I have seen those Tamara Hoover photographs (see LIKE A HOUSEWIFE'S KNITTING below) online and I don’t think it is the nekkid woman we should be worrying about here. I think it is Gayle Andrews, the other Austin High School art teacher, the one who turned her in. She is the one we should be worried about.
For starters, Gayle Andrews is a teacher who was willing to bitch about another teacher in front of students (it was a fight with Hoover over a pottery kiln). She bitched so much that students told her they knew how she could get Tamara Hoover in real trouble and all she had to do was check out some photographs of Hoover online. Andrews was willing to take and follow advice from adolescents on the best way to resolve her problems with Hoover (adolescents are the same people who shoot people at Colombine, don’t think blowjobs are sex, etc., and who are so insecure that half of their
lives are spent having adolescent revenge fantasies – the kind that begin with she/he/they will be sorry). These are the people Gayle Andrews was willing to listen to (You can almost hear her saying, “She’ll be sorry”). She claims she hesitated, then asked a student to show her the site. Bingo. She also says students told her “hundreds” of students knew about the site (but we all know that adolescents have a hard time with numbers, as in "Everybody's going, why can't I go?"). Uh-oh! Then she claims she quit looking because she suddenly realized that students were looking too, and it was a computer belonging to the school district. Oops! After that, she told a co-worker about what she had seen (funny how she didn’t go directly to her own supervisor). And after that, it was all over but the high school principal finding the photos of pale, skinny Tamara “quite disturbing.” Termination proceedings are under way for Hoover.
Some sort of proceedings should be under way for Andrews. How effective can she be as a teacher
after all this? She bitched to students, she was unprofessional, she looked at the photos with students, exercised worse than bad judgment, didn’t follow chain of command, etc.
And if the Austin High principal let an argument simmer in the art department for months, someone should be taking a look at that too. Isn't the principal supposed to do more than say things are "very disturbing?"
Gayle Andrews was willing to pull the rug out from under Tamara Hoover’s life over a pottery kiln. That is the inflated way adolescents exact revenge (or imagine it). Too big a response to too small an argument. Unless, of course, Andrews has something else on her mind. People who invoke the preservation of the status quo to get their way can’t be trusted. They don’t like naked. And there are a lot of other things they don’t like either, but they are often not brave enough to say so.
Personally, I would rather have my children taught by the nekkid woman.
(See LIKE A HOUSEWIFE'S KNITTING below)
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