tenure

We talked about tenure a little bit in class today. It was weird for me to hear tenure only being a real security measure in higher education instead of in all education. I didn't relize that many teachers are still being fired even though they have tenure in K-12 classrooms. I gues this really caught me off guard because my experiences tell me otherwise. There was this one teacher in my high school who was tenure. He was a spanish teacher and so him and a few other teachers took a trip to Spain as a trip for which ever spanish students wanted to go. While they were in Spain, the teacher actually ended up getting a student pregnant. The student was 18, and I don't remember what time of year this happened, either in the Spring or right after school got out. Anyway, because this teacher was tenure and the studen was 18, the teacehr was allowed to stay and teach. I don't necessarily agree with this decision. It is one thing to get someon pregnant but it is something completely different when it is one of your students. I see that as unacceptable. Because of this experience that I saw/hear about, I see, well saw, tenure as something that protects you a lot from being fired. Since ther are several teachers that do still manage to get fired with tenure, I think tenure is better than I initially thought. I orginially didn't like the idea that once you got to tenure that you basically couldn't be fired. I can see how it is a good thing and something similar to a security blanket, but I also think you should earn your way to stay, even if it is increasingly nerve-racking. I might feel differently about it once I am actually an educator and being employed by the school district, but I do not know.