John Karr, substitute teacher (my prior job) may very well be the killer. He was regarded as a poor teacher, though. He taught in many different places and was a caregiver. According to some reports, he had a sexual assault charge, but in California during a fingerprint check -- nothing came up. I'll return to this fiend later.
I know that there are two schools of thought on male teachers -- perverts and queers. Little does anyone remember the powermad school masters who beat the snot out of kids who threw a fit or didn't "get with the program" in one room school houses. Later, the state was happy to pay women teachers less and require them to be unmarried. Later still, integration and the vast need for qualified teachers.
Men should be role models -- and many urbanites need good role models, men and women. Generally, it is accepted (through assumption and data) that urbanites tend not to have a stable father figure in their lives (via jail/prison, abandonment, death, etc.) I actually was a novelty, and I love teaching, but as life would have it, I failed to fullfill a requirement, relegating me out of teaching, which didn't pay me much anyway.
During my experience, there was always doubt, wonder, suspicion as to which one I was -- queer or pervert. As it happens, I'm neither, but that wouldn't sway most persons feeling I had to be one or the other or both. An EH (emotionally handicapped) child once called me a pedophile, actually perfunctory response in an attempt to defy me, get attention, and to seem superior. It was my only time that I met or saw the child, in that 5th grade class. A month later, she was removed from the school and into another program.
A woman teacher, "mom" as it were, is trusted categorically because she is a woman, who could be a mother. I have found, even in my small group of 90 would-be teachers, that some carried too much baggage for the trip. One woman would not teach in a mostly Black or high-percentage Black school. She didn't like Blacks. You don't get to always choose. She could not have been a fair teacher. A couple others, I had in the back of my mind -- certain worries about their intents -- control mainly, over others; nothing more.
I did encounter some creepy adults; somehow affiliated with students at a sschool, whether parents, uncles, cousins, etc. Some surely would have been jailed for mindcrimes. Even others were, well, demonstratively too close with some kids. That may or may not have led to anything, but the wrongness was there.
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So far, no job, but the month of August might bring something.
1 comment:
Now THIS was worth reading! Rare insight on a topic of prejudice that goes mostly undiscussed. Yes, because places where children gather are targets for pedophiles, those people come under a considerable amount of scrutiny, which isn't a bad thing, so long as the scrutiny doesn't expand beyond the facts. Being a male teacher I would think it somewhat like being a Palestinian airline passenger. You are already under the microscope just for showing up, so all it would take is an odd manorism or sneezing too loudly to sway opinions. Ironicly, if you've been watching the news, it seems that men aren't inherent to all the sins on this Earth, there are increasingly more pedophile women out there being discovered. And those are just the ones being reported, it's much more likely that a female will go unreported, staying in the school system for years with access to children. But, that's the way the world is, if you're a woman, you're a harmless saint, and if you're a man, you're up to no good. If the person hitting on you is good looking, it's flirting, if they're not, it's sexual harassment. So many sterotypes. I get personally offended by women who just assume that men are capable of the most haneous and disgusting crimes. Have you ever seen the movie "The General's Daughter?" that movie was so prejudice I couldn't believe it. This girl was raped and killed and in the end it turns out that multiple men in the military raped her and others killed her and without conspiring, just by their nature, as the plot goes, they all covered it up and agreed upon the outcome. That may very well have been the moment when I stepped back from the screen and went "WHAT THE FUCK?!" and started questioning EVERYthing that came out of Hollywood. The moral of that movie was "yeah, of course all men are evil and capable of rape and murder, it's a completely unspoken agreement among them." Footnote: Oprah loved it.
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