Remember when you were kids...

[stevie_d_64]

And you used to play cops and robbers, good guys and bad guys...

Here's a teacher who was demonstrating something interesting, and one of the students got up and took him out in a play acting situation, and the discussion apparently insued from there about the whole incident...

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

The administrators fired him for this lesson...

[nitrogen]

I'd have voted, "Not proper, but not fired"
The execution was insensitive and flawed, but the lesson was a good one, in my opinion. I'd have limited it to discussion, not the actual "example"

[txinvestigator]

I cannot believe the idiots in academia management.

[stevie_d_64]

I'm waiting for Venus to chime in...There is always some valuable insight from their perspective...

Nitro, is your objection based upon the timing??? Would you believe it was too soon to present a situation like this to student???

Txi, nobody said administrators were the sharpest bowling balls in the bag...

[pbandjelly]

I'd have voted, "Not proper, but not fired"

Agreed.
This guy taught Finance. not really a harbor for political discourse, IMO.
from a management perspective, you tell your faculty to have discussions on the topic, and then react to something you didn't like?
I mean, really?
The management should have given guidelines to the discussion if they wanted to control the scope of what and how things were to be spoken about.

[j1132s]

I didn't vote, because I think although his conduct wasn't appropriate but he shouldn't be fired. colleges give their professors great latitude in teaching, but i guess he was just an adjunct prof :)

[KBCraig]

I'd have voted, "Not proper, but not fired"

Agreed.
This guy taught Finance. not really a harbor for political discourse, IMO.

Exactly my take. "We" object when Humanities instructors offer unsolicited opinions on political issues. This teacher's link to relevant course matter was tenuous at best. It had nothing to do with his course.

And no, he shouldn't have been fired.

[HankB]

No . . . and not fired.

I see no connection with the class he was SUPPOSED to be teaching - Financial Accounting. He should have been reprimanded for failing to do the job he was hired to do - and that's it. (Unless this was just the latest in a long line of deviations from the class topic, in which case his dismissal was justified; not because of the way he discussed the VT shooting, but because he wasn't teaching Financial Accounting.)

[Cosmo 9]

Unless there's alot more to this story I see nothing wrong with his lesson.

[kauboy]

The fired Prof has posted a series on YouTube with his response to the firing. He gives a pretty good explanation of what he did and the reaction he got from the students versus the administration.
Fired Professor Speaks 1/4
Fired Professor Speaks 2/4
Fired Professor Speaks 3/4
Fired Professor Speaks 4/4

I don't think he did anything wrong. Especially by his account, stating that all of the students agreed to take part in his demonstration (even though they didn't have a clue what he was going to do )

[Venus Pax]

"The college issued a statement saying: "Emmanuel College has clear standards of classroom and campus conduct, and does not in any way condone the use of discriminatory or obscene language." "
This is a quote from the article. I didn't read/hear where his language was inflamatory or profane.


I voted that the teacher should not have been terminated. I believe that self-defense discussions are matters that we should be encouraging students to discuss in the classroom. It is a fact in our current climate, and unless a school's mascot is the ostrich, school officials would be wise to encourage it.

However, he was out of his area of expertise. If this was a finance class, he should have been discussing material in the curriculum. I teach language arts; we don't discuss quantum physics. I believe he should have been spoken to about sticking to his curriculum, but starting a RKBA club on campus for such discussions.
Had he been a sociology, psychology, humanities, etc, instructor, this would have been more appropriate.

I hope this is clear. I've gotta get... dinner's done.

[stroo]

If he had done this out of the blue, I would agree with improper. But his school's administration encouraged him to discuss VT. In that context, his actions seem entirely proper.

[Tote 9]

I see nothing wrong with what he said or did. You don't have to be an expert
on guns, defence or anything else for that matter. He was
encouraged to talk about the VA> Tech. shooting and thats what he did.

He taught a simple lesson.---No one fought back as he said. NO one else
had a gun but the shooter, thereby he had his way. He simply said, less gun
controll would have allowed someone be sides the shooter to have a
gun.

If several students had attacted the shooter at the same time as they
did on the plane in 911 he wouldn't have killed as many as he did.

I know that would have been very hard especially for students, but
it could have worked. What would I have done were I there as a student or Teacher?? I don't know

[srothstein]

I don't think the professor should have been fired. At first, I thought that he was out of line since it was a finance class. Part of what got me in that was he was making a political statement about the situation (and I have nothing against that) and then he tried to come up with a weak excuse about it being a lead in to the subject of how these type of eevents afect the financial markets.

But the more I thought about it, especially after I read VP's post about defense, I thought to myself that every teacher has a responsibility to prepare their students for this kind of attack. When you are dealing with college age students, it is not unreasonable to teach them the realities of life, and that includes defending themselves from attack. We psoted, and I personally thought, it was unbelieveable that no one attacked while he was reloading. The answer was hypothesized as the kids getting their knowledge from TV and not realizing how long he had or how many bullets he had (and the well known "I am shot so I am dead" training from being a kid may have killed some who could have survived).

In this case, he was right to show them that this was not something to cower from and that they should be able to defend themselves. Maybe we should require all teacehrs and professors to discuss how to survive these types of attacks with their students, based on the age of the student.

[nitrogen]

Nitro, is your objection based upon the timing??? Would you believe it was too soon to present a situation like this to student???

I'm projecting a bit, admittedly. The VT Tragedy made me very angry. I feel that walking around, shouting "BANG" at your students is a poor way to make a good point. Timing didn't have as much to do with it. I personally feel that just opening it up to discussion would have been a more "intellectually honest" method. I do not condone "gotcha" tactics to make points via emotion. I also acknowledge that any feeling I might have about HOW he made his point really don't matter. It's not how I would have done it, but he's not me. He's a professional educator who knows a lot more about educating students than me, so it should be his call.