Freshman (Part 4, Those Who Can, Teach. Those Who Can’t Teach, Suck.): Why you never bring porn to school

I have never been a big proponent of mixing your personal life with your professional endeavors. For one thing, there is no graceful segue; and for another, it almost always leads to trouble. Personally, I prefer enigma rather than enunciation. In fact, for the first year that I taught, most of my students didn’t know my age, where I was from, how I was trained, that I was married, or that I had a son … in spite of the fact that there were pictures on my desk and a wedding ring on my hand. (Kids aren’t much for details.) Still, left to my own devices, that was the way I preferred it.

A few good arguments for the validity of this position are, quite obviously, teachers like Miss Jane and Sir Bill (not to mention the damage a kid can do with too much information.) That much, I imagine, goes without saying. After all, nobody likes a deposition. Still, even with stellar examples like those two, some people never learn. And so rather than leaving life at home, they bring their baggage with them, dropping bits and pieces all around campus for sticky little 15 year olds to find and then, rather tactlessly, share with the rest of us. Of course, by the time we get it, it’s filthy with embellishment and interference, but usually the idea’s the same; and almost always spectacularly inappropriate. For example …

Because schools have no money—at least not enough to keep up with technology—many teachers find themselves bringing personal laptops and hard drives and iPods into class to use as instructional aids (perhaps you know where I am going with this). I was most certainly one of them. We would run slide shows and videos and audio clips and music and give presentations; it was, in my opinion, a valuable use of personal resources. One that is necessary is today’s digital (and educationally bankrupt) society.

The IT guys were always troubled by this practice, given the rampant spread of computer viruses and the relative ignorance of the average Internet user, and I understood that. Still, if you wanted to use technology in your classroom, you didn’t have a lot of options, regardless of what the IT department would have preferred. So it was no surprise to me to hear that a teacher of some of my students had brought in his laptop to run a PowerPoint and show a few web sites to the class.

What was a surprise to me, however, was the students’ recollection of the presentation. Not that it was a bad presentation, because no one made that claim. In fact, they didn’t really talk about the presentation at all. The conversations went something more like this:

“Riedel … you’re never gonna’ believe this.”

That was usually how the conversation started. It was only rarely accurate.

“We were in class this morning and the teacher was giving a presentation,”

“What was the presentation on?” I interrupted, mostly because it was fun for me.

“What? I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. But listen …”

“I am supposed to listen to a story about something you weren’t even paying attention to? Tell me how that makes sense.”

“Dude,” he said, “I’m going to tell you why I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Really?” I said. “Please go on. This should be interesting.”

“Oh, it’s interesting all right.” And then he laughed, which is never a good sign when you’re about to be told something about another teacher. “Dude … I can’t even believe this shit myself.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“So we’re in class and the guy is giving this presentation from his laptop. He’s showing us slides and stuff and the he’s pulling up some websites for us to check out … and the whole time he’s doing it he’s got his bookmarks folder open and there’s all these porn sites. It was crazy. Here … check this out,” he said, pulling a piece of paper from his pocket. “I wrote down a list.”

Now that’s just cold. I mean, definitely don’t bring your porn to school, that’s just dumb (certainly inappropriate, illegal, unethical, and so on.) But kids are harsh when it comes to stupidity, and if you’re going to be stupid in front of them, you’re also going to wind up out at your car one day with a flyer plastered to the windshield listing all of your favorite internet porn sites. The same ones you broadcast in high definition to your classroom full of children. Because, like I said, they’re cold; and also, you deserve it.

“Dude, Riedel, listen to some of these …” and then he went on to list some of the most sexually dysfunctional domain names I had ever head of. I am not going to repeat them here, but I am sure your imagination is quite capable of filling in the blanks.

That day I had at least one conversation per class period about this particular teacher and his internet-porn fetish. I got more than one list of sites from his bookmarks folder, and most of them corroborated one another. I had girls tell me, boys tell me; I even had another teacher call me and ask if I had any unusual conversations that day regarding a presentation in one of the history classes.

“Funny you should ask,” I said.

Now, I am not going to indict anyone here for the personal choices they make. That is not my job. You may do as you please, so long as it does not negatively impact the lives of others; that much is between you, your conscience, and your Internet service provider. Of course, when you bring those things into the classroom, you have effectively crossed that invisible line between personal and public. Then, I am sorry to say, you become fair game. And if you choose to do stupid things in front of kids, prepare yourself for the fallout, because there is always fallout; always, even if they like you. And sometimes, especially if they like you.