Oct 03 2007
I Honk For Losers
WASHINGTON - Kissimmee Middle School teacher Deborah Mayer’s long, lonely and expensive legal fight over a war-related classroom comment ended with two words.
“Cert denied,” her attorney e-mailed her, which is legalese for the U.S. Supreme Court dismissing her appeal without hearing it. Mayer was fired in Bloomington, Ind., in 2003 after a classroom current-events discussion about peace protesters during which she said “I honk for peace.”
She, of course, is devastated because she thinks that she has a right to free speech. While I do believe that teachers should be given a certain amount of latitude in the interest of academic exploration, “I honk for peace” is a political statement, particularly when followed by:
“People ought to seek out peaceful solutions before going to war.”
Indeed, they ought to, but that still doesn’t give you the right to lecture your students on your peace-protesting positions. Just like it wouldn’t give you the right to sit in front of the students and force them to swallow the fact that the war was the right thing to do.
A deeply disappointed Mayer, who now teaches sixth-grade reading in Kissimmee, said Tuesday that the high court had shirked its duty.
“I have gone all the way to the Supreme Court and I have still not had my day in court,” said Mayer, who rang up $70,000 in legal fees and uprooted herself from family and friends in the Midwest to move to Florida to find a new job.
$70,000 in legal fees? For an elementary school teacher? Wow…
And what the hell is up with moving from the Midwest to Florida? Are there no teacher jobs in Nebraska?
Technorati Tags: deborah mayer, honk for peace, honk for unemployment
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Apparently Florida is the place to be if you’re a crazy school teacher.
October 4th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
I can’t believe she can’t see that she could offend and upset kids in that class. What if they had parents currently serving? What if they had parents killed over there? What if they were not raised as hippies? You can’t go pushing your own agenda as a teacher. You can lead the kids to make their own decisions, but you can’t state that sort of thing.
Exactly Vin. You can talk to your students about the war, but you can’t say “It was the right thing to do” or “It was the wrong thing to do”. That’s all subjective and opinions. You can have the kids debate, but as a teacher, you need to sit the fence.