Teacher villains

It's summer break and I've been watching marathon runs of the hit TV series Breaking Bad.  The show has brilliant plot twists, dark savage irony, and deliciously flawed complex characters.  I'm fascinated by the show's main premise of a high school teacher's twisted decent into becoming a villain. Not that I am in the least tempted to become a meth cook or drug dealer of any sort (or am at all capable in the least of doing so), but it brought up questions in my mind about my profession and how it is viewed by society.

It's funny how when you think about teacher villains in the past, you usually imagine the witchy teacher from A Christmas Story (You'll shoot your eye out) or some washed up lame-o who has 0 passion (Bueller...Bueller...)

I wondered why (until Breaking Bad) you don't really see teachers being clandestine criminal masterminds, thieves, serial killers, or drug dealers.  I guess because the thought of it is really scary.  God forbid a person you trust your children with for a good portion of the year would be moral monster at home.   Perhaps it's like finding out that breakfast cereal has been the one and only cause of cancer all this time.  Then what?  It would cause a panic.  You'd be up all night counting the bowls you ate while watching Saturday morning cartoons.  Lying there, calculating the darkness you innocently consumed, and then freaking out about it.

I remember once seeing on the front page of the local newspaper an article about a high school teacher who was arrested for DUI over the weekend.  Out of all the DUI cases the police caught that weekend, it was the teacher who made the front page.  In fact, there weren't any other cases in the paper at all.  Why was this guy's arrest so special?  Because he was a teacher.  The standards we live by in our culture are so high.  It's so important to the community to publicly "out" teachers who have violated the law.  

Not that teachers resent it.  In fact, I would say that most teachers are the strongest believers in very public and strict levels of accountability.  We set very high bars for ourselves.  We are aware that "The Children are Watching" (an assigned reading I had one year from administration).