Maureen Dowd

Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm a big Maureen Dowd fan.

She will be appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher tonight at 11:00 p.m.

Another Teacher

So recently there has being an alarming trend of older female students sleeping with their male students. At the HS for Health Professions and Human Services, one teacher has been fired for an alleged tryst with a student and for supposedly having his baby, and then a day later it came out that a guidance counselor, Samantha Solomon was having an affair with a student of hers as well. I’m thinking people in the education field might want to think about making some serious changes.

The story below is from last Friday's New York Post,


'TICKLE-ME TEACHER' SPURRED AFFAIR
By DAVID ANDREATTA Education Reporter
4/15/05

Tickling and whispering between guidance counselor Samantha Solomon and a 17-year-old student in her Manhattan high-school office blossomed into a lurid love affair cut short by a teen snitch, investigators said yesterday.

Probers said the pair, who met in November at the HS for Health Professions and Human Services when the boy was applying to colleges, admitted to having multiple sex trysts over a two-week span ending just last month.

Details of the affair were released yesterday by Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon — two days after The Post first reported charges that another Health Professions teacher, Rhianna Ellis, gave birth to a student's baby.

Solomon, 29, denied admitting to sex romps with the teen and said probers misconstrued her written statement about a "consensual relationship."

But in addition to having testimony from the counselor and student about trysts, Condon reported that undercover probers caught the couple smooching at a bus stop after leaving her Manhattan apartment at 7:40 a.m. "He might have kissed me on the forehead or the cheek," Solomon countered. "We were close, I'm not denying that. But there was no way there was a kiss on the lips."

Solomon said the teenager, who was identified only as "Josh," often called her after school and visited her apartment to use her computer and work on his college applications.

"I'm not saying I didn't give him extra attention, but that's because I saw the potential in him," she said. She acknowledged helping him pick out clothes at Macy's in Herald Square and taking him to dinner at a T.G.I. Friday's, and once bumping into him while buying an iPod — as probers charged.

"I'm the kind of person who follows her heart, not her head," she said. "Even though I know it might be looked upon badly, I wanted him to do well."

The phone calls strayed from professional business only when rumors of an affair began flying at the school — and the pair didn't feel comfortable discussing the allegations in public, she claimed. Condon's probe began a month ago, when a school official contacted his office to report a student saw Solomon sitting on Josh's lap and "tickling each other."

The same snitch also reported seeing Josh "draped over Solomon with his arms around her back and waist" while showing her how to play pinball on a class trip to the Nevele Grande ski resort in the Catskills.

Solomon is facing a disciplinary hearing today with the city Department of Education, which is looking to fire her and her former colleague, Ellis.
Solomon said she believes Josh was coerced into describing a sexual relationship to probers — just as she believes she was duped into admitting having sex with him five times.

"I might have been listening to what [the investigators] were saying, going 'uh-huh,' 'uh-huh,' but I never admitted to anything," she said. "None of this is true."
Both Solomon and Josh told probers that he never slept over at her place, with Josh explaining that he was afraid his mother would ground him.

Additional reporting by Jennifer Fermino and Douglas Montero

The Pacifier

And I’m not referring to the Vin Disel movie. I was riding the subway on Saturday and I was sitting across from a mother and her two children. Her son was crying, so the mother gave her son his pacifier to quiet him down. The boy continued to cry and then he threw the pacifier onto the floor.

Now, my train of thought was, leave it, let the dollar go, it’s not worth it. The mother picked up the pacifier, (I assumed she has some water and was going to wash it that way) but instead, she put the pacifier in her mouth, to clean it, and then placed the pacifier into her son’s mouth.

The boy eventually threw the pacifier onto the floor again, at least this time, the pacifier went into the mother’s pocket.

On a sidebar note to this, I was hanging out with my friend Sam later that afternoon in Astoria. We saw a boy, pickup a frosted, that was halfway done off the ground and proceed to drink it.

I guess garbage, for the most part isn’t garbage anymore.