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The Bewitching Of Ex-Teacher's Advocates

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 18, 2008

The Pundit of Parker Street has noticed the employment policies of the Pasco County school district, and he is not amused. Thursday, he seized on the storied dismissal of Jim Piculas, a substitute teacher with a talent for minor prestidigitation, and pinned it to the cover of the Metro section as a prime example of how civilization is replaced by foamy-mouthed superstition at the northern edge of County Line Road.

(Line missed by the Riverside Rickles: How many Pasco residents does it take to change a light bulb? Who knows? Pasco uses oil lamps. Alternating current is Satan's work.)

Inspired by Piculas' claim that he lost his position over a hysterical youngster's charges of wizardry, our Mencken-by-the-Bay stabbed out 520 words worthy of dispatches from the Scopes Monkey Trial.

It was prudes on parade, a fine fellow's reputation and "career" succumbing to the overwrought sensitivities of crybabies and tattletales and Cotton Mather daddies. All because this Horace Mann on part-time wages mesmerized impressionable Rushe Middle School students with the old vanishing toothpick gambit.

Never mind that Piculas produced no witnesses to corroborate his assertion, or that his personnel records cite assorted failures to command his classrooms, but is bereft of references to wizardry, sorcery, alchemy, bewitchment, divination or any suggestion the district recoiled from a demonstration of the black arts. Piculas said it, wire services circulated it, dailies around the globe published it and that - in the absence of firm fact - was that.

Hogwash, And Then Some

Likely as not, it's hogwash, and it should have stayed in the sty. Why didn't it? See: Rowling, J.K., CEO of Harry Potter Inc. Otherwise, this is another "disgruntled worker" tale.

Alas, once out, the story got legs and, absent fresh nonsense oozing from the Karl County Center or Tampa City Hall, gained escort from the Master Of His Own Opinion. Guided by the inconclusive he-said/they-said kerfuffle related in The Pasco Tribune, the News Center Necromancer achieved clarity: Piculas provided a complete and accurate account, and everybody else behaved like dentally impaired galoots with straw in their hair and pitchforks in their fists.

Oh, the burden of omniscience.

Passing The Guffaw Test

Well. One is tempted to use small words so as not to confuse the mouth-breathing, Bubba-listening, scandal-page-clicking consumers of the Sage Near Swann. However, This Space toils for a Pasco audience accustomed to more sophistication.

Therefore, we will continue as tradition commends: Endorsing the conclusions of the Olde Tampa Typist requires a new standard for the conduct of employee-employer relations. In our post-Piculas world, evaluation by performance lacks sufficiency. Employers now also must consider whether the public will greet with raspberries or guffaws news of the unsatisfactory employee's separation.

In deference to the Oracle of the Offset Press, This Space offers this gift-with-purchase, an unassailable and laugh-proof argument to justify firing substitutes who resort to sleight-of-hand as a classroom technique: One thing leads to another and then students are changing class festooned with balloon art hats.

Nobody wants that.

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