[#] A completely random topic

There comes a place where we have to ask ourselves: when, exactly, did adults become completely without any sense of decorum or modesty?

LOS ANGELES -- Teachers are expected to bear long days, challenging students and demanding parents. Now, apparently, some teachers are baring too much of themselves. School boards and superintendents increasingly are pursuing dress codes for teachers. At issue is the same kind of questionable attire most often associated with students.

In some districts, teachers can get dressed down for wearing skimpy tops, short skirts, flip flops, jeans, T-shirts, spandex or baseball caps. Spaghetti is fine in the cafeteria, but shirts supported by spaghetti straps are not welcome in the classroom.

District 11 in Colorado Springs, Colo., for example, prohibits sexually provocative items. That includes clothing that exposes "cleavage, private parts, the midriff or undergarments," district rules say.

Hey Teach: this isn't a Van Halen video. Whether you "look good" dressed like that or not, your job is supposed to be to teach kids how to think. Maybe if you spent less time showing us your business and more time on subject matter, our kids wouldn't be growing up stupid.

From that same news story:

"What's too short? What's too long? What's too provocative? What's too revealing?" said Jacqueline Oglesby, a representative for the Alabama Education Association, which worries about unfair enforcement of a dress code. "Everyone has their own definition. And besides, this is supposed to be about the education of children, not tattoos or holes in your tongue." {Emph. added}

Hey Jacquie: What's 2 + 2? What's the sum of the square of the sides of a right triangle equal? Does everyone have their own definition for those? Of course not. The question is not "do the definitions exist" but "are you willing to accept the consequences of rejecting those definitions".

Here's a real simple definition of "What's too short? What's too long? What's too provocative? What's too revealing?": if you can bring a credible complain of workplace harassment against me if I have pictures of people dressed "that way" on my bulletin board, then it's a no-go. What the Alabama Education ASsociation should be worried about is if the children they are around 8 hours a day are getting edumacated, not if teachers are getting treated "fairly" becuase some people think they shouldn't come to school -- their allegedly-professional workplace -- dressed like mall-crawling trailer-trash.

Sheesh.