A Glen Cove teacher is engaging in public discourse, and is being permitted to hide behind a mask. This enables him to make surreptitious forays into the arena of free speech, and then disappear, bin-Laden style, into a cave of anonymity. He is a concerned educator.

He answers well the question as to why our children attend movies during school...movies are regarded as literature. Under his criteria, Goosebumps, a popular book/video series, could be included in the fifth grade reading curriculum. He should take a poll among his students asking how many have seen the movies depicting Kipling's Jungle Book, Roland Bertal's The Lion King or JM Barrie's Peter Pan, and then compare those numbers to the number of kids who have actually read those books. The NYS standards for English Language Arts mandate that all children "shall read 25 books or equivalent per year." It has now been explained to me why this is not happening. He is a concerned educator.

He knows little about the study by Dr. Thomas Robinson, professor of pediatrics at Stanford, which was published in the January, 2001 edition of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. If he did, he would know that, on average, children spend more than 24 hours per week viewing TV, videos and video games. In that study, third and fourth graders were asked to abstain from TV and videos. Researchers saw a dramatic decrease in verbal and physical aggression displayed by the kids. He, however, has a better plan to reduce school violence. He is not struggling to raise children. He is a concerned educator.

He thinks a teacher in a one to 20 ratio can provide parental guidance, (permission slips are required for every school trip). He had no idea that during the Oct. 29 BOE meeting at Deasy School, former BOE member Lorri Prince asked, "Why are you playing the role of the parents?" He, however, does not attend board meetings. He is a concerned educator.

He purports to invite parental participation, but he knows that the principal and the team leaders of the fifth grade have a policy of no parental conferences without having a compelling reason. He doesn't bother to answer a letter from a parent but rather bristles with sarcasm and defensive indignity that a mere muggle should dare to raise a legitimate question regarding the policy of the schools. He is a concerned educator.

He mentions Romeo and Juliet twice in his letter, but I've yet to see Shakespeare in my child's book bag. We, as parents, may wonder what ever happened to books like Little Women, A Wrinkle in Time, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Black Stallion, Johnny Tremain, Poor Richard's Almanac, The Secret Garden, The People Could Fly and many others. Now we know what has happened to them. The great omission of these works (with the possible exception of The Secret Garden) was that they never engendered hit movies. He never fell in love with books like this. Note the sentence structure he uses in his letter. He is a concerned educator?

Choice is great, so is tolerance, it's just sad that we have so precious little of it in our public school system.

Finally, public discourse while wearing a cloak of anonymity is not public discourse at all. It militates against everything free speech should stand for. These letters should be signed by using "name withheld," not by the pompous, self-serving, presumptuous appellation..."a concerned educator."

Dennis O'Dowd