I was a teacher for twenty-seven years, but it took about twenty years before I admitted it. Until then I said that I was a writer with a day job. Eventually it became obvious that I was going to retire from my “day job”. I had become both a writer and a teacher.

During the thousands of gab sessions in the break room, one theme recurred regularly. Whenever the television or newspaper would report a teacher who turned out to be a sexual predator, one of my colleagues would say, “How could a teacher do that?”

I heard it on the TV news and I heard it from my non-teaching friends: “How could a teacher do that?”

If you have said that, let me suggest that you are asking the wrong question. If a person had the urges that would lead him to become a sexual predator of children, what jobs would he chose? Teacher? Boy scout leader? Youth minister? If you are a pedophile, practicing or potential, you would go where the opportunities are.

Most police officers are there to protect the public, but if you only want to drive fast and shoot people, what job would you choose? Cops or robbers – take your pick.

Even if 99% of soldiers are right thinking patriots, there will be some who joined so they can rape and kill, and get paid for it. Where else could they find a job with those benefits?

It seems to me that teachers and cops and soldiers don’t usually go bad. The bad ones start out bad, then blow their cover.

There is a flip side to all this. Kids lie. Kids make things up. Not every teacher (or cop or soldier) who is accused of a crime is guilty of that crime.

In education today there are strict, formal procedures for reporting misdeeds or suspicions. This is designed to assure that every suspicion is reported, but is then investigated by an agency set up for that purpose, not by the accused’s colleagues. It provides protection for the accuser and the accused alike.

I don’t see any better solution, and when I can’t see a simple cure in the real world, I write a novel.

In the late eighties, I wrote Symphony in a Minor Key, a novel in which a teacher whose life has been disrupted by false accusations has to begin again in a new school. There he discovers that when one of his students seems endangered, he believes her without question, just as others had believed the student who accused him falsely.

I will say more about Symphony in a later post.