A Novel Approach to Gym Class

The story has a Miami dateline, but it actually happened in a rural part of Florida’s panhandle — an area that is culturally more Alabama than anything else. It seems that Ernest Ward Middle School gym teacher Terence Braxton is alleged to have let kids cut gym for $1/day,

Fla. Teacher Charged as Children Pay to Cut Gym: Braxton allowed kids to skip his class if they paid him $1 a day, according to charges filed by authorities in Escambia County, Fla. They say he may have racked up more than $1,000 over three months.

The 28-year-old teacher has been charged with six felony counts of bribery and turned himself in on Thursday at a Pensacola jail. He was released on his own recognizance.

“The basketball team had lost every game for five years,” Principal Nancy Gindl-Perry said. “This year, we only lost two games, and they were only by two points. He had a very good rapport with the kids.”

Suspicions about Braxton arose during a parent-teacher conference, when the teacher known as “Coach Braxton” and a student differed on attendance records.

“Coach said he’d missed four or five classes,” Gindl-Perry recalled. “Well, the look on the child’s face. Then the mother said, ‘You told your dad and I you only missed one.'”

For some reason it reminds me of the old Woody Allen line: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym. Those who can’t teach gym, teach here.”

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7 Responses to A Novel Approach to Gym Class

  1. John says:

    ohn Says:
    February 17th, 2006 at 9:25 am

    Personally, the dollar a day practice the Florida teacher performed was illegal, but worth thinking about. My 14 year old daughter regrets going to gym everyday. As a result, she recieved a D on her progress report for not joining in the daily activities. Well…I wish she would take part, but what can I do? ..besides encouraging her to go. I would rather teach her nothing in life is free and have her to pay the $1 out of her own allowance.

  2. 2-L says:

    With that quote, you’d think Woody Allen went to Miami Law!

  3. bricklayer says:

    I’m surprised that liberals haven’t championed the gym teacher as their new “freedom fighter”; isn’t gym class evil?

    Exactly, John, why shouldn’t kids be allowed to do whatever they please? Aren’t these age restrictions on drinking, driving, and voting just plain rediculous?

    Doesn’t gym class encourage evil competition?
    Shouldn’t kids be doing yoga and tai-chi instead of barbaric american sports?

    Why hasn’t this teacher been nominated for a Nobel Prize?

    I fail to understand why liberals haven’t found the great nobility behind this teacher’s “corruption.”

  4. anon says:

    “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym. Those who can’t teach gym, teach here.”
    I think that might be our school motto, too bad I can’t read Latin to say for sure.

  5. Eli Rabett says:

    Bricklayer clearly mistakes a libertarian position for a liberal one.

  6. Toysruskid says:

    I can’t believe people are actually believing that he actually did this crap. Ernest Ward is a very small school. Less than 300 kids. If it had really happened then I sure someone would have noticed about half of the class not dressed out for gym a whole lot sooner. It supposidly took them from Sept-December to figure it out. I heard the teacher didn’t even have a couch in his apartment. You would think if he was making $1000’s of dollar a week he would have had one.

  7. Toysruskid says:

    I can’t believe people are actually believing that he actually did this crap. Ernest Ward is a very small school. Less than 300 kids. If it had really happened then I sure someone would have noticed about half of the class not dressed out for gym a whole lot sooner. It supposidly took them from Sept-December to figure it out. I heard the teacher didn’t even have a couch in his apartment. You would think if he was making $1000’s of dollar a week he would have had one.

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