In My Own Backyard

I don't normally read the newspaper in the morning, to avoid destroying trees and creating unnecessary clutter, but I always look at the headlines of one of my favorite newspapers and pick it up if there's something particularly interesting. My favorite 'paper by far, is the San Jose Mercury News, but as I am content getting my news through the internet, I'm too cheap to pay for a subscription. On the other hand, my other favorite paper, the Palo Alto Daily News is one of those free ad-driven local papers that carries stories that one wouldn't normally see elsewhere. Kudos to them, huzzah!

A bit to my shame, I usually end up not reading the important news, like the City Council's recent decision to patch up potholes or ban beagle-baiting or whatever. But this morning, I read some sensational news about a teacher, Bill Giordano, who was just arrested yesterday for allegedly having a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student in the 1990s.

So I picked up the newspaper and started reading. Now, I don't have middle school-aged kids, but if I did, they would most likely be attending Jordan Middle School in Palo Alto. Mr. Alleged-child-molester was the athletic director there! Like, OMG, gag me with a spoon!

The shocks don't end there! Apparently, revelations about area teachers have been popping up like zits on a prom-goer all year:

1. On February 28, a teacher in Campbell pleaded no contest to possession of child porn.
2. On June 8, a Homestead High School teacher (in my home town of Cupertino!) was sentenced to four years in prison for having sex with three of his students.
3. On July 6, a Redwood City private school teacher was arrested and later pleaded no contest to having sex with a student.
4. On August 19, a Palo Alto Fire Explorer's leader was charged for alleged "relations" with three teenage girls in the program.
5. The instant story: Bill Giordano - accused of a two-year, 28-count, affair with a then-14-year-old girl on his basketball team (and baby-sat his kids for corn's sake).

Madness! Sheer madness.

P.S. In composing this 'blog, I ran into an irksome issue re: hyphenation of ages. So sue me, my job involves a lot of word-crafting. From some grammar website (read: accuracy not verified, but it seems plausible):

Hyphenate ages when they are adjective phrases involving a unit of measurement: 'Her ten-year-old car is beginning to give her trouble.' A girl can be a 'ten-year-old' ('child' is implied). But there are no hyphens when outside of such an adjectival phrase: 'Her car is ten years old.'