Both are being investigated for misconduct, and, as the Daily News notes, both of the "good-looking" language teachers were very popular with their students. • General Mills has announced plans to reduce the amount of sugar in cereals marketed to children. This means that munchie-favorites like Lucky Charms and Count Chocula could drop at least 25% of their sugar, until there are less than 10 grams per serving. Wonder if that will effect the taste. •  According to an Italian newspaper, Amanda Knox still has hope that she will be freed. She reportedly told Italian lawmaker Walter Verini that she "has faith in the Italian justice system," including her pending appeal. • New York State's oldest registered sex offender could be released from a halfway house soon. Prosecutor Frank Sedita has warned against the dangers of releasing the 100-year-old convicted child molester, who he calls the "personification of evil." •  A 10-year-old British girl has made the news after she wrote an angry letter to the man who broke into her house. Her letter, which describes her feelings of fear and sadness, will be sent out to known burglars with the hopes that it will deter them from robbing again. •  In the past few weeks, three top female newspaper editors have announced that they are leaving their jobs, and do not intend to continue careers in journalism. The timing of their resignations has lead some to worry about diversity in the newsroom. However, Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of the Oregonian says it is not always gender-specific issues that force editors to seek new opportunities, and that times are tough across the board. •  The New York Times helpfully reminds us of the number one rule of any affair: don't put anything in writing. Oddly, many otherwise intelligent-seeming people (Tiger Woods, Senator John Ensign) seem to think that this does not apply to text messaging, which has led the NYT to deem texts the "new lipstick on the collar." Professor Shirley Turkle rather poetically describes our cellphone-blindness: "Like Peter Pan, we do not see our electronic shadow until it is pointed out to us. We assume it is not there." • Kumari Fulbright, the former beauty queen and University of Arizona law student accused kidnapping of her ex-boyfriend, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit kidnapping and aggravated assault today. She'll spend the next two years in prison. • A Pennsylvania woman who drank herself unconscious at her 20th birthday party is suing a hospital for medical malpractice because she passed out while sitting on the floor in the emergency room and was left in that position for 12 hours. This cut off circulation to her legs, and they were later amputated at the knees • The International Olympic Committee has reallocated two of the three gold medals Marion Jones was stripped of in 2007 when she admitted to using steroids. But for the first time the IOC is leaving a gold medal spot vacant because 100-meter silver medalist Katerina Thanou of Greece is still facing charges for staging a motorcycle accident to avoid doping tests. "She disgraced herself and the Olympic movement by avoiding three doping tests. We are not legally bound to give medals," said an IOC spokesman. • Police arrested a Florida woman for allegedly throwing a raw steak at her disabled live-in boyfriend when he asked for a roll instead of sliced bread with his dinner. Authorities say she beat the man, who has terminal cancer and an injured left leg, in the face with the meat and threw a bag of clothing at his bad leg. She repeatedly told a deputy that she only slapped him "so that he can learn." •

Marcia Carlisle was Houppert's professor at Bennington in the early 80s, and Houppert praises her "stealthy approach to teaching history, luring us in with novels and diaries and memoirs that brought an emotional understanding of the period and its hardships." Carlisle favored allowing her students to arrive at their own opinions — in the discussion of Virginia Woolf's "A Room Of One's Own," Houppert remembers that she "weighed in to raise a question or two, but otherwise sat tight, a sphinx having posed her riddle." This approach resonated with Houppert, moving her "from a dark swirl of discontent about the state of the world and my place in it to a systematic analysis of injustice." Later the two became friends, and when Carlisle contracted a degenerative neuromuscular disease, she asked Houppert to edit her essay on the illness. The essay, which was never published, sounds like a profound statement of collective spirit in the face of personal pain. Of her former teacher, Houppert writes,

For a while, despair consumed her. Then, she did what feminists have done all along. She took a hard look at her circumstances and considered her personal story in the larger political context. I am reminded of a passage in "A Room of One's Own," in which Woolf observes that, "[w]omen have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Marcia saw a similar desire to inflate oneself among the able-bodied — at the expense of the disabled. She began to move from internalizing her anger to placing it a historical context of oppression — insisting that Phillips Exeter add ramps to buildings not only to accommodate her but to make it an inclusive campus, to alter its "wheelchair access" buttons outside doors to read "universal access," and to end its practice of holding faculty meetings in inaccessible second-floor conference rooms. She was determined to teach her students to reframe their understanding of disabled.

Houppert doesn't know why Carlisle decided to make her the beneficiary of her $75,000 life insurance policy. She says,

Perhaps Marcia was playing the role of Woolf's aunt, bequeathing me a small measure of artistic freedom.

Or perhaps not.

In truth, I'll never know, and maybe that was Marcia's point:

How did we get here? she might ask. How did this happen?

If Carlisle's goal was to make sure that the conversation about disability — and larger questions of the place of the female and/or ill body in the world — kept going after her death, then she chose a worthy heir. Houppert writes affectingly of Carlisle's illness not in familiar terms of individual strength and struggle, but in political terms, and it's clear that she is continuing with the "systematic analysis of injustice" that her professor taught her. It's also clear how much this professor affected her. Houppert's piece isn't just a remembrance of a single woman; it's a testament to the power that teachers can have not only over our minds, but over the values that shape our lives.

It was impossible for me to read Houppert's essay without thinking of my own teachers. I will be grateful forever to the one who taught me that literary criticism can be like playing, the one who sweetly explained that my poetry made it clear I should be a fiction writer, and the one who told me what a rare and worthwhile skill it was to be funny. But more than anything else, Houppert's words brought to mind two incidents that happened when I was about twenty-two years old. Houppert writes of a conversation with Carlisle soon after college:

"I wanna do something that matters, that will make a difference in the world," I confided in a half-whisper, because I knew it sounded corny.

She could have looked at me with a softly condescending smile that said, This, too, shall pass. But she didn't.

"You can," she said.

I had just graduated and was working at my university when a fairly famous male critic came to visit. He asked me what I had studied, and I told him literary theory. He shook his head and said, "Oh sweetie, you'll grow out of it." I wasn't quite green enough to take his words to heart, but I might have been, if not for conversations like the one I'd had with my classics professor a few months earlier. I'd gone to her office to ask what I should do with my life, and I had told her I wanted to be "a public intellectual." She fixed me with a kind but appraising stare, and said, "Yes. I think you can do this. But you should move to New York."

What's ironic about these two interactions is that what I said to my classics professor was kind of callow and silly, while what I said to the critic was not. But my professor was the one who chose to take me seriously. She was the one who looked at a very young woman with more arrogance than experience and gave that young woman actual advice. I didn't move to New York for a long time, but I never forgot that someone had given me permission to claim a position of importance for myself. It's a permission that everyone deserves and that many of us — women especially — are often denied. But once given, it provides protection — against people like the critic (who, to be fair, may have been more anti-theory than he was sexist), against those who view public speech by women as shrill or narcissistic, and against anyone with a stake in making intellectual or political endeavor seem pointless or overweening or uncool. Marcia Carlisle, in sitting back and letting her students find the answers for themselves, was giving them this permission. Houppert clearly benefited from it, and now she is repaying her old teacher by sharing her lessons with the world.

A Room Of Her Own [Washington Post]

• Welfare workers report that girls in gangs are often raped by the male members of the gang as part of initiation, but many of them accept this as routine. "The girls think they are going to be protected by the gang if they have sex with one person but then they find there are more boys there," said Teresa Pointing, chief executive of In-volve, a charity that works with teen girls. • According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Sasha and Malia Obama have not been vaccinated for swine flu. The vaccine is currently unavailable to the twogirls because they are not at high risk. • Doctor Patrick O'Brian recalls being shocked at the state of pregnant women in Uganda, a country that apparently has some of the worst maternal care in the world. In efforts to address this issue, he started a program with the University College Hospital in London that works to distribute medicine to women in need and offer pre and post-natal care to mothers. • Researchers have found that breast reduction surgery may have unexpected benefits. Through testing the removed tissue, doctors may be able to better identify patients at risk for breast cancer. Another upside to breast reduction? Decreased back pain and increased range of movement. • According to a new study, well-educated older women who live alone report a lower emotional well-being than breast cancer patients who live with a partner. •  A little girl from Brooklyn has made the news for a heartbreaking letter she wrote to Sasha and Malia Obama. Bianca's mother was shot several years ago by an abusive boyfriend, and the 6-year-old and her father are still struggling. In her letter, she begged for help for her family, and readers of the Daily News have been quick to respond. • Researchers have found that sperm itself - and not just the fluid it travels in - may transmit HIV to healthy cells. Doctors previously suspected that sperm could transmit the virus, but they were unable to prove this until recently. • A revealing new poll from the UK shows that 90% of expecting mothers are denied the choice as to where they will give birth. The vast majority of women in Britain are not offered the option to give birth at home or at a birthing center attended by a midwife. • The Daily Beast on sexism in nonprofits: "Charity is not allowed to use the same tools as business because society subconsciously regards it as female, and discriminates against it the same way it has historically discriminated against women." Read the rest of their interesting take on charity here. • Good news: The Saudi king has decided not to flog a female journalist charged with participation in a television show in which a man spoke publicly about his sex life. • Among women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, breast cancer is diagnosed six years earlier than in previous generations. Doctors don't know if women are screened better today, or if hormonal and environmental factors are giving women cancer earlier. • Jury selection will begin today in the trial of the first 12 male members of the polygamist sect whose Yearning For Zion ranch was raided last year. Flora Jessop, who escaped the compound 15 years ago, said she's happy to see the men go on trial but, "What I'm upset the most about, I think, is the fact that none of the women have been indicted, as well. ... I think that the women were nothing but pimps on that compound and giving their daughters over to these perverts knowing what was going to happen to them." • A study by the National Center for Voice and Speech found that female teachers used their voices about 10 percent more than males when teaching and 7 percent more when not teaching. Female teachers speak louder than male teachers at work. All teachers spend more time talking than most professionals and are at a greater risk for hurting their voices. • Debbie Davis, 29, of Sunderland, England has been named Britain's top Avon saleswoman. She started selling the cosmetics when she was laid off five years ago and now she's making $408,000 a year. • 14-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker says she will wait until the school year is over to begin her attempt to become the youngest sailor to circumnavigate the globe. She had planned to head out in August but was stopped by authorities who said she was too young. The court is expected to rule on her case by Friday. • Elizabeth Edwards told a local news station that John Edwards said of their relationship, "Perhaps [it's] not the great love story that we hoped, but maybe a great love story nonetheless." Well, most great love stories don't involve the man possibly fathering a child with another woman. • After more than 120 years, the Beloit's girls reformatory school in Kansas closed for good in August. Before 1983 the institution often housed girls who hadn't committed criminal offenses, but were considered "incorrigible," "immoral," or had suffered abuse at home. Under some administrations, girls were punished with huge doses of vomit- and diarrhea-inducing castor oil, humiliated with forced hair clipping, or even sterilized. • After a "concerned citizen" in Yulee, Florida tipped the police that the Girls Gone Wild bus was in town, police organized an undercover investigation and arrested seven women who complied with the organizers' request that they "show their breasts so they could be photographed/filmed or so they could have their breasts spray painted. The women were charged with indecent exposure along with the bar's owner and two Girls Gone Wild employees, who were each charged with illegally operating a sexually oriented business. •

• Speaking of Palin and "broad", the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner is really sorry for calling Sarah Palin a "broad" in a front-page headline. In their defense, it was a pun ("A Broad In Asia"), but editor Rod Boyce has apologized for printing "offensive language." • The Guardian reports there has been a sudden increase in the number of female headteachers, who often make over £100,000. However, although 70% of elementary school heads are women, the few men who do work with young children are more likely to be in senior management positions than women. • According to a recent survey, swearing is "so common" in the UK that one in three Britons claim they hear a curse word every five minutes. Maybe we're just foul-mouthed Americans, but that doesn't sound that bad. • Researchers have found that your personality type may influence your success at weight loss. This sounds totally obvious, but they also claim that more optimistic people have a harder time keeping weight off. • A new study has found that taking anti-depressants early on in pregnancy may increase the risk of giving birth to a child with a heart defect. Researchers note that the risk is still relatively small, and that Zoloft, Prozac and Celexa carry a higher danger than other drugs. • After a "disastrous marriage," Robina Niaz started Turning Point for Women and Families, an organization that helps abused Muslim women in New York. She says domestic violence is no more common among Muslims than non-Muslims, but that cultural norms can make it harder to confront. • 10% of homeless veterans are now women, and their numbers are rising — many suffer from PTSD resulting from combat or sexual assault by other service members. • If new vaccination and screening programs are implemented, some say cervical cancer could disappear within 50 years. • Tufts University has instituted a new policy instructing students not to have sex while a roommate is in the room, or to allow their sex lives to affect a roommate's "privacy, study, or sleep." Translation: don't be an asshole. • Susan Atkins, follower of Charles Manson and killer of Sharon Tate, has died of brain cancer at the age of 61. • Women have long been barred from serving on submarines, supposedly because space concerns make separate bathrooms impractical. But now an admiral thinks that should change. • Hugo Chavez says "I laugh when I see people from Fox News" that President Obama smells like hope. • A new study has found that gay parents are just as fit to adopt as heterosexuals. Children raised by same-sex couples had no more emotional problems than those raised by straight parents. •

In a well-researched and disturbing article, Steven Brill portrays the city's Rubber Rooms as Kafkaesque bureaucratic purgatories, where teachers are sent because of misconduct (like molestation) or incompetence and must wait out the long process of arbitration. Brill describes one as "a windowless room in a shabby office building" in Manhattan, where the occupants sleep, play board games, or argue over folding chairs. They wait there until an arbitrator hears and resolves their cases — an average of three years. In a 2007 Times article, Samuel A. Freedman made the rooms sound even more hellish. He described one thus:

The room in question was about 1,100 square feet and on blueprints submitted to the Fire Department was designed to hold 26 people. On this day, it contained upward of 75. It had no windows, no land phone, no Internet access, no wall decorations, not even a clock. Any personal belongings left overnight were removed by custodians.

A disabled teacher with a service dog was initially allowed to sit outside this room — she was later forced to move inside, and several teachers who are allergic to dogs were forced to move out. According to Brill, several teachers confined to rubber rooms compared themselves to detainees at Guantánamo. The conditions obviously aren't as severe, but the rubber rooms are a little like prison, with an important difference — teachers who are sent there still get paid, and accrued benefits and seniority. Brill notes that one senior teacher, Brandi Scheiner, will earn $300,000 for three years in a rubber room, plus an additional $6,000 a year for the rest of her life in pension benefits — all without once entering a classroom. And that's not counting the hundreds of thousands of dollars it can cost the city to settle a teacher misconduct or incompetent case via arbitration.

Brill paints the rubber rooms as a poor solution to a difficult problem — incompetent teachers are almost impossible to actually fire. The United Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in New York, was founded in 1960 in response to a variety of injustices including "meagre salaries, tyrannical principals, witch hunts for Communists, and gender discrimination against a mostly female workforce (at one point, there was a rule requiring any woman who got pregnant to take a two-year unpaid leave)." Now, however, the UFT, like many teachers' unions across the country, has grown into an incredibly powerful body that mandates lifetime teacher tenure and compensation based on seniority rather than performance. The result: even teachers like Patricia Adams (Brill has changed her name), who was found passed out drunk in her classroom, cannot be outright fired — Adams spent two years in a rubber room and in arbitration hearings before finally being reassigned to an office job, where she passed out again and was finally fired.

Less extreme cases of incompetence are obviously even harder to deal with. Teachers' unions across the country resist the use of test scores to measure teacher performance, but the ratings system currently in place are inadequate. Brill writes that in districts that rate teachers as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, 99% receive a satisfactory rating. And even when there are more choices, 94% still get one of the top two ratings.

So why are teachers, unlike almost any other workers, exempt from any sort of performance accountability? It's tempting to chalk it up to unions unthinkingly protecting their own, but that's far from the whole story. Teacher Brandi Scheiner offers a telling perspective. Before reform efforts by Mayor Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein, she says, "everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own. There was no need to push anyone out." Another teacher Brill talked to in a rubber room said, "we can tell if we're doing our jobs. We love these children."

But the two aren't synonymous. Many people Brill talked to got into teaching because of a love of children, and it is a profession that tends to draw people with high ideals. But loving children doesn't mean you can teach them math, and commitment to an ideal isn't the same as putting it into practice. Some teachers might say that teaching is different from all other professions, because teachers are motivated by passion rather than pursuit of the bottom line. But passion by no means guarantees the kind of honest, clear-eyed self-evaluation Scheiner talks about. If teachers truly love children, they should welcome such evaluation, even when it comes, as it sometimes must, from the outside. This doesn't necessarily mean rigidly tying teacher retention to test scores, but it does mean making sure that people who want to teach children actually can. And when they can't, districts should be able to fire them — not send them to to makeshift prisons for expensive, pointless years.

The Rubber Room [New Yorker]
Where Teachers Sit, Awaiting Their Fates [NYT]

• Almost 90% of the South Korean teachers surveyed in a recent study said that there needs to be something done to keep the gender imbalance of female-to-male teachers in check. The respondents (which were, strangely enough, mostly male) felt that the lack of male teachers is leading to problems in teaching and counseling students. • A teacher from Maine has officially apologized after he played the groom in a mock wedding with a fourth grade student. Having nothing better to complain about, parents called the school to express their distress over the playground game. • The online journal PLoS Medicine has released a report on the Centre for Vulnerable Women and Children in Mumbai, which offers service to women and children in crisis. The article can be viewed in its entirety here. •  A large scale study found that pregnant woman who undergo certain invasive tests may lower their risk of miscarriage. Although researchers believe that the tests affect the rate of miscarriage, there is no evidence about women who have not undergone the procedures. • According to the ladies over at Feministing, the first ever women-run pharmacy in North America (located in Vancouver) has an unfortunate policy of excluding transwomen, a decision it justifies by the presence of a nearby health clinic for trans people. •  The New York Times reports that although congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a hormonal disorder that can cause infertility, is easy to treat, many fertility centers do not perform the simple blood test for the disease, and some doctors are unaware of its effects on fertility. •  Snuggie, the backwards bathrobe that became a pop cultural phenomenon last winter, will be back in September with more sizes and colors. How long do you think they can ride the popularity wave born from almost incessant parodying? • Tyler Weinman, the 18-year-old accused of killing 19 cats in Florida, reportedly laughed at police during questioning, before he proceeded to excitedly describe the process of dissecting cats for class. Police also said that he was eager to show off the scratches on his body, which he said he got from his neighbor's cat. More horrible details here. •

While we can lay some of the blame at the door of increased awareness, a more salacious media, and a culture that encourages victims to come forward — and, it must be said, sue — this alone does not explain the dramatic upswings in female teacher-student "relationships". In one week last year, Tampa saw three such cases:

'I loved today,' 28-year-old math teacher Stephanie Ragusa had texted her alleged 14-year-old lover at Davidsen Middle School. 'The sex was amazing.' Those arrests stole the spotlight from married English teacher Jennifer Mally, 26, who that same week pleaded guilty in Arizona for her affair with a 16-year-old, often conducted in the back of her Nissan Xterra. Two months earlier, Rebecca Bogard, a 27-year-old science teacher in Mississippi, allegedly seduced a 15-year-old in her Jaguar with plates that read grrrrr, and later texted the boy, "I love you, yeah it was the best, which night was the best 4 you, I'm sensitive but not sore, you were good." Scandalous as those cases were, they were followed by more arrests — notably that of Julie Pritchett, 34, a teacher in Alabama accused of seducing eight members of the high school baseball team.

The new Rolling Stone profiles one such case, between an attractive young gym teacher who began a relationship (ie, statutory rape) with a 15-year-old football star named Jason Eickmeyer. The article is highly sympathetic to the young man, whose home life was in shambles and who opened his heart to the pretty teacher, Traci Tapp, reading her his poetry and confessing his insecurities. When the affair blew up — she left him for a football coach — the teen was devastated and fell into a self-destructive spiral of self-mutilation and rage; going public with his accusations only earned him outcast status at school. Now 21, he is deeply in debt, with no prospects, and still living in his hometown. His one pleasure, he says, is coaching 9-year-olds in football; his girlfriend is 34. Ms. Tapp, despite allegations of numerous relationships with students, pleaded to a single count of "offensive touching," was fined $225 dollars and works as a real estate agent.

Although the article is sympathetic to the young man, the comments on Rolling Stone's website are revealing: Boo hoo, you lived out every boy's fantasy with a hot teacher, they say. Get over it. This is fairly typical of the way in which we view such cases: the boys — save the very young — are not thought to be terribly affected by such a situation; at best, it's a coup. Indeed, if anyone condemns these women, it is more likely other women than men. Says Eickmeyer, "'You are a guy, and it's not supposed to bother you.' But it really did mess me up.'" The women, moreover, are regarded often as sexy Mrs. Robinsons — sick, sure, but not predators as such. And their penalties reflect this — a stark contrast to men who abuse girls of the same age.

Of course, it's not equivalent: the nature of the physical act is not the same, the consequences are different, and the truth is, a teen boy is often likely to regard such an experience as a lark. (Says one friend of the boy's, "We couldn't believe it...we were still virgins, and he was hitting it with teachers! It was pretty fucking sweet." A teen girl's reaction would probably be more complicated, to say the least.) The truth is, it's not as stark a power dynamic or so clear a case of exploitation. Besides, although more appalling, male teachers with young girls is somehow more expected: a part of us feels that the attraction to a Lolita is normal, expected — and as such, the inability to withstand this natural temptation is both more shameful and less strange. Women might jokingly drool over an underage star now, and it has none of the sleaziness of a guy doing the same thing, because it's understood we'd never do it. Except, of course, as Rolling Stone's article shows, women do:

Though the general belief about women who proposition students holds that there's something wrong with them — a mental disorder, a history of abuse — experts are beginning to question that assumption. 'Usually it's someone who is quite normal but has poor boundaries and has not had success with adult relationships,' says Stephen Braveman, a sex therapist noted for his work with male victims of sexual abuse. 'Throw in a little bit of immaturity, and we have the perfect storm for sexual abuse of this kind,' Braveman says. 'They're lonely. They're looking for love, and they're finding it in the wrong place.'

In other words, there but for the grace of God go the rest of us. Of course, age should not be the deciding factor: anyone in a pedagogical relationship should, legal barriers aside, not be sleeping with a student (something the Washington State courts don't agree with, apparently.) But looking at Jossip's "Gallery of Rape-y Teachers," (no trivializing there!) a pattern seems to develop: the women profiled are either pretty and young, or older, plainer. In both cases, it doesn't seem hard to speculate about the attraction of high school: either a chance to re-live glory days to which adult life never measured up; or, alternatively, going back to a scene of embarrassment and unhappiness and, this time, taking control and getting a chance with a popular boy. An oversimplification, sure, but worth thinking about; as a rule, these women seem less like general sexual predators with uncontrollable appetites than those who've developed "feelings" for specific boys. Better? No, but arguably less dangerous. And why now? Well, certainly youth culture has never been as glorified or exalted; hot 21-year-olds playing high-school students all over prime time has a lot of us lusting after "16-year-olds." We all know kids today are sexually active to a degree they've never been before, and Facebook and texting blur the boundaries of authority more and more. Has adult female attraction for young boys always been around, and is only now becoming public? Certainly the bulk of teen boys are not at the peak of their beauty, which may have something to do with it; has the prevalence of Retin-A, the importance of grooming and weight-lifting, distasteful as the question may be, had anything to do with the strange up-swing? When we feel that involuntary shudder of revulsion at reading one of these stories, how much of it is bafflement, and how much unwilling recognition of something we have felt, but stopped and banished? I have heard both from women — but only in private.

Sex, Lies And Phys Ed [Rolling Stone]

Related: Teacher Sent Sexually Explicit Texts To Schoolboy [Telegraph]
A Rogues' Gallery Of Rape-y Teachers [Jossip]
Should Student-Teacher Sex Always Be Illegal? [Salon]

Image via EthicsCrisis.

• Meanwhile, a judge has ordered a woman from Iowa to stay away from her fiance on Monday after she bit his hand and drove over his foot. • The National Education Association says that male US teachers are at a 40-year low, with a measly number of them in early education. • A Canadian man is currently on trial for two counts of first-degree murder because two of his former girlfriends died from HIV-related cancers after he had unprotected sex with them and lied about his HIV-poisitive status. • Meanwhile, inSPOT, a website that provides free, anonymous STD-anouncement e-cards for people who have STDs to send to their former sexual partners has sent 49,500 cards since 2004. • Studies say that the often-recommended cup of coffee to cure headaches related to post-lumbar puncture procedures is not effective. • A 38-year-old New York man was charged with assault after he hit his 62-year-old girlfriend in the eye with a roll of toilet paper on Sunday. • A former HS cheerleader is fighting a RIAA lawsuit that says that she must pay $7,400 for pirated music she downloaded when she first entered high school. • Try to hide your shock: A new study reveals that the LAPD is more likely to stop and search black and Hispanic residents than whites. • Taffey Anderson, a mom from Oregon, says she plans on burning The Book Of Bunny Suicides, which her teenage son checked out from his high school library, because she thinks the book is "not OK."• An 85-year-old table tennis champion says that it is hard to find worthy competition in her age range. • Residents of the city of Plymouth in the UK are upset that a strip club that has opened near the historic Mayflower Steps will deter tourists from the area. • The lawyers of Lisa Nowak, the astronaut accused of attempting to kidnap another female astronaut, were back in court today fighting to keep away potentially incriminating evidence from being admitted into her trial because she was taken advantage of by the police when the evidence was obtained. • A study of university students has found that an emphasis on the way that skin cancer will ruin a person's appearance is the most effective way to get people to reduce their use of indoor tanning beds. •

Can I Be A Schoolteacher AND A Slut? from Pot Psychology on Vimeo.

So what do we learn? Well, we learn that the rich fucks who brought these precious kids into the world are not very sensitive to the plight of Danielle McGuire. In fact, they sorta discipline her for viewing their kids' Facebook pages under a false name. What the fuck? Well, see, last year a teacher wrote a satirical novel based on the school and, you know, it eroded community "trust." Wait, is "trust" the right word, guys?

The whole story is a painful read, one of those murky things where you feel everyone sinking into the putrid realm of Encyclopedia Dramaticata. But whatever; you know, teaching is a fucking bitch no matter where you do it, so I thought I'd use this space to deliver this message to high school teachers: high school students are the lowest life form. Please assume that they are jerking off to your image even as they are discussing your lesbianism and assailing your leftist ideology in forums. Don't read about it on the internet. You probably just represent an affront to all the values with which their despicable parents have reared them, and also, remember, they are worse than terrorists. Take heart in their antagonism. I recently attended my high school reunion, and all the shitheads were talking about was how you saved them from turning into Republicans.

Academy X
After Facebook Scandal, Horace Mann Forced To Ask What Values It Should Teach [NY Mag]