ok, this is sort of old news, a few months old, but its resurfaced in the news again and it still makes my blood boil, and I want to hear some other peoples opinions on it.

basicly the story is this, a 2nd grade teacher took a sick day from work to be on the howard stern show in the hot wife ugly hubby contest and she wore a bikini, she won the contest and $5,000 dollars, when the school found out about this after howard stern had posted a picture of the event on his website they either fired her, or forced her to resign - this is still a bit murky Ive heard both so I wont pretend to know which, now she is unemployed and suing the school for wrongful termination amongst a few other things.

story - http://www.wfsb.com/news/16201453/detail.html

theres 2 ways of looking at this

1. she is a teacher to fairly young children and should conduct her self in a responsable , mature, way that the kids can look up to and aspire to and what she did was none of this so her termination was justified.

2. she did it on her own time away from school - plus she was not naked, she was wearing a bikini, would she have been fired if she went to the beach? what she does on her own time is her own buisness and the school had no right to fire her / force her to resign.

where I stand on this, personaly I think its bullshit, yea she took a sick day under false pretenses, which she should be penalized for, but that penalty is NOT termination, I dont think they should be able to fire her for wearing a bikini or apearing on the radio show talking about sexual stuff, I mean its not like the kids were listening to howard stern, and if they were there are bigger problems then the teacher in the bikini. if she was stark naked , or wore the bikini into the classroom or tried to show the kids the pictures / show then go ahead and fire her.

what if she went to the beach and one of her students saw her in a bikini? she is a teacher - not a nun, what she does away from school has nothing to do with what she does in school.

one last thought - one of the parents obviously saw her / heard her on this show, so its ok for them, the parents of one of these kids to listen to a radio show with that sort of stuff in it but its not ok for thier teacher to be a part of it? seems sort of like a double standard to me.

thoughts?

Thoughts? Burn the conservatives. Seriously. They're the ones going around dictating how others can conduct themselves when there's no need for it. Next thing you know they're telling me I can't jerk off in my basement while watching animal planet in a Spider-Man costume. Where's the justice!?

I don't understand why they would fire the teacher either. My closest guess is that... er... I have nothing. It just makes no sense to me. How does her appearance on the Howard Stern show have anything to do with her professional performance at the school?

There seems to be this stupid beleif that your personal life has to be carried out in a very "proper" manner or else it's a direct negative reflection of your professional life. Wich to me is total BS.

I remember watching Dr. Phil once (I know, pretty bad day huh?) and he had this high school teacher on who was fired because he has a band and they have some songs on their MySpace page and in some of the songs are "bad words". For one thing he's a high school teacher so it's not like he has little 1st graders hearing this stuff, and secondly, it's his own damn business! Of course Phil gets on his high horse and basically says that he's being innapropriate because you need to act a certain way outside of work to prove that your worthy of doing your work (it wasn't worded exactly like that, but that was the gist of it).

It's all just pathetic.

I do know that the way the school justifies its actions is by stating in the teacher's contract that certain not allowed outside of school, and that's it at the discretion of the school to terminate anyone who breaks those rules.

That's what I've heard.

It goes along the same rules as suspending a student from school for fighting, even though a fight may have been after school.

Sorry, Double post.

Obviously what she does on her own time is her business. But seriously, does she expect that her paticipation on the Howard Stern show was just going to be swept under the table. I mean its a nationally broadcast show it would eventually get back to people. She obviously was fingered as a second grade teacher and her full name was probably used during broadcast. Hopefully no one was dumb enough to mention the name of the school as thats just horribly poor judgement. Really at what point in her mind did she not just step back and think you know this may not be a healthy career decision. If it wasn't so widely broadcast her participation could be seen as harmless. Most employment contracts usually entail clauses that have to do with embarrassing behavior on part of the employee. It's seems the school is justified in their actions. Personally I just get tired of people that go into situations where something bad could happen and try not to claim fault to some degree.

Reminds me of the story of a teacher being fired a few months back for doing a skit on Tim and Eric: Great Job!, he does improve comedy on his spare time and ended up doing some stuff on Adult Swim, school didn't approve and BAMF!

I pretty much agree with everything in the original post.

My personal life is completely separated from my work life. Thats not to say that I'm not friends with co-workers outside work, I just believe that if I decide to get hammered on the weekend its no business of my employer. It shouldn't effect my status as an employee.

Was just thinking of that...course in that sense, he was doing a skit about an old woman singing about wanting to have sex with him as she watches him wash a car...its a little more extreme than this bikini incident.

You know, I may get blasted for this, but who knows.

One, nobody knows the whole story. How do we know if this teacher has a squeaky clean record or if she has numerous write ups/warnings for her behavior? Not just wearing a bikini, but maybe she has other things on her record and this was just the proverbial straw that broke the camels back. Tardiness, bad results, etc etc. After all, why would she call in sick? Why wouldn't she be upfront and take a personal day and tell them what she was doing? We are just seeing the final result of what could be a long history of issues.

Two, no matter how hard we try and fight it, when you're not at work, what you do can still affect you at work. I know at my job, even when I'm not there, I am representing my company when I'm out in public. If I do something that could make my company look bad, it could affect my job status.

Is it right? No. But it's just how it is. I don't completely alter how I behave outside of work, but I always think that if my actions lead to bad reactions (say getting in a bar brawl, arrested for DUI, etc), that I may want to rethink my actions. It has lead me to use more discretion in my day to day life. I make sure that I do my best to stay out of bad situations. If I were to enter a contest that could be publicly broadcast, I'd make damn sure my company knew I was doing it and that I took legitimate time off to do it.

That's my take. Now I have to go to work.