Being a teacher is, for many, a calling. Helping educate children is a tremendous responsibility. It’s not a job just anyone can do or, at least, it’s not a job just anyone should do. But sometimes beggars can’t be choosers and school boards hire whoever shows up with a diploma. That has led to several outrageous stories of teachers who went well beyond their job descriptions and ended up getting fired as a result.
Lest we forget, there’s also a flip side to this coin. Because of the influence of politics, parents, red tape and all around bad ideas, sometimes a good teacher will get fired for just an unbelievable reason. Let’s take a look.
10. A Teacher Was Fired for Writing a Blog on Homophones
What’s your opinion on homophones? Tim Torkildson was working as a social media strategist for the Nomen Global Language Center, an ESL school, in Utah. Part of his job was making blog posts about topics relevant to ESL students. That included explaining parts of the English language, like homophones.
As anyone aware of homophones might expect, the blog post dealt with words that sounded similar but had different meanings. However, Torkildson’s boss may have neglected to read the blog or look up the meaning of the word. Torkildson was fired for posting something people might think supported “the gay agenda.”
According to Torkildson, the owner of the company called him into his office after he posted the blog and fired him. The owner refuted this later saying it was just because his blogs went off on tangents. That said, they still removed the blog post, and the owner said the concept was too complex for their students, anyway.
9. A Substitute Teacher Was Fired for Getting Dating Advice
It’s important for teachers to separate their work life from their personal life. This can be hard because they may spend more hours per week with their students than with their own families. You can build a genuine closeness there and that leads to some teachers openly talking about their own lives. Not always a good idea, though.
A substitute teacher in New York, who clearly didn’t have that history of familiarity with her students to fall back on as an excuse, was fired for soliciting dating advice from fourth graders. According to reports, the 45-year-old woman had the children help her act out dating scenarios, where a student would play the potential male partner on a date and she would play herself.
For what it’s worth, it wasn’t suggested she did anything unseemly with the students that involved anything sexual. But she was having them offer advice on who she should date between two men and which qualities in men were ones she should look for as she was dealing with a man she described as a jerk.
When the school board learned of what she’d done, she was let go.
8. A Florida teacher Was Fired for Having Students Write Obituaries Before an Active Shooter Drill
It’s hard to relate to the school experience kids have these days if you’re an adult. Most adults never had to deal with things like active shooter drills which are commonplace all across America now. Kids shouldn’t have to practice for how to avoid dying at school, but they do. One Florida teacher made it worse, though.
Students at Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando were scheduled to have an active shooter drill. Psychology teacher Jeffrey Keene gave them an assignment to write their own obituaries ahead of time. His reasoning was that, in light of the drill, it would give the students a chance to reflect on what was important in their lives. Before the end of the day, he was fired.
The school said he was letting go for giving an inappropriate assignment about school violence. Keene said he didn’t regret giving the assignment because he felt it’s important to “talk real” to kids in that environment, and it’s something they were already talking about, anyway.
7. Ann Stewart Was Fired for Being a Witch
History has not been kind to people accused of being witches. Whether they were hung or crucified or put on scales opposite a duck, they’re often presumed guilty until proven innocent. Even up through the 1970s they were being subjected to some harsh treatment even if that didn’t include murder.
Ann Stewart was fired from her position as a teacher in Tucson, Arizona in 1971 which led to an event that even has its own Wikipedia page called the Flowing Wells Witch Trial. Stewart was fired for teaching students about witchcraft and being a witch, being insubordinate, a poor influence on students,causing mental stress to other teachers and teaching outside of curriculum.
Stewart said she told no one she was a witch, just that she had the characteristics of one and the students ran with it. It was the principal of the school who made an ethics complaint about her and she was later dismissed indefinitely because of it.
On the bright side, Stewart was a tenured teacher, and the school did not follow proper procedure for dismissing her. That allowed Stewart to sue, and the courts forced the school to give her job back though it’s not clear how things progressed from there.
6. Oklahoma Teacher Was Fired After Taking Students on a Walmart Run
It’s no secret that teachers often buy a lot of supplies out of their own pocket for their classrooms. They also do a lot of extra work on their own time like prepping, planning and grading. But they’re still expected to make the most of class time with students. This was not something Oklahoma teacher Heather Cagle was good at.
In 2014, Cagle was fired after she took her students on a run to Walmart to get snacks. That already seems like a poorly thought out plan since getting snacks isn’t really part of any school day. But it gets worse!
Cagle only had a Honda Accord to get her and 11 students to the Walmart. Feel free to Google the interior of a Honda Accord if you want to guess how many people it holds. It’s not 11 plus a driver, so Cagle stuffed two of her students in the trunk and clown-carred the other nine into the Accord.
When the school board found out, they voted four to one to have her fired.
5. A Norwegian Teacher Had Students Play with Her Blood
What’s the grossest thing you can imagine a teacher doing with their students that isn’t obviously, overtly criminal? If it involves tasting blood you’ve come to the right place.
A Norwegian teacher brought in a vial of her own blood for students, aged three to six, to taste, and taste it they did. Word is that as many as a dozen students had a sample after the teacher poured it onto a plate and started a Dracula buffet for them.
The students were invited to touch the blood, which they did, and when one asked how to clean it off their finger the teacher just demonstrated licking it off her own finger, so the kids did the same.
The teacher was fired fairly soon after and tested for diseases like AIDS and hepatitis. By the time the story was published the results of the tests hadn’t come in but authorities tried to offer some reassurance by pointing out the chance for disease transmission was low.
4. A Teacher Was Fired For Letting Students Use a Classroom Closet for Sex
Every school has a “cool” teacher, the one who relates to students better than anyone else. Maybe they’re just young and more in touch, or maybe they’re really easy or let you watch movies in class. Or maybe they were like math and science teacher Quinton Wright who let kids have sex with each other in a classroom closet which is less cool and more horrible.
Wright, who also coached basketball, was letting students schedule times when they could go to the class and make use of the closet when no one else was there. It was sort of like an in-class Airbnb for, you know, high school sex. He even provided condoms.
The teacher was caught when the mother of one of his 14-year-old students saw text messages between her son and the teacher. Her son was arranging timing for closet access. He was fired when the news came to light.
He also went on to face child molestation charges and ended up being released on a technicality since the detective who signed the warrant to arrest him let a different officer sign the paperwork.
3. A Teacher Was Fired for Giving Zeros to Students Who Didn’t Do Their Work
Have you ever heard of a no zero policy? Some school boards adopted this as a way to separate behavior from academic accomplishment. The idea was that a late assignment or not handing in an assignment at all was behavior so it shouldn’t count against academic grades and that zeroes were counterproductive and destructive to a child’s academic growth. Some policies say any work handed in, no matter how bad, shows a “good faith” attempt and should automatically get a 50%.
Canadian teacher Lynden Dorval was fired in 2014 for not complying with the school board’s no-zero policy. He wasn’t grading students unfairly; he was just giving zeros to students who hadn’t given him any work to grade. Despite how logical that may sound, because of the no-zero policy he was suspended and then fired for it.
Dorval appealed and won in court. He was given all the way he would have received during the time he was out of work and a boost to a pension for the same time, though he didn’t go back to teaching.
2. A Teacher Was Fired For Making OnlyFans Videos in Her Classroom
Sometimes what happens in a classroom can get a teacher fired even if it happens after hours and no students are involved. That’s what happened with Amanda Peer, a teacher from Thunderbolt Middle School in Arizona, when people discovered she was moonlighting on OnlyFans and filming porn in her classroom after hours.
Despite posting content under a fake name and blocking access to the entire state, someone still found the videos and reported her. While she technically wasn’t fired for what she’d done, she said she was forced to resign. In one statement she said she was given the option to resign so that nothing would be made public, but obviously that didn’t happen. That said, her husband was fired from his job as a substitute after appearing in several videos with her.
1. A Florida Teacher Was Fired For Arranging a Gang Beating
You never want to hear that a teacher has put hands on your child when you’re a parent. School violence already comes in far too many forms, the last thing the world needs is for teachers to be a part of the problem. Unfortunately, it happens and, in at least this one case, it went above and beyond what any normal person could imagine.
In 2014, Dru Dehart, a woman who had been teaching for years, went out of her way to set up a 7th grader to be bullied and physically beaten by a gang of other students. In non middle school terms, she put a hit on the kid.
The events were caught on camera and show Dehart wrangling six 8th graders and encouraging them to go after a 7th grade student who backtalked her. The boy apparently said he wished he could curse at a teacher earlier in the day. Dehart then instructed the half dozen older boys to “teach him a lesson.” After they held him down, punching and kicking him, the teacher allegedly told him he wasn’t “so tough now.”
Dehart later tried to claim that the boy threatened her, but the other students backed up their classmate’s account that all he did was lament not being able to curse her out. The school conducted an investigation after which they immediately fired her.