Teacher Assigns Students To Take Selfies For Extra Credit — So Why Do Parents Want Him Fired?

A teacher at Encinal High School in Alameda, California, — a small city across the bay from San Francisco — recently gave students an interesting extra credit assignment. Go home and take a few selfies, the teacher reportedly instructed the kids.

So why are parents of the high schoolers now in a rage over the assignment, not only demanding that the school apologize, but calling for the teacher, who has not been named publicly, to lose his job?

The problem wasn’t that he asked the students to snap a few selfies. It was that he asked the students to go home and secretly rifle through their parents’ private stuff looking for condoms or, better yet, sex toys. Then, the teacher told the kids, take a selfie with whatever items you find there.

That, anyway, is the story as two moms, Kimberly Cobene and Evangeline Garcia, heard it and relayed it to a San Francisco TV station on Wednesday.

“It was to go into your parents’ private drawers or whatever to seek out sexual toys or condoms, or anything of that nature and to take a selfie with it,” explained Cobene, who said she first learned about the unorthodox extra credit assignment about a month earlier.

She said that her daughter learned about the odd and rather inappropriate homework assignment from a classmate during an after-school program.

They said that they talked to adminstrators at the high school, but according to the two moms, the school officials blew off the supposed sex toy selfie assignment as a nothing but an attempt at humor.

But the two angry moms say that it couldn’t have been a joke, because not only did at least one student take the extra credit work seriously, when the student brought the sex toy selfie into class, the teacher held it up as an example to other students of a job well done.

“From what I understand, a student actually did it and he used that as an example of what it should look like for the other students,” said Cobene.

“If the kids took it as a joke, then why did one kid take it serious and actually did the extra credit work, and was shown as an example in class?” Garcia added. “We don’t feel comfortable with our children in his presence.”

The parents want the teacher out of there.

The school officials themselves have not offered any public comment on the strange extra credit selfie assignment, citing an “ongoing investigation.” Admittedly, the story sounds almost too weird to be true — but in this era of strange selfies and inappropriate student-teacher relationships, it’s hard to say what might be true or not.

[Image: CBS Bay Area Screen Grab]