Lynn Messna, who declares that she doesn’t want her son to be gentleman, because gentlemen are sexist.

She writes:

“Start to complain about your preschooler adopting gentlemanly behavior and you quickly discover how out of step you are with the rest of the world. Almost everyone I mention it to thinks it’s lovely and sweet. What’s the harm in teaching little boys to respect little girls?..But I don’t think it’s an overreaction to resent the fact that your son is being given an extra set of rules to follow simply because he’s a boy. His behavior, already constrained by a series of societal norms, now has additional restrictions. Worse than that, he’s actively being taught to treat girls differently,  something I thought we all agreed to stop doing, like, three decades ago. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “And The Solution To This Phenomenon Is Simply Ethics. Why Is That So Hard?”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Sir Galahad

Sir Galahad

Reader Aaron Paschall was on a roll today, and his two-part comment on the thread regarding a woman’s lament about the sexual harassment she faces every day constitutes one of the best and most eloquent Comments of the Day Ethics Alarms has ever recognized with the honor. Here is Aaron’s perspective on the post “And The Solution To This Phenomenon Is Simply Ethics: Why Is That So Hard?”:

“Certainly it’s a sad state of affairs when a woman (or man) has to keep to the well-lit areas in order to avoid the dangers lurking in the dark. If Emily’s post is a lamentation that it would be wonderful if people needn’t fear the darkness, then I agree wholeheartedly. If Emily’s post is intended as a screed about how unfair it is that she can’t go walking down dark alleys as she would like because of all the nasty, brutish men lurking in the shadows, I can only laugh and say that I can’t walk down those alleys, either. Nor would I wish to, because I’m wiser than that. Continue reading →

TV Critics and “The Following”: Let’s Blame Kevin Bacon For Gun Violence!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

tt-the-following-hed-2012

To read many of the reviews of “The Following,” the new Fox serial killer drama starring Kevin Bacon that debuted last night, one would presume it is worse trash than “Two Broke Girls” polluted by “The Bachelor.” In fact, it is stylish, original, well-acted, infinitely more interesting than dramas the same critics have fallen all over themselves praising like “The Killing,” (which is “Twin Peaks” without the kinkiness and even slower, if that is possible), and scary, which is important, because “The Following” is a horror series, just as “Silence of the Lambs” is a horror movie. What seem to scare many of the soapbox critics more is that the series is on Fox, which, after all, is evil.

The TV reviewers, in their wisdom, have decided that people shouldn’t watch serial killer shows any more, because decent Americans—them— are so traumatized by the Sandy Hook massacre that they all want an end to guns, bloody video games, and any dramatic entertainment depicting violence that doesn’t come from a zombie or a vampire. Thus they savaged Kevin Bacon’s show….not because of its artistic and production values, but because they don’t want that kind of show on TV any more, and insist that the public consists of easily pleased sheep if they don’t feel the same way. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Petter’s Sex For Facebook Likes Deal

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Sex for Likes

First Stan Musial dies, and now this.

 Petter Kverneng is an awkward  Norwegian teen. He wants to have sex with Cathrine, the love of his young life, and she 1) doesn’t or 2) wants to make him earn the privilege by showing how much he wants her or 3) wants to humiliate him first and then if she has to have sex, well, whatever. The story goes that she told him she would have sex with him if he could score 1,000,000  “likes” on Facebook. A large internet message board decided to either help out Petter or stick it to Cathrine, and now the pimply-faced youth has  1.2 million “likes” on his Facebook page.

Get ready, Cat.

Let us take an ethics inventory, shall we? What is interesting about this stupid story, if indeed it is true, is that many of its turns could be seen as both ethical and unethical. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Developing A School Anti-Violence No-Tolerance Insanity Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
More deadly than a spit-ball? Less threatening than a pizza?

More deadly than a spit-ball? Less threatening than a pizza?

The latest example of mind-numbing school no-tolerance hysteria comes from rural Pennsylvania, where a kindergarten student has been suspended for threatening to shoot another student with a pink Hello Kitty bubble gun. I confess that I have nothing new to say about this idiotic and cruel incident that I haven’t said before about, say, the school principal who attempted to punish a 4th grader in 2010 for playing with a LEGO figure who was carrying a two-inch LEGO “gun”:

“The ethical duty being violated here, along with the ethical values of fairness, prudence, proportion and respect, is competence. A school administrator who does something like this is not competent, and any school system that gives such a person responsibility for the education of young children is also incompetent.”

…Or about the school administrators that punished a 10-year-old who had bitten a slice of pizza into the shape of a gun, an incident that admittedly sent me over the edge when I wrote:

“This is the Apocalypse, the bottom of the barrel. This disgraces teachers, schools, administrators, the U.S. educational system, America and the human race. Incompetence, unfairness, abuse of power, irresponsible behavior and stupidity, all flowing from a system that has lost its way and is in despair. We are officially in the Twilight Zone, Bizarro World, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and Oz, all to the detriment of our poor students, needing an education, and encountering only rigidity, cowardice and foolishness.”

In the wake of Newtown, however, with supposedly responsible elected officials running around making absurd statements about how we have to choose between the Second Amendment and “saving our children,” the entrenched no-tolerance fanaticism in the schools has become more virulent and widespread, though it could not have become more damaging, irresponsible or stupid than the pizza episode. Continue reading →

And The Solution To This Phenomenon Is Simply Ethics. Why Is That So Hard?

/ Jack Marshall / 124 Comments

construction_workers_at_voi_bigWith her “Letter to the Guy Who Harassed Me Outside the Bar” , Emily Heist Moss makes me briefly wonder, not for the first time, why all men haven’t been murdered in their beds by an organized feminist vigilante posse. The conduct she describes is disgusting and infuriating just to read about, and I don’t even have to experience it.

The amazing thing is that this kind of ritual harassment would vanish with some slight behavioral additions to our culture, many of which once were the norm, habits of good conduct like etiquette,  manners, consideration, civility, fairness, kindness, respect, and the Golden Rule. They could become cultural norms again, and rather easily, I would think, with an increase in responsible parenting, a responsible popular culture, and the development of role models with integrity. Not featuring serial and unapologetic sexual harassers as stars of sitcoms (Charlie Sheen) and political conventions (William Jefferson Clinton) would help; so would a serious effort by Hollywood not to trivialize workplace harassment as cute or amusing, as in the long-running “Cheers,” or in current TV  dramas like “Criminal Minds” and “NCIS.”

Moss writes, Continue reading →

At Last! The Ultimate Naked Teacher Principle Episode, Otherwise Known As “Hey, Isn’t This A Photo Of Miss…HOLY CRAP!!!”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
Stacy and Tiffany, together again.

Stacie and Tiffany Six, together again.

I’ve been writing about various manifestations of what I dubbed years ago “the Naked Teacher Principal” for a long time. The principle, based in accountability and responsibility, holds that once a teacher has allowed naked or otherwise sexually provocative photographs of herself or himself to become available over the internet, that teacher will be unable to properly maintain the respect of and proper professional relationship to students, serve as a role model, or be trusted to meet professional standards. Such a teacher will have no ethical defense when he or she is fired.

Variations and near-variations have ranged from the teacher whose room mate posted household photos of the teacher doing household chores in the nude, to the teacher who wrote sexually-explicit novels about werewolves, to the art teacher whose avocation of painting pictures with his genitals was revealed in an online sequence showing him doing so with a paper bag over his head.

Now at last we have a former porn star variation, and the NTP has been upheld. Continue reading →