[Informatics] please explain

[Vear, Gary D]

Hi all,

This morning during my Informatics lesson I heard some unexpected giggling at the back of the classroom and saw some of my students passing around the textbook. When I tried to identify what was so funny about the page they were looking at, my students remained coy at first but finally told me to look at the hierarchy on the bottom of page 147. I scanned it for a minute or so but couldn't figure out what was so amusing to them.

In the end, my students explained that 'Penny' (the name of the woman used in the example) is shown to have a well-organised porn collection. Hentai, they explained, is a form of Japanese cartoon porn. At first I thought they were joking, but their strong resistance to my suggestion that I would google the term made me think otherwise. So at lunch I used my mobile data (off the school network and in the privacy of my office) to research the term and discovered that my students were indeed not kidding. A rough translation of 'hentai' is 'pervert' according to Wikipedia. The accompanying images probably would have been enough to get me fired if I'd been foolish enough to look up the term in front of a room full of students.

I don't consider myself a prude, but I do not believe a school textbook should be making such references under any circumstances, particularly when it could lead to some blissfully ignorant teachers searching for a term under the wrong circumstances that could end in their dismissal. 

Hopefully others read this as a warning. Hopefully future versions of the textbook can avoid references to porn as well.

Thanks,
Gary

Digital Technologies Leader
Emerald Secondary College
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