Some students, parents, and teachers put much faith in the "word on the street" as being a valid and reliable source concerning what is actually happening at my high school, among the students who attend the school, and with the adults who work there. The information travels in various forms. While it was formerly limited to word of mouth, either in person or by phone, or by the occasional passage of a note in class, the grapevine wasn't terribly efficient in the olden days.
Along with just about everything else in the modern world, today's bush network has gone high tech. Rumors, or truths, as some would prefer to perceive them, often initiate via word of mouth, but text-messaging and social networks are usually involved within minutes of the initial news flash. Those unfamiliar with the students and staff at my high school might make the assumption that the topics of such newsbreaks and subsequent text messages and Facebook postings occasionally concern who tried out for some local version of "American Idol" and was laughed off the stage, or who just came out [of the closet; DUH!], or even who shoplifted what item that she's wearing at school today, and from what store she shoplifted it. Anyone assuming any such thing about the rumors circulating at my school is way off base. Gossip at my school concerns one thing and one thing only: sex.
If the rumor mill at my high school is to be believed, teachers are almost constantly having sex with other teachers or school employees. Students are doing the same with other students or even occasionally non-students, with at times the two circles of the figurative Venn diagram intersecting. If the rumor mills at my school have any substance to them whatsoever, very little activity of any kind other than sex could possibly be happening at any given moment and at any given place on campus. With all the sex that's rumored to be happening, there simply cannot be any time for education, athletic participation (except in the sense that sex is athletic participation; hell, maybe we should turn it into some sort of competitive sport; if the rumors are even half true, our school could kick any other school's butt in a sex contest), or anything else of a non-erotic nature. We're all far too busy having sex to work, study, learn, or practice.
The irony in this is that my school has an amazingly high passage rate, even with record numbers of students taking the tests, for Advanced Placement exams. Only one explanation for this is plausible: the students at my school must be freaking geniuses if they're able to have sex all day in place of focusing on their studies yet still receive college credits for academic work done while in high school. Actually, I wrote prematurely when I declared the existence of only one possibility for my school's high academic performance in spite of the dearth of time and resources actually devoted to academic studies. Clearly another explanation exists, or even co-exists. (I think the medical and psychological term for this phenomenon is comorbidity.)In any event, one must not discount the possible role of the act of sex itself in my school's relatively strong academic performance as measured by comparatively high Advanced Placement exam scores. Perhaps sex makes people smarter. The more I ponder the hypothesis, the more logical it seems, especially in conjunction with the comorbidity factor. Teachers become more intelligent and competent teachers without ever teaching anything to anyone by having sex with one another, which in turn impacts students, who are also procreating and mutiplying their respective intellectual capabilities exponentially. With all the government money doled out in the form of grants for the purposes of legitimatre academic and educational research, why has this hypothesis yet to be fully tested? Why did it take a sixteen-year-old girl to come up with it?
According to "common knowledge" or "the word on the street," my school has become some sort of a free brothel. The students are then successfully moving on to respectable universities, often with nearly one-quarter of their university credits completed before the students have even set foot on the university campuses. Rumors are always true -- I've been told such is even more the case if the information was gleaned from the Internet. (If you read something on the Internet, it has to be true, right?) Sex makes people smarter and causes them to be more successful in their academic endeavors. If you are a student and are not having sex at this very minute, you are wasting precious time and valuable brain cells.
The purpose of this discourse is not to make light of any situation in which a student, male or female, is physically or psychologically coerced into an inappropriate relationship of any kind with an authority figure. Such action is, of course, abhorrent, and should be dealt with through the appropriate channels.
Way back before the dawn of the Internet, there were rumours of affairs between teachers at the school I attended.
ReplyDeleteOne was apparently corroborated when both teachers suddenly resigned at the same time.
My mom had a similar story about a priest who taught at a middle school she attended. The kids all told what the parents considered wild stories about this priest supposedly showing a loy of movies instead of directly teaching, and then sitting in the back of the classroom holding hands with the (married) classroom aide during the movies in the darkened classroom. The parents all thought it was just seventh graders spreading lame rumors. Then they took off together. sometimes rumors are true.
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