Wouldn't Even Be an Issue in the Private Sector...

So I guess somebody made a little slip-up in the payroll department down in Houston the other day, and a bunch of teachers got overpaid on their checks: The school district that runs the nation's largest merit pay program gave oversized bonuses to nearly 100 teachers and is asking them to give it back... ...A total of almost $75,000 was overpaid because a computer program mistakenly calculated the bonuses of part-time personnel as if they were full-time employees, according to the Houston Independent School District. Less than 1 percent of teachers were affected, the district said.

Now if this happened in the private sector (i.e. at my job) then a) It probably wouldn't have happened in the first place, and b) The appropriate amount of money would be almost certainly be repaid or else deducted from future paychecks.

But that course of action is discouraged by the head of the teachers' union: Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said the district can't force the 99 teachers to sign forms authorizing it to deduct the money from their paychecks, and promised legal action if it attempts to do so. "If it's the district's error, then the district should bear the loss," she said.

Now mind you, the teachers impacted wouldn't lose anything they were entitled to. They are only being asked to cooperate with having that which was mistakenly disbursed to them be reimbursed to their employer. To me, it is exceedingly unlikely that this would even be a debate anywhere other than in taxpayer-funded (and unionized) jobs.

Once in high school, we had a teacher who was handing back some tests. He was quickly found to have made an error in grading them that pushed several students up to an undeserved "A" and knocked a couple of students down to an undeserved "B." When the error was called to his attention, he promptly regraded the tests and all students got the grades they deserved. This caused some consternation among those who at first thought they would be getting grades higher than those they actually deserved, leading to crying about "It's not fair..." etc. These protests were met with stern resolve by the teacher, who, by his actions, ensured that fairness triumphed, grade-wise. Such a scenario would prove awkward at best for any of the above teachers who try to keep their un-merited bonuses.

Paul Green School of Rock; Albert Cullum School of... (Note to Self: Think of Appropriate Word Play)

Today we watched two documentaries about two very different teachers: Rock School, about the private music classes run by a guy named Paul Green (and on whose work the Richard Linklater movie School of Rock was partly based -- Jack Black played a nicened-up version of Mr. Green); and A Touch of Greatness, about a longtime teacher at a public elementary school in New York named Al Cullum who always had his students putting on performances of Julius Caesar and making films about voting for the world's greatest playwright (Sophocles, Shakespeare, or G.B. Shaw) and things like that. (Mr. Cullum did this starting in the 50s and 60s, decades before Rafe Esquith.)

Mr. Green was quite in-your-face and abrasive (The ♥G♥ called him a bad name) and very much drove his young rockers to perfectionism, often through F-word-fueled insults. In some cases this seemed to work OK, but I bet it'd get old after a while if you were on the receiving end. He reminded me a lot of the stereotype of the intense, win-at-any-cost football coach. (Not the one played by the Denzel Washington type of character either, but the dictator that the Denzellish character's team always beats for a feel-good ending.) How much of that was real, and how much was him putting on a persona for the camera? One of my favorite quotes (not verbatim, but close), as he gave his students a pep talk right before their first big rock performance (Black Sabbath-themed): "Remember, tonight is not about me. Tonight is not about you. Tonight is not even about music. Tonight is all about Satan!" Why didn't I ever have any teachers that said that?!? In any case, he ended up with some pretty awesome young rock musicians, including a bunch that went to Germany to play at a Frank Zappa Festival. Here's a clip of a 12-year-old PGSOR virtuoso named C.J. Tywoniak covering the Van Halen cover of "You Really Got Me":

Mr. Cullum, on the other hand, was more likely to dress up like a Grizzly Bear and chase his students across a giant map of the United States painted on the playground blacktop. (At least, we assume he was more likely to do this -- If he dropped any F-bombs or paeans to Satan on his 6th-graders, they didn't include it in this doc. Maybe it's on the cutting room floor.)

Cullum had the idea of teaching the classics (Shakespeare, Greeks, Romans, et al.) in his elementary school, getting the students to put on performances for the rest of the school and community, and ended up getting a 29-year-old Robert Downey Senior to put some of these on film. CBS took an interest, and gave Mr. Cullum's work some exposure on one of their interview shows. The film is told through cutting in this footage with modern-day footage of some of the former students, now in their 40s and 50s, returning to their old school to visit with their now-retired teacher.

I liked both of these films, because they profiled people who were different, and that always scores points with me.