Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (22 page)

SUBJECT
: Sex education

WINNER
: A teacher in Odawara, Japan

CREATIVE TEACHING
: What do you do when some of your sixth-grade boys try to sneak into the girls’ locker room? According to this teacher (who went unnamed in press reports), you pick one student, pin a note to his back, and make him wear it in class all day. The note: “I tried but failed to sneak into the girls’ changing room. I am an idiot.” The upset student refused to come to school for a month afterward. What’s more, it turned out that the teacher was wrong—a later investigation found that the student wasn’t one of the guilty boys. The teacher apologized, and was transferred to a different school.

SUBJECT
: Religion

WINNER
: Michael Seymour

CREATIVE TEACHING
: Mr. Seymour was teaching at a Sydney, Australia, high school in 2006 when he got into an argument with one of his students, a 16-year-old Muslim boy of Lebanese descent named Wagih Fares. At a heated moment, Seymour cut
the boy off and said, “I’m not negotiating with a terrorist.” The outraged young man ran out of the classroom and left the school, quickly followed by an apologetic Seymour, who immediately realized what he’d done. The incident set off a firestorm of protest in the city’s large Muslim community. Seymour was required to take a multicultural sensitivity course, but he was allowed to remain in the school (which set off an even greater firestorm of protest).

SUBJECT
: Phys ed

WINNER
: Peter Porath

CREATIVE TEACHING
: In 2005 the wrestling team at a high school in Woodburn, Oregon, thought it would be funny to play a prank on their wrestling coach, Mr. Porath. According to an Oregon Teacher Commission investigation, here’s what happened: “Six wrestlers, weighing between 180 and 215 pounds each, came up to Mr. Porath from behind in an attempt to give him a ‘wedgie.’ In the process of getting the boys off of him, Mr. Porath bit the inside of a wrestler’s leg, leaving distinct teeth marks.” Porath was forced to complete a class on “appropriate behavior,” and had to write a formal apology to the students. (He later became a baseball coach.)

SUBJECT
: Biology

WINNER
: Jerick Hutchinson

CREATIVE TEACHING
: In November 2007, Jerick Hutchinson, an agriculture teacher at Huntsville High in Arkansas, asked a parent of a student to bring a dead raccoon to the school…so he could teach the kids how to skin it. That’s kind of weird, but it got even weirder when the parent brought in a
live
raccoon (it had been caught in a trap) instead of a dead one. Hutchinson, who the school later said had once worked at a slaughterhouse, took the animal out to his truck—and killed it with a nail gun. Then he brought it back in and skinned it for the class. Superintendent Alvin Lievsay said school officials later talked with Hutchinson, telling him not to kill animals on school grounds. “He does a great job,” Lievsay told reporters. “The kids love him.”

A look at the details involving some infamous murders of prominent political figures, starting in 1584
.

V
ICTIM
: William I, Prince of Orange (1533–1584)
BACKGROUND
: In the Netherlands he’s known as the “Father of the Fatherland,” having led the initial stages of the Protestant Dutch revolt against Catholic Spanish rulers that eventually led to independence. King Philip II of Spain (and of the Netherlands) wasn’t particularly pleased with that, and offered a substantial reward for William’s murder.

THE KILLER
: In 1582 a radical French Roman Catholic named Balthasar Gérard heard about the reward. He planned and plotted for two years, and then on July 10, 1584, snuck into William’s house in Delft, Holland, and shot him in the chest three times. Gérard was quickly captured and taken to local officials. He was tortured for three days, then tried (he proudly confessed) and convicted. The sentence: He was disemboweled alive and quartered by horses, his heart was cut out and thrown in his face, and then his head was cut off. King Philip gave Gérard’s family three large country estates as thanks for their kin’s murderous actions.

EXTRA
: Gérard remains a hero to some Catholics, and in the tiny village of Vuillafans in eastern France, where he was born, there is a street called Rue Gérard, which is said to be named for him. As for William I, he has the dubious honor of being the first head of state known to have been assassinated with a handgun.

VICTIM
: Michael Collins

BACKGROUND
: Collins was an Irish Republican Army leader during the 1919–1922 Irish War of Independence. The war ended in a treaty with England that established the Irish Free State (which eventually became the Republic of Ireland). Many in Ireland opposed the treaty, and the dispute led to the brutal 10-month Irish Civil War. Collins had helped negotiate the treaty, supported it, and became commander in chief of the Irish Free State army. On the evening of August 22, 1922, while driving into Cork (his hometown), his army convoy was ambushed near Béal na mBláth,
or “Mouth of Flowers.” After a confused 20-minute firefight between an estimated 50 men with rifles and at least three machine guns, only one man was dead: Collins, killed by a bullet to the head. Nobody claimed to have taken the shot, and nobody claimed to have seen him go down. He was 31.

THE KILLERS
: The subject of who killed Collins remains controversial in Ireland. Two of the most popular theories:

• Éamon de Valera was the president of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, and was a longtime close confidant of Collins. But the two men bitterly split over the treaty. De Valera had been a leading antitreaty figure during the civil war, and was in the area when Collins was killed. He got a report, the theory says, that Collins would be driving into Cork, so he ordered the ambush. De Valera’s many supporters still vehemently deny this. He remained a top figure in Irish politics until the 1970s, even serving for 14 years as the president of the Irish Republic.

• Jock McPeak was a Scotsman who fought on the side of the Irish for years. A personal friend of Collins, he was manning a machine gun in the convoy when it was attacked. He wasn’t brought under suspicion in the killing until later in 1922, when he was smuggled out of Ireland to Scotland by anti-treaty IRA members. Some people believe he took a moment in the confusion to kill Collins—though nobody seems to know why he would have.

VICTIM
: Mohandas Gandhi

BACKGROUND
: At 5:10 p.m. on January 30, 1948, the leader of the Indian independence movement was walking the grounds of the Birla House, his home in New Delhi, with several followers when he was shot three times in the chest at point blank range.

THE KILLERS
: Shooter Nathuram Godse, 39, surrendered immediately, saying, “No one should think that Gandhi was killed by a madman.” Godse was a member of a Hindu nationalist organization known as Hindu Mahasabha (roughly “Hindu Council”) that was opposed to Gandhi’s cooperation with Muslims and had made at least two other attempts on his life. Godse was hanged on November 15, 1949. Though vilified by the majority of Indians, he is still a hero to many Hindu nationalists.

• Eleven other members of Hindu Mahasabha were also charged in the assassination. Narayan Apte, 37, was with Godse at the
time of the murder and was the only other man executed. Several others were found guilty and served sentences of varying lengths.

• Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, 66, was the founder of modern Hindu nationalism in India and a frequent and vocal critic of Gandhi. Charged with being behind the assassination, he was acquitted for lack of evidence. A 1965 inquiry into the murder, however, found new evidence that most experts say would have gotten him convicted. He died in 1966.

Victor Jara.
A popular Chilean songwriter and activist in the 1960s, he is credited with aiding the 1970 election of socialist Salvador Allende. On September 11, 1973, a United States-backed coup saw Allende killed and dictator Augusto Pinochet installed. During the coup Jara, 38, was arrested and taken with thousands of others to Chile Stadium in Santiago. Over the next four days, he was beaten, tortured, and finally machine-gunned to death. His body was found four days later in a Santiago slum. In 2008 a new inquest was opened into his murder. It is still ongoing.

John Paul Newman.
A member of the parliament of the state of New South Wales, Australia, he had long worked to stop gang activity in his home city of Cabramatta. On September 5, 1994, he was shot and killed in front of his home. In 2001 Phuong Ngo, a local club owner believed to be involved in Vietnamese gangs, was convicted of the murder. Newman’s is believed to be the only political assassination in Australian history.

Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko.
A former KGB officer, writer, and vocal critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, he was arrested three times in the late 1990s and finally fled to the U.K. in 2000. In November 2006, he became mysteriously ill, and on November 23 he died. It was later determined that Litvinenko had been poisoned with the radioactive element polonium-210. Investigators were able to track “radiation trails” to two men: Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, both former KGB agents who met with Litvinenko in the days before his death. Lugovi has been charged by British authorities, but Russian authorities refuse to extradite him. Kovtun was hospitalized in Moscow in 2006 (with radiation poisoning) but managed to recover.

Ever wonder how a team from Utah came to be called the Jazz? Here’s how NBA teams got their nicknames
.

DALLAS MAVERICKS.
Although it makes sense that a Texas-based team would have a western-themed name, it was actually chosen because one of the team’s original owners was actor James Garner, star of the TV western show
Maverick
.

DENVER NUGGETS.
The Denver Rockets entered the NBA when the American Basketball Association folded in 1976. There was already a team called the Rockets, so Denver executives chose Nuggets after Colorado’s gold-mining history.

SAN ANTONIO SPURS.
They were formerly the Dallas Chapparals in the American Basketball Association, but team execs wanted a cowboy-themed name when they relocated to San Antonio in 1973.

MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES.
Minnesota has the largest population of timberwolves in the lower 48 states. The name was suggested by 17 different people in a name-the-team contest.

CHICAGO BULLS.
Original owner Richard Klein thought bulls were tough, and so was his team. The name also pays tribute to the city’s stockyards and meatpacking industry.

PORTLAND TRAILBLAZERS.
A contest was held to allow the public to suggest names. More than 10,000 entries were received, with Pioneers receiving the most votes. But the team decided against it because Portland’s Lewis and Clark College used it as
their
nickname. The second-most popular entry, Trailblazers, was used instead.

CLEVELAND CAVALIERS.
Team executives let fans vote on the name from five suggestions: the Presidents, the Jays, the Foresters, the Towers, and the Cavaliers.

NEW ORLEANS HORNETS.
Until they moved to New Orleans in 2002, they were the Charlotte Hornets. The city of Charlotte resisted British occupation during the American Revolution. British general Lord Cornwallis reportedly called the city “a veritable nest of hornets.”

MEMPHIS GRIZZLIES.
There are no grizzly bears in Tennessee, but there are in Vancouver, Canada, where the team started in 1995. (The team first picked the Mounties but was forced to change it when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police objected.)

MIAMI HEAT.
More than 5,000 entries were received in a team naming contest in 1987. Among the suggestions were the Palm Trees, Beaches, Suntan, and Shade. Team owners picked the Heat.

BOSTON CELTICS.
Original owner Walter Brown named them after an older basketball team, the New York Celtics, in honor of the large Irish (also known as Celtic) population in Boston.

WASHINGTON WIZARDS.
They were the Washington Bullets (formerly the Baltimore Bullets) until 1995, when owner Abe Pollin decided that “Bullets” was too violent, especially since Washington, D.C., was experiencing higher than normal murder rates. A fan contest was held, and Wizards won out over Dragons, Express, Stallions, and Sea Dogs.

PHILADELPHIA 76ERS.
Named for 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed (in Philadelphia).

ORLANDO MAGIC.
Magic beat Heat, Tropics, and Juice in a newspaper contest. (It references nearby Disney World, also known as the “Magic Kingdom.”)

UTAH JAZZ.
Prior to 1979, the team was based in New Orleans, where jazz music originated.