As If There Weren't Enough Reasons Not To Be A Teacher

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, a woman in Connecticut has been convicted of showing computer porn to 7th graders while substitute teaching, despite the huge amount of evidence that she was the victim of malicious software already on the computer before she used it.

The school in which the teacher, Julie Amero, was teaching in a school which was running Windows 98 (!) and had let the school's firewall/internet filtering program license lapse, leaving the computers open to attack, and the computer she was using was, in fact, infected with adware, spyware, and malware, likely from the regular user visiting questionable dating sites (!) as found in the computer's history.

In addition, the computer's history indicated that the user had done a search on hair styles that led to a site that locks the computer in an infinite loop of porn sites that is difficult for the casual user to break out of. A defense expert witness testified at trial that this was how the porn ended up on her screen and why she couldn't get away from it.

Despite all this exculpatory evidence, she was convicted of multiple felonies.

For the record, no action has been taken against the school despite the fact that it is against Federal law for public schools to provide internet access without filtering software.

No wonder no one wants to become a teacher in the US. Jeesh. Low pay, high educational and licensing standards, poor treatment by teachers, students, and administrators, long hours, poor facilities and equipment, increasingly impossible-to-meet Federal standards, plus the chance to spend the rest of your life in prison because of poor computer security in your school.

Awesome. Sign me up.

Not.