“What Was She Thinking?” Australia Teacher Gives Student USB with Explicit Selfies

Over the last couple of years, I’ve dived deeply into the topic of teacher misconduct. The cases I’ve studied and summarized have ranged widely, from the merely sad to the reprehensible to the truly horrifying. One thing is abundantly clear: we need to improve teacher candidate education and professional development to better instruct educators about technological risks and cyberethics.

And then there are those cases that involving jaw-dropping stupidity, stupidity of such profound perfection that it is hard to imagine that any instruction could help. Here’s the latest entry in what I might dub “The eStupidity Chronicles.”

From Australia comes the report that a teacher at John Tonkin College in Mandurah, Western Australia, loaned a USB stick to a student and instructed him not to click on any of the photos stored on it.

Seriously?? Needless to say, the student couldn’t resist doing so. The photos turned out to be “extremely graphic” images of the female teacher engaged in sex with her boyfriend.

That would be bad enough, but not surprisingly, the student decided to share them with his mates. At some point, they inevitably found their way onto social media.

There’s not a lot of information at this point about how the case is being handled, apart from a statement by the school that “a few people are in trouble.” The case has been referred to the state Education Department, which said that the matter would be “fully investigated” by the Department’s “staff standards and integrity team.”

A few years ago, my brother Jon gave me a copy of folk singer Christine Lavin’s CD, “Live at the Cactus Cafe.” One of her songs, “What Was I Thinking?”, is the perfect accompaniment for this type of teacher cybertrap.

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