Employment & Labor Insider

You can't fix stupid.

Homo sapiens is fired for teaching about homophones (and his sister is a known thespian rumored to have dramaturgical aspirations). A teacher at a private language school in Utah says that he was fired by the director for posting about homophones on an educational blog, which the director allegedly believed was promoting a gay agenda.

Homophones, as we all know, are words that sound the same but are spelled differently and mean different things. Like, "bear" and "bare," or "red" and "read" (past tense). There's nothing sexual about homophones. Well, except for "sex" and "sects." Maybe the director has a point, after all.

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This article has a picture of the teacher, manifestly displaying his epidermis.

P.S. - "Homo" is a prefix from Greek meaning "same." It is also the name for the human genus.

P.P.S. - Read this. I am in awe.

"Don't hate me because I'm white." A police officer in the town of Moultrie, Georgia, who made Barney Fife look competent, was forced to resign and was sure it was because he was white. The fact that he'd left his squad car with the engine running and his window down, backed the car into a light pole, left the car while it wasn't in "park," ran a red light, didn't tell the dispatchers where he was, caused a wreck when he used his cell phone while driving, drove 20 miles over the speed limit, wrecked his car and couldn't remember how he'd done it, accidentally shot himself with his firearm, lost the notebook that contained his incident reports, left his shotgun on the steps of the entrance to the police department, lost a pager and a gas card, lost a $100 counterfeit bill that was evidence, failed to put documents into evidence, "failed to immediately confiscate a firearm with an altered serial number that somebody was attempting to pawn," failed to use a voice recorder in an interview, found a knife in the trunk of his car and had no idea how it got there or whether it was evidence, lost a suspect's cell phone, was late for court, frequently missed training sessions, arrested the wrong person, spoke rudely to a fellow officer in the presence of a witness, and failed to get the police dog he was in charge of recertified as a K-9 dog, had nothing to do with it.

(Summary judgment for police department on race discrimination and retaliation claims, and the Town of Moultrie, Georgia, is sleeping better tonight. However, "Barney's" claims for unpaid wages related to time he spent caring for the police dog will go to trial.)

Hmmm . . . maybe you'd be happier in another line of work, d'ya think? Suburban Philadelphia honors English teacher Natalie Munroe was doing fine in her career until she decided to start venting on her blog about her students. On Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?, Ms. Munroe reportedly used words to describe her charges like "jerk," "rat-like," "dunderhead," "frightfully dim," and "whiny simpering grade-grubber with an unrealistically high perception of own ability level."*

*Impressive verbiage. You can tell she's an honors English teacher.

She also said "that parents 'were breeding a disgusting brood of insolent, unappreciative, selfish brats.'"

The school was not thrilled when word got out through students' social media postings, which then drew the attention of mainstream media like . . . "The Huffington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox News, Reuters, the Associated Press, and the Philadelphia Inquirer." Ms. Munroe was initially suspended, and when she returned, students were allowed to opt out of her classes, which they did, leaving her classes too small to be viable. Then the school system fired her, and she sued, claiming retaliation for exercising her First Amendment rights.

A federal judge in Philadelphia ruled last week that her blog was primarily personal, and that her statements about the kids and parents were not protected because the blog contained "gratuitously demeaning and insulting language inextricably intertwined with her occasional discussions of public issues." The Honorable Cynthia Rufe apparently has a way with words, too. English major?

(Summary judgment for the school system.)