Why is it that there are always some teachers who don’t know how to use the technology in their classroom?
Unfortunately I’m old enough to remember the heady days of VHS players and giant TVs being wheeled in into the classroom on trolleys so we could watch a documentary about how to make an ergonomic paperweight. But despite it being, basically, plug in and play, there was always one teacher who couldn’t figure it out.
There were upsides though, as the technological limitations of the VHS era at least meant that, for a teacher to start playing porn on the TV, there must’ve been a spectacular mix-up of video tapes.
Nowadays, however, with everything connected to various clouds and streams and other nature-y misnomers, the chances of playing the wrong thing are a lot higher.
One teacher found this out the hard way as, while apparently trying to show a class a video about Lewis and Clark for a history class, porn started playing on the screen instead.
It reportedly played for a good 30 seconds too, which can feel like an eternity if you’ve ever had to quickly change the channel or close your browser, so I’m told…
Porngate went down in front of a class full of seventh graders at a school in Dearborn, Michigan. And to make matters worse it was a substitute teacher which means a) the kids will (probably) already have been acting out and b) I doubt the school will be asking the substitute back any time soon.
The school is blaming the error on a computer glitch, as WJBK reports.
David Mustonen, Dearborn schools communication director, said:
In this particular instance it appears there was some sort of loophole – one time too many – but very isolated.
Answering his own questions, Mustonen added:
Are we looking into this particular instance are we making sure this doesn’t happen again? Yes, absolutely. Do we need to scrap everything and start over? No, nowhere near that.
According to Mustonen, the substitute teacher ‘was unaware that this video was there’. And, when asked whether it could have been the students pulling a prank on the teacher, police and the school agreed there was no evidence of that, nor was there evidence of any ‘criminal intent’.
The school had to send a letter to the parents of the 29 students who witnessed the incident, explaining the ‘unfortunate and rare occurrence’.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.