Daily BrewToronto teacher fired for offensive jokes; but what were they?
A Toronto drama teacher who was sent home after giving students a list of off-colour jokes has since been fired for his indiscretion, and still very few in the public sphere know exactly how offensive those jokes actually were.
The Toronto Star reports the Toronto District School Board decided to dismiss Jeff Jones earlier this week after parents became upset that a list of some 100 jokes were distributed as part of a class assignment.
Board members reviewed the jokes and found them offensive and obscene. The Star, which first broke the story last week, has declined to publish a single one of the jokes.
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Now that Jones has been dismissed, although he says he will appeal, the question turns to the common good. If Jones crossed the line, perhaps it is appropriate to know where that line is.
The incident has launched an interesting debate around whether the jokes should be published. In some ways, a reader's view on whether the distributing the jokes were a fireable offence is based on whether they trusted the source telling them they were offensive.
Newspapers once stood up to such scrutiny on a daily basis, but in a time where they are dismissed, often derided, as MSM (mainstream media), trusting a newspaper to make that judgement call is a tougher stretch for some readers. Not all, but some.
The Toronto Star's Public Editor Kathy English weighed into the fray today, explaining the newspaper's decision not to run a single one of the 100 jokes.
Let me tell you: Having seen the teacher’s handout, I found the jokes to be highly offensive in both the context of a classroom and a family newspaper. So much so that I won’t repeat them fully even within the context of a column examining the newsroom’s decision not to publish the jokes.
Suffice to say, the jokes reference group sex, oral sex (many blow job jokes), use the “F-word” stereotype, portray blond women as dumb and promiscuous “like railroad tracks . . . being laid all over the country.” The dead baby jokes are sick and disgusting, one making fun of “a kid with down syndrome.”
Enough? Do you really need to read any more than this in the Toronto Star?
The most interesting revelation in the piece is that the Star's editors parsed through the list of jokes, rating them on a scale from very offensive to "not so bad at all," in the hopes of finding something they could publish.
They found that they fell into two simple categories: benign and offensive. The offensive ones could not be published, and the benign ones shed no light on how bad the offensive ones really were.
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At the time, there was no mention of any benign jokes. And, as the National Post’s Christie Blatchford points out, students are now rallying on behalf of Jones, a “creative force” at his school who has helped build an impressive drama department.
The question remains: Should the jokes be published, or should readers trust that they really don't want to read them? The whole debate really comes down to the "sour milk response."
Someone pulls a carton of milk out of the fridge, takes a sniff and says, "This milk has gone bad."
There are some people who respond to that by saying, "If it's bad, throw it out." Others feel compelled to take a sniff for themselves. Even if they know they will regret it.
Those people who sniff the milk probably won't be satisfied until they hear those jokes. They'll want to know exactly how bad the jokes are, no matter how much they might regret it later.
And you really can’t blame someone for wanting to smell the sour milk.
