Welcome to the 21st Century

A couple of news stories this week that a colleague told me about and rather struck me. The first concerned some parents who decided it would be fun to teach their 2 year old how to smoke a joint. Not only that, they filmed it on their cell phones and sent it around to their friends. You would think that there would be reasonably severe punishment for doing this, but it seems that all they have to do is to attend 'Parenting classes' - maybe they'll end up writing lines 'I shall not teach my child to smoke weed' 500 times should do the trick, do you think??

This is to be contrasted with the case of a substitute teacher who was fired in Florida (I think it was). You might wonder what this was for - perhaps striking a pupil unnecessarily, maybe an inappropriate relationship or something like that. No, none of those. It seems that the teacher did a magic trick - in actuality, i believe they made a toothpick 'disappear' in class. The official reason given for the sacking? The teacher was 'promoting wizardry and witchcraft'. So i guess David Copperfield is going to be in court next? What about David Blaine?? What boggles my mind even more here is that, presumably, a child went home and said 'oh, my teacher did this neat trick. He made a toothpick disappear' and someone, somewhere said 'Oh My Goodness. This is horrendous. He's turning our kids into dearranged people who want to become evil wizards.' and decided to do something against it. It makes me wonder why they didn't just say 'to hell with it', take us all back to the dark ages and burn the guy at the stake. And here was me thinking it was 2008.