The secret sex lives of teachers:  Educators have under fire for X-rated extracurricular activities

The revelation that Judy Buranich, the same woman teaching classics like “Catcher in the Rye” to high school students, also writes erotic novels with names like “Rednecks ‘n’ Romance” shocked a small group of parents in the town of Middleburg, Penn. They called up local news outlets, which were all too happy to relay the parents’ tasty morsels of outrage and paranoia, like: “I don’t want my son sitting in her class thinking, is she looking at him in a certain way.” The next stop: The Daily Mail, naturally.

At no point was Buranich, who writes erotica as Judy Mays, in danger of losing her job; sanely, the administration didn’t actually consider disciplining her over her legal side-job. But there is clearly something irresistible about teachers with decidedly adult extracurricular activities, and many have not been so lucky as Buranich. In 2009, a Florida biology teacher was fired after photos of her in a bikini were discovered online (interestingly enough, after failing to find a new teaching job, she turned to porn). Earlier this year, a teacher in San Diego contested his firing over posting an ad—with a photo of his face and his penis—on Craigslist’s men-seeking-men section. Last month, a high school secretary in Quebec was sacked after it was discovered that she had done porn; and just the month before, a Florida high school teacher was canned when her X-rated past surfaced. Then, of course, there’s Melissa Petro who recently wrote in Salon about losing her job over her public admission of a sex work past.

It kind of makes you wonder why we care so much about what teachers do in their private and—with the exception of Petro—entirely legal sex lives. This is part of a problem popping up in nearly every profession, not just teaching. So many of us live online—posting photos to Flickr, checking in on Foursquare, tweeting about Happy Hour exploits and casually commenting on Facebook friends’ walls. Never before has it been so difficult to keep our private selves totally private, and the potential for professional conflict is huge. The stakes are raised even higher when it comes to teachers, though. As concerned parents have pointed out, they’re teaching “our kids,” the young and impressionable future generation. Does being an erotica writer make one unfit for that task? What about being a fan of Craigslist’s “casual encounters” or a former sex worker?  Read Article

By Tracy Clark-Flory
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