The Education Wonks
Does the "Queen of all testing" as you call Mz. Spelling, award the TOY a pair of her famous "big girl panties"????? 
does anyone else find it ironic that it was a music teacher who received top honors as teacher of the year? How many music programs are being cut as a result of high stakes testing, especially in many low-performing districts, in which the mantra seems to be "all testing, all the time."
Even more ironic is to be selected as teacher of the year and then have to receive the award from George W. Bush.Now that is a hoot.
More Marin County, California educators with double lives. Sausalito's John Leary, the New College founder. Craig Benedict Lee on suspension as superintendent of the Lagunitas School District. Two San Rafael math teachers. Norm Burgos, a gym teacher and tennis coach at Tamalpais High School charged with sexual battery against a former member of the boy's tennis team, and was arrested on a $75,000 warrant following an investigation by the Mill Valley Police Department. A former athletic trainer at Terra Linda High School charged with molestation. A Drake High basketball coach charged with peeping and acquitted in a mistrial. A Novato youth soccer coach fired after getting arrested on indecent exposure allegations in San Francisco. A coach charged with having sexual relations with two girls at the Marin Water Polo Club. Father Gregory Ingels of Marin Catholic High School. Wow. those Marin educators lead some very interesting lives. One comment wrote about Craig Lee has 'I am not surprised at all. I had several problems with Craig Lee and was always uncomfortable around him. Igo Ono school is so much better with our new principal and a lot more safe. What isn't being said is the law suit he had against him for allowing child molestation to go on at Platina school. He should have never been hired anywhere. I do feel sorry for his children and the children of his girlfriend. I hope he not only looses his career but that he is locked up for a long time.'
One wonders why Mary Jane Burke, who knew about these issues, the stories, the rumors, the allegations, failed to take action. By far the wealthiest school district in Marin, spending more than $22,000 per student -three times the state average and among the highest in the nation. Yet its students have the lowest test scores in the county. More than half never graduate high school. Its teachers have among the smallest classes in Marin and are the county's highest paid, earning an average of $71,000 a year. Yet critics often target the teachers as the biggest part of the problem. And Mary Jane Burke and her predecessors continue covering up past and current transgressions of their teachers.
Enter another Marin County educator with a Significant Other Woman, or two, and some secrets of his own. Sounds like an adulterer just wants the women to fight for him and the best woman wins the adulterer!
OR
'Imagine, for a moment, that you grew up having to hide a deep, dark secret. One so terrible that, if revealed, people will call you a 'pervert', a 'freak', or an 'abomination'. If you're lucky you'll only be called names; reveal your secret to the wrong people and you'll get harassed, beat up, perhaps even murdered. How would you feel if you couldn't even talk to anyone about it? Every representation society provides about what you feel inside is negative. If you suppress it until you are married, you can never tell your spouse for fear of divorce, losing your job, being legally denied visitation with your children. You're in for a lifetime of shame and guilt and denial. How would you deal with it?'
You develop and live two lives. One life knows all about you and still loves you. Another life is your public teacher mask who knows only the mask.
Psychiatrists disagree about what forces are at work in men who cross-dress. One camp considers men of this type to have a 'gender-identity disorder,' to be 'women trapped in men's bodies.' In recent years, another group of doctors labeled some men who demonstrate these tendencies to be autogynephiles -- straight men who are essentially sexual fetishists, aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women.
J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and the author of The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, is a vocal proponent of the science behind autogynephilia, and although he declined to comment about Larry Wachowski, he did describe typical autogynephilic behaviors. 'Autogynephiles frequently mention having a longing to be a girl that begins in childhood,' says Bailey. 'But the first outward manifestation of it usually crops up in early adolescence, when they discover that it turns them on to wear women's clothing. What you do not see, despite frequent claims to the contrary, is evidence that these folks were notably feminine in childhood.' Some experts believe that men who want to be women also tend to be what Larry Wachowski appears to be: a guy with a jones for technology. In 1974, Donald Laub, a plastic surgeon, and Norman Fisk, a psychiatrist, conducted a study at the Stanford University School of Medicine of 769 patients. Of the male patients, Laub and Fisk discovered an interesting predisposition: ' . . . to be interested in mathematics and computer sciences.'
Naturally, crossdressing impulses and potentials cannot be denied forever. They emerge partly, and in disguised form so as to elude the mechanisms of repression. For example, a boy may dream that he is a girl. And in dreams he may experience the totality of all these repressed thoughts and feelings. Perhaps the repression of these tendencies produces a form of 'arrested development.' These impulses linger in a state of continual half-activation, never fully on, but unable to be turned off until they are expressed. At this point, we should consider what happens with 'normal' male development--which perhaps is not so normal at all. The usual dynamic is that the male eventually projects his repressed female side onto women in his life. Part of his attraction to women is that they display (or he imagines they do) some of his own female traits which he cannot let himself express. He experiences his own anima vicariously through his female partners and other women. But these women have their own identities. They are who they are, not the man's projection. When a man projects his anima onto them, he is not seeing them as they really are, and he creates false expectations for them. That is bound to cause problems.
One can easily see examples of how crossdressing leads to excess, or, at the least, fails to bring the crossdresser to a more balanced, happy, and effective way of life. How does the process go awry? One answer that perhaps the crossdressing behavior becomes autonomous of the original goal: crossdressing becomes a habit, rather than a spontaneous response to the impulse for personal completion. The analytic mind says 'I enjoy crossdressing. Let me plan and arrange my life to facilitate this.' In any case, crossdressing has secondary gains. For example, it is a way to escape reality. All people are prone to escapism, but the crossdresser is especially vulnerable. Crossdressing is secretive and therefore less likely to benefit from corrective support and feedback from friends, family, and society in general. Inasmuch as the crossdressing remains a detached and isolated part of the ego, there is nothing to say 'This much is enough.'
An excellent web site for understanding cross dressing. It also discusses the two lives, separate personalities of crossdressers:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/h...thytg/
anima.htm
As things progress, the CD may develop almost two personalities. The male side has a concept of the female as almost a different person. He may even refer to 'her' in the third person. At the same time the reverse may happen. The female may see the male as like a different person. This might seem like 'multiple personalities' making people think it's bad. But it isn't a psychiatric disorder. With multiple personalities, different personalities within the same person are unaware of each other. The crossdresser does not just wear women's clothes. He creates a new persona. Here both the male and female parts are completely aware of each other essentially living a dual life.
In the rigid Marin County school world, teacher's social and sexual identities cannot shift, and must remain hidden. Here something different has occurred though - two lives. A similar pattern of behavior from Craig Lee, the recently accused Marin school superintendent. Or another teacher’s life with his out-of-state wife is a private, never-before-seen one in Marin - awash in androgyny, leather and B&D.
A guy who’s got the chutzpah to try to pull the wool over somebody’s eyes.” That’s a good definition of a bigamist, said University of Cincinnati clinical psychiatry professor Linda Chernus. “One (spouse) is hard enough,” joked Chernus, who has researched bigamists and believes generally they have such low self-esteem that they marry multiple spouses to compensate with a sense of “grandiosity.” “They need to control women, to keep secrets and keep autonomy so no one knows what’s going on inside of them,” Chernus said. “There may also be some underlying insecurity. “(Bigamists) have a sense of invincibility, that they can get away with this. They think they can get away with anything,” she said.
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