Time Was, You Could Innocently Brush Up Against Your Student’s Breast

Urban students lack even a basic understanding of science, perhaps due in part to fewer (and less!) hands-on learning opportunities:

A physics demonstration landed a Queens teacher a suspension from his job and he now faces allegations of improperly touching a student.

Teacher Leonard Brown says he’s done the demonstration on Newton’s Third Law of Motion in countless physics classes in an 18-year teaching career. But when he called a female student to the front of his class at Benjamin Cardozo High School on Nov. 15 to help illustrate that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, he got a reaction he didn’t expect.

He asked the student — from Cardozo’s elite Da Vinci Math Science Institute — to hold her hands up against his and lean against his hands with all of her weight, he said. He also put his hands on her shoulders before the demonstration.

Brown said he heard the girl claimed he touched her breast during the process — an allegation he denies.

“Assuming I wasn’t moral and ethical, I’m not stupid,” he said. “Do they think I’d be stupid enough to molest a girl in front of 34 witnesses? To me, this is absolutely insane.”

He was yanked from his classroom on Nov. 16, he said. Special schools investigator Richard Condon requested Brown’s removal from the classroom until the investigation is complete.

Kids — so touchy these days!