Natalie Munroe

Ethics Dunce: Judge Barbara Jaffe

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Yes, it's true this teacher wrote on Facebook that she wished her fifth grade students DEAD, but the comment was only meant for her friends to see, and hey, just because she hates them doesn't mean she can't teach them...so it's OK. Right, Judge?

New York Judge Barbara Jaffe disagrees with me on the issue I discussed here regarding Natalie Munroe, the elementary school teacher who still has her job despite professing her contempt and dislike for her elementary students and their parents on her blog. Thanks to Jaffe, Christine Rubino, whose online comments about her students were infinitely worse, has won a court challenge to her firing from her job teaching at PS 203 in Brooklyn, New York. The judge is wrong, and I am right. The judge is also a fool.

Imagine: last March,  the day after a 12-year-old Harlem schoolgirl drowned during a class trip to a Long Island beach, Rubino posted a vicious rant about her fifth-graders on her Facebook page. “After today,” she wrote, ” I’m thinking the beach is a good trip for my class. I hate their guts.”

A Facebook friend quickly asked, “Wouldn’t you throw a life jacket to little Kwami?” Kwami was the child who drowned. The 38-year teacher replied: “No I wouldn’t for a million dollars.” Continue reading →

The Third Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2011 (Part 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The 2011 Ethics Alarms Awards for the worst in ethics continues (you can catch up with Part I here) with the large and depressing…

 Shameless Bad Character Division

Jerk (defined as an individual who habitually places his personal benefit and ego gratification above the welfare of everyone and everything else) of the Year: Donald Trump

The Dennis Rodman Award, (Awarded to a professional athlete for a career and lifetime of  behaving like a jerk): Jose Canseco. Jose’s done it all, from being baseball’s Typhoid Mary of steroids, to getting arrested for various assaults, to writing a series of tell-all books designed to rat out the very players he corrupted, not as a service to his sport, but as revenge for it rejecting him. In 2011, he hit a new low, accepting money to appear in a celebrity boxing match (the 21st Century version of becoming a circus geek to pay the bills) and sending his less-talented, equally dim-witted, identical twin brother Ozzie to perform instead, hoping to fool the fools who hired him. This, of course, was fraud. It takes quite a jerk to take this award from Manny Ramirez, who became eligible in 2011, but Jose was up to the task.

Asshole (defined as an individual who intentionally and maliciously causes pain and harm to others because he can) of the Year: Rev. Terry Jones, the publicity-seeking leader of a tiny rural church, who caused riots and deaths abroad and ramped up political tensions between America and Muslim nations by threatening to burn, and finally burning, the Koran as a demonstration of contempt for Muslims and the Islamic faith. Continue reading →

Introducing the Munroe Rule: “If You Teach, Don’t Denegrate Students Online; If you Denigrate People OnLine, Don’t Teach”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Viki Knox fans

I want to thank Viki Knox, the  Union Township (N.J.) high school teacher who decided to proclaim her condemnation of gays on Facebook, for making it possible for me to re-use much of an earlier post. This saves me a lot of thought and time.

That one involved Jerry Buell, a veteran high school teacher who was suspended indefinitely earlier this year by Lake County, Florida’s Mount Dora High School for posting an anti-same-sex marriage rant on his Facebook page.  In his post, prompted by New York’s decision to legalize gay marriage, Buell said that the news made him want to throw up, that gay marriage was “a cesspool,” and that homosexuality was a sin. Knox went Buell one better, going to the heart of the matter by declaring that homosexuality is a sin that “breeds like cancer” and describing it as “perverted.” She also wrote:

“Why parade your unnatural immoral behaviors before the rest of us? I/we do not have to accept anything, anyone, any behavior or any choices! I do not have to tolerate anything others wish to do.” Continue reading →

And You Thought Natalie Munroe Was An Unethical Teacher…Well, Meet Jeremy Hollinger

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Jeremy Hollinger, showing his compassion for his students' struggles

Remember Natalie Munroe, the teacher who blogged about how much she detested her high school students, calling them names like “rat-boy” and “jerkoff”? What, you may ask, could be more destructive to the necessary trust between teacher and student, or parents and the teacher to whom they entrust their student’s education, short of actual abuse?

How about a teacher ridiculing his grade school special ed students?

Believe it or not, that’s what Jeremy Hollinger, a Mobile (Ala.)County Public School teacher who handles a second grade special education class at the Eichold-Mertz Elementary School did on his Facebook page. (In news reports, that’s what he “allegedly” did, or “is accused of” doing. In fact, all the evidence is public, it is clear and unambiguous, and the bottom line is, he did it.) Most spectacularly, Hollinger posted a mocking picture of himself wearing a seizure helmet and making a goofy face. Among his charming jibes at the young and challenged children in his class were such satirical comments on their behavior as “I guess crayons are on the menu” and “Why is there shit on the floor?” Continue reading →

Sorry, Mr. Buell: It’s Not About Free Speech, It’s About “The Naked Teacher Principle”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

The Naked Teacher Principle rides again!

Jerry Buell, a veteran high school teacher recently named his district’s ‘Teacher of the Year,” was suspended indefinitely by Lake County, Florida’s Mount Dora High School for posting an anti-gay marriage rant on his Facebook page.  In the post, prompted by New York’s decision to legalize gay marriage, Buell said that the news made him want to throw up, that gay marriage was “a cesspool,” and that homosexuality was a sin.

He is welcome to his opinion. He has an absolute right to it. However, he does not have a right to be allowed to teach students, several or many of whom may be gay, after voluntarily allowing it to become public knowledge that he is disgusted by gays and considers them sinful. The school is right to remove him from his teaching duties, and it will be right to tell him that he will not be permitted to teach in the school again. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Central Bucks East High School

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

"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: Continue reading →

Why Students Lose Respect for School Authorities, Case Study 309,456: “The Red Scare”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Inappropriate, Thomas!

It is not directly relevant to Natalie Munroe’s complaints perhaps, but when students today seem less than in awe of those adults who claim to be qualified to guide them to wisdom and success in school, they often have good cause to be wary. Take the example of Stephanie Plato, a sixth grader at Cobb Elementary School in Houston’s Channelview school district.

Stephanie was suspended from school because the red and blonde highlights her mother let her get died into her hair as a 12th birthday present violated the school’s code of conduct.

You read that right.

We are not talking electric orange here, or anything strange and disruptive. Just a few red highlights in her naturally brown hair. But the school dress code bans “inappropriate hair color”…such as red.  Don’t ask me why. It doesn’t matter why. It is stupid. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Teacher Natalie Munroe

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

This isn't Natalie...just on the inside.

Teacher Natalie Munroe was suspended from her job at a Philadelphia-area high school after her online rants about her students, co-workers and administrators were found, read, and distributed by some students and parents.

Munroe, however, neither had the common sense or the understanding of her obligations as a professional to apologize, and has decided to be defiant instead. She pulled down the offending blog posts and is now defending herself, arguing (naturally) that her First Amendment rights have been violated (yawn!), that her comments were “taken out of context” (an old stand-by), that her insulting opinions about her school duties were but a small proportion of what she posted (and, she might have mentioned with the same rapier logic, an extremely small percentage of her total communications output since birth, and an infinitesimal percentage of all the words uttered by homo sapiens since the Stone Age ) and most of all, that what she said about her Central Bucks East High School students, none of whom were mentioned by name, was all true.

You can read her self-absorbed excuse-making here, if you have a high boredom and annoyance threshold. Or you can read one of the blog posts that got her suspended, in which she confesses how she would like to describe her various students to their parents, listing, among other descriptions… Continue reading →