I find myself in an awkward situation here, and would appreciate your advice/criticism/sarcastic wit. I recently started teaching in a small high school as a long-term substitute for the science teacher, who had to leave due to illness.

Since he left suddenly, I was kind of left in the lurch—no way to contact him (he's that sick), barely any info on what to teach the kids, etc. So, in desperation, I started rifling through his desk in the classroom, looking for old tests, syllabuses, anything to help me get on the right track. Unfortunately, I also found some print-outs from a porn website—nothing crazy, just straight vanilla porn, carefully hidden at the bottom of a stack of papers.

Now, I'd usually consider myself pretty open-minded, porn-wise. Don't really care who looks at what, or where, or when. However, this totally rubs me the wrong way. I guess I'm not a big fan of keeping
your porn in close proximity to children, especially ones you're supposed to be in charge of. So what do I do? He's fairly out of the picture, it seems, and I'm very new on the scene. Don't want to get off on the wrong foot at school. I've already thrown out the pics—didn't relish anyone finding them and mistaking them as mine. However—is this a big enough deal to make a stink about it? I just don't know!

The New Teacher

My response after the jump.

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1. For fuck's sake, TNT, you found some porn hidden in a man's desk. You're acting like you found a five-pound sack of anthrax. Chill.

2. Give the guy a fucking break. If he's so sick that you can't reach him, he's too sick to be present a threat to any high school students who might stumble across his reconstituted, top-secret porn stash should he ever get well enough to come back to work.

3. Vanilla porn, nothing crazy, carefully hidden? You can rest assured, TNT, that every last one of the "children" in your high school has access to—and has accessed—much, much worse. High school students on the hunt for porn aren't going to rifle through their science teacher's desk. They're going to open up their laptops and pull out their smartphones.

4. Even if one of his students had stumbled across his porn—how often do students rifle through their science teacher's drawers anyway?—the only person who would've gotten hurt was the science teacher. His students have seen worse, many have done worse, and they would've gotten a laugh at the expense of their teacher. He most likely would've lost his job.

5. You don't have any evidence that there was porn in his desk—you threw his porn away—so there's no proof. If you go to the authorities and he isn't lucky enough to pass away before a porn inquisition can be assembled to indict, torture, try, convict, castrate, and behead him for the sin of looking at naked ladies at work, he can deny there was porn in his desk. Then you'll look like a vindictive nut who was trying to turn her long-term, substitute-teaching gig into an open-ended, permanent-teaching gig.

6. Keep your mouth shut.