Thornton P. Knowles on Candy Cigarettes

Growing up I got hooked on candy cigarettes. But because those little suckers were so hard to light, I eventually switched to the real thing.

Thornton P. Knowles

Teaching While Intoxicated: Two Cases

Case 1: Ankeny, Iowa
   
      Jennifer Lynn Rich began teaching in 2001 at the East Elementary School in Ankeny, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines. On Friday February 13, 2015, the 40-year-old teacher and the mother of one of her students were overseeing a St. Valentine's Day party for Rich's kindergarten class. At two that afternoon the parent-helper called the local police department and reported the presence of a can of beer in Rich's classroom.

     A police officer showed up at the school and entered the kindergarten teacher's classroom. (I presume the kids had been dismissed by now.) Inside a leather bag the officer found six cans of Busch Light beer. Two of the beers had been recently consumed. Jennifer Rich's eyes were bloodshot and she had alcohol on her breath.

     Suspecting that the teacher was intoxicated, the police officer administered an on-site breath test that confirmed that she had recently consumed an alcoholic beverage. (A blood analysis later revealed a blood-alcohol percentage double the legal limit for driving in the state.)

     A local prosecutor charged the kindergarten teacher with one count of public intoxication and one count of child endangerment. School officials placed Rich on paid administrative leave. Not long after her arrest she resigned from the East Elementary School.

Case 2: Marshallville, Iowa

     Carissa Bryant taught sixth grade at the Lenihan Intermediate school in Marshalltown, Iowa, a small town 60 miles northeast of Des Moines. On March 4, 2015, Chief Sheriff's Deputy Steve Hoffman was at the elementary school presenting a substance abuse program. When he encountered the 33-year-old teacher he smelled alcohol on her breath and noticed that her eyes were red and that she was slurring her words.

     Deputy Hoffman took Carissa Bryant into custody and booked her into the Marshall County Jail on the misdemeanor charge of public intoxication. A blood-alcohol test placed her alcoholic content at .190 percent. In Iowa .08 percent is the threshold limit for driving under the influence.

     The elementary school teacher posted her $300 bail and was released from custody. The school principal placed Bryant on paid administrative leave.

A National Problem?

     These two teachers were caught drinking on the job because outsiders just happened to be in the schools at the right time. Because there is no national databank on how many public school teachers are fired every year for this kind of behavior, there is no way to know if this is a serious problem. One thing we do know, however, is that misbehaving teachers are rarely fired.

     Only one in 1,000 public school teachers are dismissed for performance related reasons. In the legal profession that number is one in 97 and in medicine, one in 57.

     Under these circumstances it is reasonable to suspect that classroom drinking is a problem made worse by the fact public school teachers are protected against dismissal by tenure and teacher unions.

Thornton P. Knowles On His Mother's Stories

My mother liked to tell stories, and most of them featured either someone's gruesome death or some bizarre disease she had heard about. For a kid, these tales of woe were often unsettling and hard to listen to. But there was one store that caught my imagination, and while I didn't believe a word of it, I repeated the story to all of my friends who did buy it hook line and sinker. It went like this: The husband of one of my mother's friends suffered a heart attack and was being transported to the emergency room in a city ambulance. As the vehicle sped up a steep hill on a cobbled street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the rear doors burst open. The patient, strapped on a stretcher, flew out the back of the ambulance and bounced down the hill into an oncoming truck. He was, as they say, killed instantly. Because I felt the ending of the story needed a boost, I added this: Following the accident, all ambulance attendants in the city had to equip their patients with helmets. Because my friends believed this as well, they didn't appreciate my attempt at dark humor. I was an idiot for passing this story on, and they were dimwits for believing it. It was great growing up in West Virginia.

Lawyer Suicides

     Lawyers are killing themselves [according to] the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….Lawyers ranked fourth when the proportion of suicides in that profession is compared to suicides in all other occupations in the study population….They come right behind dentists, pharmacists, and physicians.

     Lawyers are also prone to depression, which the American Psychological Association identified as the most likely trigger for suicide. Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to suffer from depression than non-lawyers.

     Prominent lawyers keep turning up dead….Kentucky has seen 15 known lawyer suicides since 2010….There was no clear explanation for the rash of suicides in Kentucky, two of which came days apart. "It's been primarily men," said Kentucky Bar Association Executive Director John Meyers. "To a large degree it's been trial attorneys. The men are primarily middle-aged."

Rosa Fores and Rose Marie Arce, "Why Are Lawyers Killing Themselves?" CNN, January 20, 2014

The Get-A-Way Kayak

     A fast-paddling Good Samaritan in a kayak helped sheriff's deputies in Washington state nab a suspected Christmas mail thief…Deputies received multiple calls on Wednesday morning December 24, 2014 that a man and a woman were going through mailboxes around the town of Sammamish. While deputies were on their way, residents spotted a car filled with mail and used their cars to block it in.

     The suspected mail thieves ran off, and one was caught immediately. The other fled into a nearby pond with a kayak he stole out of a yard. A resident grabbed his own kayak, caught up with the suspect and convinced him to return to shore where he was arrested.

     The sheriff's office said the suspect didn't get very far because he was using his hands to paddle.

"Good Samaritan in a Kayak Helps Nab Suspected Christmas Mail Thieves in Washington State," Associated Press, December 25, 2014 

Thornton P. Knowles On The Harsh Reality Of Life

Growing up, the toughest pill to swallow is the realization that life is not fair and that nothing is on the level. The quality of one's life depends on how one deals with this harsh reality. To various degrees, this reality eventually destroys all of us.

Thornton P. Knowles

Silence is Golden

We are a nation of talkers. Everyone is talking--nonstop. We talk about everything, and about nothing, and we don't listen because we're too busy talking. Often the talking turns into shouting. Turn on your television and you get talking heads going on and on about sports, politics, the weather, entertainment celebrities, and, of course, themselves. And there's talk radio with more of the same. We're in the Golden Age of Talk. The air is filled with words. There's nowhere to go to get away from it. Some day scientists my find that all of this media gabbing caused climate change. What ever happened to the old adage: "Silence is Golden."

Cases For Home Schooling

The Criminal Compliment

     An elementary school principal in North Carolina recently suspended a fourth grader for sexual harassment after the 9-year-old called one of his teachers "cute." (One can only imagine what would have happened to the kid if he had called her "ugly.") The reason behind the school suspension caused such an uproar the school board forced the principal, after a 44-year career in education (I'm thinking of the Peter Principle here), to retire. While admitting that he may have been a little quick on the sexual harassment trigger, the public school administrator blamed his fall from grace on media overreaction to his overreaction. The principal wanted people to believe that because he lost his job, he, not the sexually abused teacher, was the victim.

No Holding or Biting

     A fifth grade teacher near Albany, New York, during an arm wrestling contest with several students yanking on his arm, bit one of his opponents. The girl on the receiving end of the bite, suffered a deep bruise on her forearm. The principal placed the biting educator on administrative leave, and the local prosecutor charged him with endangering the welfare of a child. If the defendant pleaded not guilty and denied inflicting the wound, one could imagine a battery of prosecution bite mark identification and DNA analysts testifying at his trial. While this case did not reflect the best in American elementary education, it had the potential of  becoming a triumph in forensic science.

All Students in Illinois Are Above Average

     An investigation by the Chicago Tribune in 2008 revealed that elementary school teachers in Illinois, to produce better state required test results, helped their students cheat. The cheating involved excessive coaching to providing kids with answers to the tests. While the state legislature, since 2009, had given the Illinois State Board of Education $1.3 million to investigate educator misconduct, teachers throughout the state caught in the test cheating scandal were not disciplined. They were still teaching, and I presume, still cheating with their students. (When I was a kid we learned to cheat on our own.)

Left Hanging

     A special education student at an elementary school in Baltimore complained to his teacher that he was being bullied. The teacher, apparently busy with another student, ignored the kid. To get her attention, this student threatened to hurt himself. When the distracted teacher didn't respond, the boy stood on a chair, tied his coat around his neck, attached the other end to a hook, then kicked the chair over. As the boy dangled in the air, the teacher grabbed her cellphone, and instead of calling 911, photographed the boy as he gasped for air. "Now that's the picture I want," she reportedly said before placing the chair back under the kid's twitching feet.

     When summoned to the school, the student's grandmother was shown the photograph of her dangling grandson. The boy survived his swing, but spent a week in the hospital. Grandma, claiming gross negligence, sued the school for $10 million. The school district settled out of court.  

Thornton P. Knowles On Living And Dying Without a Trace

I've pretty much have lived alone my entire life. After my father hanged himself when I was fifteen, my mother, although present in the house, went somewhere else. I didn't have roommates in college, didn't join a fraternity, never married, and do not have children. I haven't bothered to meet my neighbors, and have never joined a club. I am not a member of a union or a church. I have lived alone and will die alone. I will have no gravestone, my ashes will be dumped into the trash, and because I have no will, what I leave behind will go to the state. I've destroyed all my papers. My books will comprise the only evidence that I have ever lived, and they will soon follow me into oblivion. Like a good burglar, I've covered my tracks and will slip quietly into the night.

Thornton P. Knowles

Thornton P. Knowles On The Love Of His Life

In high school, I hitch-hiked to a burlesque house in Steubenville, Ohio. It was there I saw a young stripper who performed under the name Salty Buttons. She stole my heart. I returned to the place several times but she was gone. Since then I have made up hundreds of stories of her life, including myself in many of them. As hard as I've tried, I've never been able to attach a happy ending to any of these stories. As pathetic as this sounds, my brief, one-time encounter with Salty Buttons turned out to be the romantic highlight of my life. Maybe that's why I never married.

Thornton P. Knowles