A Teacher With No Class

For anyone who has never lived in or visited Bennington, VT, I should point out that it is a wonderful little community made up primarily of shops and scenes depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings (Rockwell lived for a time in Woodstock, VT, about an hour or so up Route 91 from Brattleboro) nestled between the Green Mountains and the Taconics in the southwest corner of the state. You enter Bennington via Route 9 from Albany, and when you cross the Vermont border, it becomes Route 7.

The first thing you see after you rise a hill about a mile or so later is the Old First Church with its towering white steeple, which is emblematic of the architecture in that area. Robert Frost, one of our finest poets, is buried in the church cemetery.

OK, enough of the travelogue. I'm not Rick Steves, and I don't pretend to be.

I'm pointing all of this out to give you some background. The town is made up primarily of craft people and artists (wood and stone workers, painters, writers, etc.) who, as much as any of them have a political inclination, tend to be liberal (deep down, I admit that I hate those labels, even though I call myself The Liberal Doomsayer).

So even though I'm sure the residents of the town understand the political viewpoint of teacher Bret Chenkin and probably agree with it for the most part, that doesn't give him the right to communicate that to a classroom of school kids.

In this story, I think the head of the school union is right, but I think the principal is an idiot for saying that "this needs to be investigated." Hey, Chenkin was told not to communicate his political opinion any more (even though, as the story states, Chenkin encourages debate, something that makes the Repugs shed "crocodile tears" because they want to reserve the privilege of free thought only for themselves). That's it. There's noting else to "investigate."

So Chenkin, as I said, should be polite about Dubya. That's extremely difficult I know, but calling him an imbecile here is one thing. Anyone viewing any content from this site chooses to do so. However, school kids, in addition to being young and impressionable, are a captive audience.

That all having been said, though, I'd like to see a teacher in the south or the Midwest "called on the carpet" the next time he or she makes a smart remark about Bill Clinton. After all, fair is fair.