Teacher Resigns After Parent Pressure

I resigned from my job teaching high school science for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the administration came down on me for trying to broach the subjects of racism & homophobia with my students & fellow teachers. It's been a year and I am still insanely bitter. I can only imagine how she feels.

I am an english professor and I have to say that todays students are woefully underprepared to read and critically look at any text and a lot of that has to do with people that this who want to ban books/essays from HS that can help prepare students for work they will do in college. If my kids were a student at this hs I would be pretty angry that this one women, who as far as i can tell has no background in education, gets to decide what my kids read.

As a college professor, I can tell you that I have had parents complain about what I teach and ask that their kids be excused. My response: I cannot discuss your child's progress and performance with you as your child is an adult. If you are not satisfied with the course content, don't take the class." As I also teach high school, I cannot say the same thing and have had parents challenge my readings simply because I confirmed a student's speculation that Bassanio and Antonio (in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice) could be read as lovers. It's indeed a sad day in education.

Ms. Johnson is an idiot and seriously needs to get a life. I pity her children - brought up in a world of fantasy with an obviously over-controlling mother. The fact that the school buckled so easily is an embarassment to them. They are the ones who refelected "Poor Judgment". Information about any of those subjects is more than readily available on the internet and this was an ELECTIVE class.

I think is very sad. How will HS students be expected to grow and survive in the real world when they can't be prepared in HS? What are these parents going to boycott colleges and universities aswell? So much for higher learning.

I think others have posted just about every thought that pops into my head, upon reading this article. David from Raleigh, you expressed it particularly well. What planet are these parents living on?

I taught high school for one year, and, these days, there is a particular subset of parents who have convinced themselves that their children are pure as new-fallen snow, despite the reality that these kids have been on the internet and are using slang terms for bizarre sexual acts that I had to look up for myself on urbandictionary.com. In other words, the parents are psychopathologically divorced from reality and want everyone else to join in their delusions. Of course, there have always been such parents, but it seems that cowardly administrators are often more afraid of them now than they used to be. I often wonder how students in high school English classes will ever be allowed to read ANY play written after 1967. Will we simply persist in pretending that David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and Tony Kushner don't exist?

This is about weak support from the administration more than anything else. I am a HS teacher and when I initially came out, my principal told me that she was going to write me up for being "inappropriate" by telling my students I am gay. I essentially told her to take a long walk off a short pier and reported her to our superintendent. Our super backed me up 100% and that principle was not rehired (for many, many reasons) at the end of the school year. The parents that complained about me being out were told they were welcome to enroll their students in a private school or homeschool them. I haven't had any problems since then. There will always be parents who complain; the principal in this case needs to grow some balls is the main issue IMO.

UPDATE: Sue Ann Johnson proposes a huge bubble be built, in which all kids in the town will live until they are 27 years old.

Teachers like me are getting our hands bound behind our back more and more and the result is a curriculum of watered-down drivel that no one wants to read. The more interesting the literature, the more someone else is going to object to it. So someone assigned a book that someone's mommy doesn't agree to. Grow up! Didn't we all have to endure reading something for a class we weren't thrilled about? Big deal! I've been an openly-gay high school teacher in Texas for 14 years. I never quit when faced with ignorance, I fought back hard.