Jim the Teacher: The Traditional Gender of Teachers

Unending BE - episode 552066

“Listen Jim,” Victoria said, “I know you’re big on men’s rights, but my family has sort of an embarrassment. It’s sort of your fault, for convincing me to allow my son to take the same classes as my daughter. And now, can you imagine, his grades are much higher than hers! Report cards are due out in a week, and my family would become a laughingstock if it came out that our son was outperforming our daughter at school.”

Jim had a very confused look on his face.

“Mr. Morrison, it’s pretty simple. You teach both of them. I want you to swap their grades. And in the future, be harder on Davie. He needs to know his place in life.”

“Uh…” Jim said, shocked at these turns of events. “I guess I can do that.”

“Excellent,” Victoria said. “I’ll have my signature ready for you soon. And Jim…” she raised an eyebrow, “Keep things up, and maybe I’ll invite you to my office.” She winked and turned and left without another word.

Extremely confused by this turn of events, Jim looked around his classroom, and suddenly realized everything had changed.

His notes on the board had changed. All of the male names he had written were replaced by female ones. Gone were William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt and Commidore Perry, replaced by names he didn’t recognize. But they were women: Samanthas, Elizabeths, Marthas, and others. His poster listing all of the presidents had been drastically altered – all 43 of them were now women. In fact, it seemed all of the figures in his historical pictures had swapped genders.

All of his material on women’s rights had simply disappeared.

He looked at his desk. He saw a stack of envelopes that had not been there a moment ago. On top of the standardized testing memo, he found half a dozen personal letters. The first one he opened look like this:

“Dear Mr. Morrison,

We do not question your intelligence or your knowledge, but we do not feel it is proper for a man to be teaching our children. Perhaps Mr. Morrison would not be forced to teach if he had done the normal thing and settled down and have some children of his own? No one would object to you teaching them in the home, as normal.

But then again, I’m not surprised no respectable woman wants anything to do with a cad like you.”

Shaken, Jim opened another letter, which had basically the same message, only much less politely worded.

Jim, overwhelmed, collapsed in his chair at his desk.

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Heron

Thu Apr 12 14:13:25 2007