The Week In Arguably Inappropriate Teacher Behavior

Teachers these days! From an alleged “vagina dance” sex-ed lesson to classroom sex as “insulin care” to sexist firemen, a run-down of recent classroom dramas.

“You’re a woman, you’re small and you’re pretty.” That’s what Montreal firefighting instructor Marc Deschenes allegedly told a female student. He was talking about what was wrong with her, by the way. He was dismissed this week after, among other things, showing a video clip of topless beach aerobics, and comments including telling students “the best way to carry a 50-foot hose was to ‘treat it like a girl’ that was being lifted by the buttocks and “allegedly us[ing] the term ‘c—- ring’ to describe a band-shaped piece of firefighter equipment.” That stands for cockring.

Recently-released testimony from Brooklyn high school teachers Alini Brito and Cindy Mauro offers the following defense after a janitor found them “naked from the waist up with [Mauro, fully naked] kneeling between her legs” in a classroom during school hours. Brito says she’s a diabetic and Mauro was simply giving her an insulin shot! Naked. (Brito contends she was clothed). Her account actually includes Mauro telling her, “Let’s go upstairs. I have sugar and candy in my room.” State arbitrators did not buy it.

The Illinois Family Institute has complained about a sex education teacher who explained the female anatomy with a “Vagina Dance” that involves “pointing to and singing about reproductive parts while prancing around the room… set to the tune of the Hokey Pokey.” The school has responded that this “is overtly misrepresentative of the activity in class. There was no music, no song and no movement around the class. The name that the report gave it is a nickname that the students have called it. It is not the name the teacher gave it.” But why let facts get in the way of The Vagina Dance?

An English teacher is fired for writing her students into a “racy” self-published novel defends herself as being “innovative.” She said she had been told her teenage male students were “overtly racist, violent and misogynistic” and decided to write the book to engage them. According to the Independent, the book is “peppered with expletives, names several teachers and features five Year 11 pupils — all real students and referred to as Miss Rusty’s favourites. One pupil is referred to as fantasizing and flirting with Mrs Rustamova.” Her students and some parents demonstrated on her behalf.