Help me understand this batsh*ttery, please. From the great Sunshine State town of Land O’ Lakes…
Hat tip to reader Beth, who said “I assume this is the result of some fundies and their anti-harry-potter obsession?”Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.
But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land O’ Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.
“I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,’” he said.
When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he’d hoped.
“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.
Tampa Bay’s 10 talked to the assistant superintendent with the Pasco County School District who said it wasn’t just the wizardry and that Piculas had other performance issues, including “not following lesson plans” and allowing students to play on unapproved computers.
Piculas said he knew nothing about the accusations.
“That… I think was embellished after the fact to try to cover what initially what they were saying to me,” he said.
30 Responses to “Florida: teacher bounced for toothpick ‘wizardry’ in class”
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This is just too bizarre for me to know where to start.
#1 — are these people actually so stupid that they don’t know that magic tricks, of the ‘rabbit from a hat’ variety, are not actually sorcery but simple illusions?
#2 — “wizardry” is a fireable offense?
I mean, I guess I can see fundy parents getting up in arms about this. If people really want to believe that Harry Potter is some kind of nonfiction sorcery handbook, they can feel free to keep it from their children or hate it or not carry it at their bookstore or whatever, no skin off my teeth. But the fact that the school system saw fit to act on this?!
I read this the other day. Since when is ‘wizardry’ a punishable offense? And how is it different than ‘prayer’ (saying the right words, invocation, willing something to happen, etc.)?
That’s it. This country has officially gone crazy.
That’s it. This country has officially gone crazy.
what, just now? naw, man, we been crazy for years.
They really should have waited until he pulled a few million dollars’ worth of quarters from behind the students’ ears. It will help offset the future lawsuits.
You know, for all of the lunacy in the world, home schooling parents may be onto something. But I’d hate to limit my kiddos to just what himself and I could stuff in their brains…
As a teacher, I have to laugh at the suggestion that I could lose my job for wizardry. The term wizardry in the classroom would be analogous to the term terrorism in the present-day context: anyone can be accused of it for anything that seems counter to what the general populace understands. For example, if I suddenly decide to show a little math magic which I’m prone to do every few days or so, a kid could allege that it’s wizardry and thus I’ll lose my job that very second, then trump up charges of not being able to understand me or that I have a blog. That alone would set my temp to boiling. Good post.
Pam, you’re the U.S. blogger whom I’ve found the most informative evar; but I don’t get how this post adds to Amanda’s discussion of the story a few days back.
It’s not a trick, it’s an illusion…..
i caught the promo for this story on stephanie miller (i think). when they mentioned the toothpick, i thought they were just joking around. i thought maybe he tried to summon satan or something. but it was only a toothpick.
just sad.
I’ll bet these are the same folks who think the Harry Potter movies are documentaries.
If he explains how he does it, will they let him have his job back??
Sheesh! Talk about your tough audiences!
Well, if they’ll believe in supply-side economics, no wonder they believe that magic tricks are real.
I’m disappointed. I mean, they accuse someone of wizardry and they don’t even bother to see if he weighed as much of a duck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g
I’m disappointed. I mean, they accuse someone of wizardry and they don’t even bother to see if he weighed as much of a duck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g
I dunno, Jose. Chemistry did start out as alchemy, after all. But don’t tell the fundies or they’ll start banning chemistry sets too.
Oh, God, you know, this is so incredibly stupid that it just buggers description.
The Bible does say to watch out for wizards, after all.
What is this strange glowing Window I see before me? How is it that I am able to read these words, without benefit of Paper or the Printing Press?
Goody Spaulding is a WITCH!
Bryce:
Obviously, the answer to both of these questions is “it’s not.”
It’s not a trick, it’s an illusion…..
A trick is something a whore does for money…or candy!
My mother-in-law had a little tiny Yorkie dog named Goody… OMG, she’s a witch too!
But I already knew that one…
BTW, Happy Mother’s Day!
Not every adult has the sense that FSM gave a turnip. They feel left out because the world didn’t stop at the fourth grade, like they did.
You see these little learning machines in kindergarten and it makes you weep to know that evil parents will literally tell their kid to be stoopid. So, by age 15 you have a child who has a much diminished future to placate the biological progenitor(s).
Remember — these are people who believe a snake gave the first woman an apple; a man put two of every creature existing on earth into a big boat to ride out a flood that destroyed every other living thing on earth; a god impregnated a teenaged girl; angels appeared in the sky when the baby was born; the baby grew up to be a man and could raise the dead back to life and change water into wine. They believe it because they read it in a book.
Of course they believe Harry Potter is true.
Of course they believe disappearing toothpicks are wizardry.
ROTFL! Thanks for the classic clip, Elliot. I hope the “duck weighing” is on CNN.
The school district is telling a different story about the firing, for whatever that’s worth.
From a UPI article:
Brooklynite:
As Mandy Rice-Davies once said, they would, wouldn’t they?
Unless they have the rest of those items well-documented, including documenting the disciplining of other teachers for similar offenses, they got nothing. Also note that a magic trick shouldn’t be “far down the list” of reasons for firing someone, it shouldn’t be on it at all.
Which is also sad, because school officials, much like members of the Executive Branch, should not have established a track record such that our first assumption is that they’re lying.
Brooklynite,
This sounds like the classic coverup attempts by the administration from what I’ve witnessed as a public school student and heard from college classmates who are/were teachers.
My inclination as a result is to be wary of whatever the school district says unless they actually trot out documentary evidence this teacher could then defend against….especially when it seems they didn’t take the time to complain about his performance in writing right after the incident in question so he had a chance to correct his behavior and the district has the documentation that they did so.
Moreover, few supervisors in either the public or private sectors would be dumb enough to openly acknowledge arbitrary petty political and/or personal issues as the reason(s) why an individual’s employment is terminated.
Subs are at-will. No union protection. No tenure. You can be fired for failing to hand out passing grades to the sports teams.
Thankfully, here in Whitest Whitesylvania, the administrators stand for education. Dover was too expensive not too.
I’d like to watch this Substitute Teacher do some wizardry and pull the School Board members heads out of their ___es. Oh look, I just made the word A__, disappear. Wow. I’ll sit here and wait for the Salem Witch Hunters I mean Florida School Board
members to hunt me down and incarcerate me.