Don't try this at home, kids!

Before you shove your entire fist into an uncomfortable place, remember that this man is a professional educator:

Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings founded the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in 1990. In 2007 Kevin Jennings was paid $273,573.96 as the executive director of GLSEN. Recently he was appointed by the Obama administration to run the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools in the US Department of Education. . . .
If Gay Straight Alliances are not about sex, why are the people who run Gay Straight Alliances telling students about fisting? . . .

Read the whole thing. Of course, GLSEN was teaching 14-year-olds about fisting in 2000, before the full-fledged development of Internet porn videos made such educational efforts redundant.

Nowaday -- Progress! -- any teenager's curiosity can be satisfied by a simple Google search, provided they can spell the words right, that is. How much random traffic does First Things get from misspelled Google searches?

Schools should spend more time teaching kids how to spell and less time teaching them how to fornicate. When I was a teenager, we managed to figure out fornication without any help from professional educators. Well, not much help.

There was an English teacher at Douglas County High -- greetings, Ms. Dowd, wherever you are -- who left the school under a cloud of suspicion. Although I never learned the name of her alleged victim, I envied him nonetheless. I'd been in smitten with Ms. Dowd since she'd been my teacher in sixth grade, when she was fresh out of college.

She had long, straight hair and wore wire-rimmed "granny glasses," as they were called circa 1970. Her husband had been our fifth-grade English teacher and read aloud to our class Orwell's Animal Farm, explaining it as a metaphor for the Bolshevik Revolution. His wife attended our class for a few weeks while doing her student teaching. At the time, I never imagined that, a few years later, she'd be teaching high school and accused of improper association with a student.

Back then, such accusations were handled administratively and rarely resulted in criminal charges, so I have no way of knowing whether Ms. Dowd was innocent or guilty. However, she was one of the first teachers who ever saw me as anything other than an incorrigible discipline problem, and for that I am still grateful.

Speaking of gratitude, thanks to all those who have already pitched in to send me to Pasadena to cover Alabama in the Jan. 7 BCS championship game. Keep hitting the tip jar, folks.

And kids: Keep your hands (and fists) to yourself!