Of teachers and moral virtues.

The Local Shitecan New Paper is at it again. This time it's a teacher who's been a little brazen about her sexuality and random thoughts about non-school stuff. Do I condone her for what she did? Not quite. It wasn't exactly the smartest thing in the world to do, posting her pictures of her Primary School students on the same page that she talks about sex, dildos and (*gasp*) lesbian tendencies.

But then again, when I first heard from le grapevine about the incident and how the village bicycle times New Paper had printed the story, I said to Ondine that they're not paying us enough to be paragons of moral virtues.

And sure nuff, I had a new blog post to put up.

Firstly, let's just say that The Pondscum sucking bottom dwellers New Paper really knows how to fuck upjazz up a story to the point that even fiction cannot compare to the putrid reporting that it squeezes out of its colon of truth. (Can't you just feel the love for our local tabloid...[I mean of course The Pool of Crap New Paper and not our national tabloid The Straits Times])

Secondly, it reports that some people were aghast when a group of teachers while overseas on vacation ordered a jug of beer to share. Implication being that teachers were supposed to behave themselves at all times and be saints. (Read it, it's there.) Anyways, on this, a few facts to share:

• Teachers: Ranked 2nd in professions in incidents of alcoholism.
• You do not need to go overseas to see teachers drinking. We do a lot of it locally. Heck...sometimes, the jug of beer is not to share.

Anyone who's wondering why teachers drink so much need only take a look at what we have to deal with in the education profession.

1. Students who are now not only stupid, but openly defiant and our only means of dealing with said students* has effectively been removed leaving teachers less than eunuchs.
   
2. Parents who think that said students are angels and therefore the problem lies with the teachers. Otherwise known as they who do not realise that the problem with these students are often internal.
   
3. School administrations that do not support them, instead piling on the problems by siding with said miscreants (both 1 and 2)...which are birthed in unholy and unnatural means by:
   
4. An upper management that is so far removed from the actual groundwork of actually teaching that the concept is alien to them...yes, teaching actually already is a 20 hour a day job thankyewverymuch.
   

(Of course, I'm lucky that I don't have any of the aforementioned gripes to worry about because I've been blessed to be where I am but I know that there are many WAY worse off than I.)

Thirdly, perhaps the idea of a teacher who is actually not repressing her sexuality and instead embracing it might mean that she will not end up sleeping with her students. Meaning that we can avoid fiascos such as math teachers boning secondary 2 students etc...

Fourthly, irony much?

All in all, despite the fact that I think the teacher should have kept work and her personal life separate on her blog (especially when mixing sex and little kids' pictures...that's SO wrong), I don't think that the teacher did anything wrong. Did she spend class time preaching perversions to her students? No. Did she prosyletise? Definitely not. Was her sexuality getting in the way of her teaching? Don't think so. So what exactly is the problem here?

Let's see if I can put a finger on it:

Parents don't have time to be paragons of morality for their children so they need teachers to step into that role.

Hmmm...How about that for a theory? Isn't that the major basis for any complaint in todays society?

Too much violence on TV = I don't have enough time to teach my child that violence is not the way to solve problems. Censor the violence please so that I never have to do that...

Too much sex on the internet = I can't spare the time to tell my kids that pornography objectifies women and in itself is disgusting. I also can't tell my kids that sex comes with responsibilities and pornography does not reflect that responsibility.

Teachers behaving badly = Damn. Looks like I'll need to be the role model for my kids because the values they may learn from teachers are not good enough. Also, my kids don't have a value system of their own so their teachers might twist their young minds with perversion and immorality.

I know that it's a simplification of the problems that parents face and I can only hope that I can live up to the high expectations of parenting when I become a parent myself but I think that this is where all the expectations are coming from. Did I ever believe that my own teachers were the moral giants that we expect of our teachers today? No. They were fallible, even the ones who were good. But then my teachers did their jobs and that was all that was expected of them. What changed? Perhaps we've gotten too busy as a society to worry about the young. And that's why teachers are now observed through the filthy lens of the national/local tabloids.

As for me? I'm just going to get myself a beer. Kick back on my couch with fat laden foods and watch some uncensored violence or perhaps a film with some extremely bad language in it.