Blue Collar Scientist

There have been two pretty high profile cases of teachers being fired recently, and I thought it was time to comment on both.

The first one involves the firing of substitute teacher Jim Piculas in Florida for engaging in a bit of performance art. Piculas performed a pretty standard magic trick in his classroom, making a toothpick disappear and then reappear. Years ago when I was a kid I did a trick like this; that means, by definition, that it is a beginner’s trick and one that just about anyone can learn.

Piculas probably did the trick because such things are encouraged by education experts as ways of gaining the attention of the class, regulating the classroom, and winning the respect of the kids. I’ve seen such advice dispensed at several educational conferences. If you do a google search, you will find 420,000 references to classroom management and magic tricks. Many of the pages advocate using magic in the classroom, especially for substitute teachers like Piculas; for example one suggests performing tricks as rewards:

If you have special kid friendly talents, sometimes these can be used as great classroom management techniques! If you can play the guitar, bring that in with you and play for them when they are working quietly…. If you know some magic tricks, that works well in the same way. Show them one at the beginning of class, and then offer to show them more as rewards. Juggling can be used in the same way, if this is something you are capable of doing.

Even religious school authorities advocate magic tricks in the classroom, although in this case the trick is being performed by the kids:

Pastoral Care Day at our school takes place at the end of every term. Children may choose to sing a song, recite a poem, read a short story, crack a joke or say a riddle, share an invention, show their art work, put on a one-minute skit, dance or sing to music, play on an instrument, do a magic trick, etc.

Suffice it to say, performing magic tricks in the classroom is a widely sanctioned professional activity amongst teachers, and it has a very important role in classroom management. You don’t have to go far at all to find experienced educators advocating such performances.

And the key here is performance. Magic performers¹ know that what they do is performance art, and they don’t claim - in fact they specifically deny - that they are using supernatural forces to accomplish the illusion. However, that is not the stance that the Pasco County School District has taken - they’ve specifically accused Piculas of engaging in wizardry. And if they are responding to a student’s complaint via its parents - well, maybe they ought to re-evaluate what they are teaching in this school district. Normal people know magic isn’t real.

I suppose it would be going too far to say that the school district has established a religious test for employment - their issue is that engaging in wizardry is unacceptable in their schools, not, apparently, being a wizard. But one wonders about the edge cases. Christians are allowed to pray in schools; is disappearing a toothpick and then re-appearing it significantly more disruptive than a teacher who retreats into an internal mental world to have a chat with the creator of the universe? I wonder what kind of hay a lawyer could make of this situation. Of course Piculas, who probably wants to be able to get other jobs, would be wise not to take on such an experiment unless he’s looking to change careers. Opposing the establishment will get you blackballed.

And that leads us to our other case. Wendy Gonaver, an American Studies teacher who teaches units on constitutional freedoms, was fired from her job for not taking a loyalty oath exactly as written in the California constitution. Gonaver is a Quaker, and hence a pacifist. The loyalty oath, which dates from the McCarthy era, requires that those who take it defend the Constitution of the United States and of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

As that language is the same language used in the loyalty oaths that are taken by people who are shortly going to be sent out to kill America’s enemies, Gonaver wanted to include a statement that she would do so non-violently. This is permitted by other state institutions, but not by hers, who chose to take a hard line on the matter. They even claim that adding or supplementing material that explains an oath-taker’s interpretation of the oath is against the law. Presumably we’re to be grateful that Gonaver wasn’t thrown into jail for declaring her intention to commit a crime and recruiting conspirators.

It is not the first time the institution has pulled hard-line tactics. Marianne Kearney-Brown took the oath, but inserted the word “nonviolently” into it before she signed it. She was fired for her trouble. Kearney-Brown is a math teacher who specializes in teaching math-phobic and otherwise not math-inclined students, so there’s a depressingly urgent need for her and people like her to be able to get jobs teaching math. Her case gathered enough media attention that she was eventually rehired.

The main effect that California’s loyalty oath has on state hiring is to exclude Quakers and Jehova’s Witnesses from employment. Apparently, the oath also makes reference to god, but a state supreme court case struck that down, allowing atheists, agnostics, and polytheists to get jobs in state government in California.

One might also mention that if you have to take an oath to get the job, that would appear (at least to the oath-taker) to be taking an oath under duress. I’m not sure that’s going to be particularly effective at rooting out commies, or barring people who won’t take up guns and kill people the state says are bad. Only principled commies or pacifists will be stopped. Spies and traitors, if there really are any² will slip through.

In any case, these three examples serve to illustrate the same point. The government can’t seem to figure out that it shouldn’t impose religious tests on employment, and is stupefied by the idea that it should impose tests of merit instead. The sooner this generation of bureaucratic dunderheads goes off to their retirement, the better.

1. Excepting Yuri Geller and a few other such frauds. [↩]
2. We really only hear about them from political delusionaries who make their livings by smearing people for supposedly believing weird things; the real spies and traitors get rooted out periodically by the FBI and are generally shown to have been working for money. [↩]