And it's called "teaching"

Here’s an odd one. A high school teacher at Cleveland’s Brooklyn High assigned his students a research project on Internet pornography. Darn! I must have been absent the day they handed out the porn assignment at my high school. This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “born too late.” When I was in high school, research consisted of three steps 1) copy a few pages out of the World Book Encyclopedia 2) change happy to glad and 3) hand it in. Now a days not only do high school kids have Internet access to copy from, they get to get to use all of that technology to look up porn. Cool!

But alas, the grown ups found out and ruined the party. So the nutty teacher got canned, right? Well no, according to Superintendent Jeff Lampert, the teacher's apparent noble goal was to discuss the harmful effects of pornography, so it was well-intentioned which in today’s world makes it fine and dandy.

What’s next? I got it! Next week’s assignment for students is two fold. The kids will be asked to venture into the deep recesses of inner city Cleveland to make a crack cocaine buy from a person of color (It’s African-American month). They are then expected to stiff the dealer and volunteer to pay off the drugs by selling them at Brooklyn High. I can hear the teacher now, “OK, the porn was just my personal thing. But this drug thing is different. We want students to experience and empathize with the inner city gang drug life.” Superintendent Lampert, who doubted that the teacher would face any punishment for the porn assignment, no doubt will opine, “as long as the kids don’t get high on school property, it’s out of my hands.” Of course all of this is being done while the majority of Brooklyn High students have trouble getting through a Dick and Jane book, and when handed a dollar bill, can’t make change for a 50 cent coke unless the computer figures it for them.

Hint to Jeff Lampert and the Brooklyn School board: The best case is that you have a teacher with colossally poor judgment. The worst case is that you some kind of dangerous pervert in the midst of your student population. In either case, you have a problem that you might want to do something about.