US school children grow up with US “news” where they learn that people in power will never face consequences for their actions, hence the lack of respect. That’s my theory, anyway.
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Why would you follow up on accusations from a felon? 
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Yeah, but this is more about punishing the joker rather than investigating the claims.
What I have to wonder is why this tweet has any more weight than a fart in the wind? (thinking back to my pre-internet high-school days when rumors circulated in a less technologically enhanced manner). Does making a big deal out of the tweet make a mountain out of a molehill?
We (humans) don’t seem to have the skill set to rationally deal with a world full of spurious, ephemeral thought in text form.
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Where, precisely, did I say that the teacher was wrong? I’m arguing that she’s a grown-up with options if she needs them. What are you arguing? That she has zero agency because as a society we don’t have a solution to defiant students? This is a student that isn’t going to be defiant, because there are consequences for this student.
You seem to have an issue with me saying that students have less power than teachers: In this circumstance, yes. If you think I’m being too general, fine. But I’m not convinced that teachers have zero power just because there are students with little to lose when it comes to defiance.
It isn’t often enough to be a genuine issue. That being said my mother is a teacher, and she’s been physically threatened with sufficient credibility to involve the police. My girlfriend was a teacher, briefly, before grad school and then worked as a para as well where a student kept making inappropriate romantic advances that warranted some disciplinary action. I may well become a teacher myself, although my current plans (and the current career outlook situation for people who are considering the profession in the US) make this unlikely. I get it, teachers have a hard job and students aren’t all saints. This is a bad hill to fight and die on to make that point. It is a great place to talk about the overreaches and overeactions of school systems.
I’m stating known facts and reasonable presumptions based on what we know. Coulda,shoulda,maybewoulda presents its own fallacy.
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I’ve made a series of very clear arguments. There is no mystery about what I’m arguing. But perhaps before we get into this any further, you should try summarizing really quickly what you think it is I’m arguing. Because most of your responses to me have been completely irrelevant.
Is that what I’m doing? Or am I simply arguing against the notion that the teacher’s interests in situations like this can be safely ignored because [insert sarcastic and irrelevant comment by @ActionAbe here]?
Was in response to:
and
There’s no speculation involved in saying that:
- “Not calculated to be believed” is not the same as “implausible” or “unlikely to be believed”
- “that no one with a brain believes” is not even remotely justified given the fact that inappropriate relations between teachers and students happen and that the implied relationship is therefore not prima facie implausible
- That rumors and jokes like this do indeed have the possibility to create career havoc
- That even if I was wrong about all the above, completely spurious rumors about such a thing can still mightily interfere with the ability of the teacher to teach in that school, thus still having a significant impact on the teacher’s career.
At the very least, such rumors often cause investigations which can impact the likelihood of the school renewing that teacher’s contract even if the allegations/rumors are completely false and impact the likelihood of that teacher getting hired at nearby schools. Since teaching certification is state-based, this has a big impact on the teacher’s employability in general.
I’m all for standing up for the little guy. I’ve already made it quite clear that I think the administration and police department are also wrong. But teachers can also be the little guy, so I’m not sure why it’s such a huge fucking problem to acknowledge that the student was being an irresponsible little dipshit when he sent that tweet.
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I’ve said this elsewhere in this thread, but thought it might be relevant here as well:
The student was absolutely being a dipshit, and the school absolutely overreacted. But the teacher’s options for reaction are very, very limited, and for the most part would read as wild overreaction.
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What did the teacher do again?
Ah, sorry- I was unclear.
They teacher’s only real option is to go after the student with a defamation lawsuit- which seems overkill. But there’s not much else she could do. So my suspicion was (is?) that the school tried to create some kind of in-between punishment. And created all sorts of more trouble in the process.
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Yeah, the teacher had no good recourse. Seems like all the more reason to me not to dismiss the teacher’s interests in the matter as irrelevant, which as far as I can tell is all that I’ve argued here.
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Teachers, like the police, would be markedly improved as a demographic simply by invalidating those who seem most intent on gaining authority as opposed to doing the job.
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I think you’ve been very successful at ignoring basically everything I’ve said up to this point. For @Falcor’s sake, I’m done arguing with you.
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I’ve responded to very nearly everything you’ve said to me, even though most of it was irrelevant to my arguments.
You have ignored all the arguments I’ve actually made and argued against me on points that I never argued against in the first place.
I have stayed on topic and civil despite the fact that you have attributed to me views I do not hold and ignored the arguments I’ve made even when I made them very explicitly and asked you specific questions to make clear what would be a salient objection to my arguments.
Apparently you don’t agree, but I highly recommend reading the thread again when you’ve calmed down a little, and to try to maintain some degree of equanimity in judging whether I’m really being unfair and ignoring everything you’ve said. I think you might learn something about yourself from this exercise.
If you need the last word, have at it, bud.
I’m so very conflicted for lots of reasons.
- School overreacted.
- Teachers are “held to a higher standard,”* and any whiff of an improper relationship between the two could be detrimental for a teacher.
- I hate censorship, but defamation is a real issue.
- I find that many parents are also creating problems by also “doubling down” and supporting their precious children’s antics that could get them sued in the real world, or at least by Donald Trump.
- This is why Boing Boing is my only form of social media because as a teacher I find that ignorance of my perceived reputation is bliss.
- My parents would have taken the teacher’s side and they would have insisted that I learn that I’m damn lucky that they didn’t get sued for defamation of character (being a minor and such).
As an older teacher, my guess is that the teacher is young and inexperienced in dealing with students who are not that much younger. The kid got what he wanted: attention. However, the district should already have figured out that nothing comes between parents and their kids’ college admissions.
*Before anyone questions this, I will clarify. This is what an assistant DA for Orange County, California, stated when prosecuting a young teacher (22 y-o) for statutory rape when he had sex with a college student a week before her 18th birthday even though the complaining party was her former 20 y-o boyfriend, with whom she had had sex and who was not prosecuted…So for OC, it’s true.
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that wasn’t the teacher who extended the punishment, it was the administrator. perhaps you might rephrase as “principals, like the police, . . .”
How about some accuracy in reporting?
This stuff occurred on ask.fm - it’s not a tweet. 
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Police Chief called him a felon? That’s libel.
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How about “educators” since there are plenty of tyrants in classrooms as well as in administrative offices. A case in point was the escalation of this beyond calling in the kid and his parents for a face-to-face.
Should this online conversation even have been discussed? Arguably, yes. But it should have gone through due process, not immediately turned into a “kill it with fire” overreaction involving multiple levels of administration wielding suspension slips like SLAPP-happy litigators, and law enforcement committing defamation.
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I imagine a lot of things in the US seem very strange to the outside. Sometimes I think we are a separate species.
But is that actually the case?
I don’t see any evidence of this, they state in articles that the chief stated that he could be charged with a felony, but nothing more serious. Maybe there’s a link that says otherwise?
